"No-Bugs-Land" Topic

I'm thinking of mixing things up on next years convention circuit. I've run the game with hordes of the bugs attacking a hacienda, a village and a ruined Spanish Mission in Panama. In the Hive, Queen and Country this area will become similar to the Western Front in WW2. The ruined buildings and shattered forests are easy. How can I do a landscape covered with a deep layer of giant insect carcasses?

I'm thinking that this might be a time for "soft terrain". Do the endless miles of shattered bugs (with some human wreckage interspersed) on a computer and then print it onto iron on transfers. Put these on fabric and sort of make a series of thick lumpy quits or thin pillows. What do folks think?

I would suggest you sculpt a dead bug and then do a mold of it and just cast it with water putty or something similar. Then you can make as many as you want and it is dirt cheap.

Or, skip the sculpting step:
auction

Terry: Chris beat me to it, but that was what I was thinking, essentially. Or some cheap soft plastic bugs, suitably mutilated and glued into bases. The terrain around it would be mostly blackened earth, so that's pretty easy.

Dollar stores tend to have them in fair number; soft-squishy, but none-too-dear.

I gather you're covering ground in dead beasts. Squishy is mitigated a bit by them set into the terrain. The difficult way would be to scoop the terrain base or push the bug into a hardening base. The easier, though still a bit tricky with soft bodied toys, is to halve them the flat way.

It would give you some 3D, but a bit more effort than simply printing. Unless you think you could combine the two…

Doug

Those are great ideas and I've done that for bug casualty markers. For this I used bugs that had been rejected during casting or 3D printing. I'm looking for something bigger. The game I'm running will be on the 20 foot by 20 foot floor area. Putting down zillions of traditional miniatures will be a huge pain and picking them up worse. They will also take up a lot of space and possibly be fragile, and certainly not walkable. I'm thinking it might be easy to lay out these soft sculptures and I was even thinking about putting some BBs in them so they would lay flat and I could pick them up with a magnet on a stick!

Get a bag of Halloween spiders or plastic insects, glue a bunch to a piece of board and go at the morass lightly with a hammer to squash it up a bit. Make a mold of the squashed morass and mass produce it in soft, cheap silicon. Preferably try to do pieces about 6 inches by 6 inches.

Do that for areas of especially large concentrations of dead bugs. Do a couple dozen or so for effect.

Elsewhere, chop up the bugs and spray sheets of paper or plastic with glue and sprinkle with chopped bugs and basing material. You can use the chopped bugs to decorate craters, too!

MUCH bigger than I thought, and challenging even if you go with the printed route. However, by 'combine the two' I had in mind a printed surface, and spread with halved toy bodies, perhaps glued to sheet.

Keeping the squishes fairly thick, and the printing darker, as if shadowed, and there'd be enough dead to walk on, you'd never touch earth.

A four by six table cover could roll up tres easy, but 20' x 20'… *whew*

Doug