Raiding the Cantina

So, I recently purchased the AE Bounty rules in the post after a search for some decent sci-fi skirmish rules, a fantastic battle report over on Lead Adventure that I'd advise you to check out and also it's mention over at this great blog.

I'm a huge fan of Firefly, Star Wars, Halo and wanted to work on a setting that would reflect those interests a little better than uber-gothic 40k. I do love the 40k background but it's often a tad gloomy...

I've also been playing a lot of Borderlands recently, which seems to have nicely melded sci-fi and post-apocalyse into a great setting. I've been getting lots of inspiration from that and I was surprised by the extent to which it covered a lot of the areas I'd wanted to cover in my Wasteland setting. I'd always planned on it being more Firefly than Fallout and that's probably how I'd describe it. That gave me ideas for my terrain collection - I'm going to add a bunch of starport features to the planned shantytown terrain and my current scrapyard pieces. Think Mos Eisley meets District 9 meets Fallout3.

After picking up AE Bounty from Amazon I decided to check out the pre-painted Star Wars figures available from eBay - here's what I purchased:

Probably my favourite of the bunch, this is an Ithorian Commander. There is a very similar looking alien in the AE Bounty book, so he'll probably be one of those. The miniature is decent, nice and tall - the only problem was the barrel on the gun, which was extremely flimsy. I've now replaced it with the barrel from a Kroot rifle and rebased him.

Another of my favourites, this is Gha Nachkt, a rather rotund alien. I like the different body shape, looks a good deal different to a human.

This guy is a Devaronian Soldier - I'd originally thought about turning him into a robot, but the best laid plans are prone to change. The weapon is severely under-detailed and the paint on the head was rather thick.

I was rather surprised at the size of this guy - I thought he was going to be about the size of a Space Marine. It's just a shame he's wielding such a puny pistol! I got two of this mini, so they'll be heavily converted.

This gent was bought for the head, which has now been removed and cleaned up - it'll be used on a member of a Mercenary team I have in the works from some old Void plastics (similar to the team in the earlier battle report link).

A Wookiee, as I couldn't resist. Not sure what surgery he'll receive...

I also got a bit of a shock at the size of this miniature. Probably the least usable of the bunch, which is quite a shame. If it'd been more 28mm tall I'd have included it in one of my crews...

On the subject of crews, check back tomorrow for a couple of current WIPs...