The Last V8 Interceptor

I've got something special in this post, the latest in a series of articles about toy cars used for 28mm post-apocalyptic sci-fi gaming.

I present my interpretation of one of the most iconic post-apocalyptic automobiles. Mentioned in a passing reference in "The Road Warrior" as "the last of the V8 interceptors" Mad Max's Interceptor should be an irresistible temptation for post-apoc gamers.

The car existed in two different states. In "Mad Max," it was a souped-up muscle car. In "The Road Warrior," it was a a dusty, banged-up post-apocalyptic survival vehicle.

My version attempts to capture the spirit of the car featured in "The Road Warror."

Here's some more info about the vehicle that became the Interceptor in the film. The filmmakers started with the Australian-made Ford Falcon XB.

As it's not currently available as a cheap 1/43 toy, I had to make do with whatever I could find at America's Best, Train Toy and Hobby Shop here in suburban Chicago. The store always has a great selection of cheap 1/43 toy cars. The closest thing I could find was a 1967 Camaro from the Road Signature line.

Besides the general muscle car shape and overall dirtiness, I noted six major features of the Road Warrior Interceptor. 

1. Concorde after-market nose — In "The Road Warrior," the bottom half of the nose is missing. It was complete in "Mad Max", but the top half is still present. 
2. Hood mounted blower 
3. Large exposed gas tanks in trunk that necessitated the cutaway of the trunk and part of the rear cabin, including the rear spoiler. 
4. Roof spoiler 
5. Small exhaust pipes coming up the sides just behind the doors 
6. Extended guards around the wheel wells 

I decided that with the Camaro, I could replicate steps 1 through 4 and disregard 5 and 6 while still keeping the spirit of the vehicle.

I first disassembled the Camaro and was delighted to see the shape of the lower section of the bumper. This would become the basis for the Concorde nose. This discovery alone is enough to make me recommend this specific toy

After a bit of trimming, the lower bumper section was inverted and glued to the front. I saved the stock grill for future modeling projects. Squadron White putty was used to fill the gaps. I highly recommend this product for fast filling (dries in 30 minutes!) and ease of sanding.

I then used the cutting blade on my Dremel to remove the trunk and rear spoiler, being careful to remove the spoiler in one piece so that it could be reattached to the roof. I also sanded the paint off the area where the spoiler would be glued.

The Dremel and a diamond file made quick work of sizing and shaping the spoiler to fit the roof. The back seats were also cut away.

Unfortunately the gear and stowage I added behind the seat would end up virtually invisible when reassembled. The gas tanks are two halves of a Warhammer 40k barrel.

The blower was assembled from random bits. After assembly, the vehicle was primed with black gesso.

Painting was fairly simple. Here are the steps I used

1. Drybrush brown with some heavier application around the wheels
2. A wet drybrush of rust red here and there, and silver on the blower and gas tanks
3. Drybrush of dusty tan all over 
4. Seal with brush-on matte varnish

The windows were then put back in and the car was reassembled and glued back together. The windows received a drybrush of dusty tan which brings us to today's Easy Tip! Using your thumb, draw an arc across a windshield that has just been drybrushed with tan to give the effect of windshield wipers. Here are the results; this car will be a great addition to the post-apocalyptic chase game we are running at the Little Wars game convention next week.

I'm very happy with the results. In retrospect, the blower intake is ridiculously huge, but it's all in good fun and doesn't ruin the look.

While doing the Interceptor, I also made two more cars. In order to be usable in modern and post-apoc settings, I made them dusty and worn, but not totally post-apocified.

The Toyota Land Cruiser came with a large plastic suspension screwed to the bottom and monster truck wheels. The suspension was removed and replaced with a set of smaller wheels. I used a can of cheap red spray paint to cover up the silly paint job before drybrushing it to achieve a weathered look.

The Crown Victoria Police Interceptor is another nice car from Kinsmart and is widely available online and in stores.

Here's my standard formula to quickly paint toy cars to make them look more appropriate for the gaming table:

1. Brush on Matte varnish to cut the shine and make the later steps adhere better
2. Drybrush dusty tan all over the body
3. Very light drybrush of dusty tan over the windows and wipe the front window with a finger to create a windshield-wiper effect
4. Brush on another layer of matte varnish 

Here's a photo showing all three cars together. The scales are not entirely correct (all had 1/42 or 1/43 stamped on them) as the Crown Vic and Toyota are notably larger than the Interceptor, but the difference shouldn't look bad on the table.

Lastly, here are my two Mad Max figures: the EM-4 Road Warrior (formerly produced by Grenadier) and a recently acquired Reaper Chronoscope figure called Rex, Dark Future Hero.

Both are good representations of Mad Max, with Rex being from "Mad Max" and EM4's Road Warrior representing Max from the end of "The Road Warror" and "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome." But as you can see, the difference in size is huge. Using sole-to-eye measurements, Road Warrior is 28mm, while Rex is nearly 34mm!

Despite being a great figure, Rex is by far the tallest post-apocalyptic figure I own, and it has kept me from painting him, though now that I have an Interceptor I'll probably paint him up anyway.

I would like to know what the heck Reaper was thinking, though, in making Rex so much taller than the other brands of figures he would likely be matched with. There you have it, a few more cars to populate the grim darkness of the near future. As always questions are welcomed and comments appreciated.

— Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

Teaser photos from our Little Wars convention game

Here are a couple teaser photos from a playtest game we held last week for our Little Wars scenario. We're using two 7-foot desert boards laid end-to-end to create an epic post-apocalyptic highway duel. Check us out at Little Wars on April 28 if you're in the neighborhood!

28mm on the cheap: Sci-fi bikers and post-apoc cars

Many of the games that Chicago Skirmish Wargames plays are generic skirmish games. These games don't require a lot of miniatures, and they don't try to tie you to a specific line of figures. This fits well with our philosophy of "28mm on the cheap."

Recently, I painted up a biker gang and some vehicles for our club's playtest of Apocalypticum, a forthcoming post-apocalyptic skirmish game from Ganesha Games, publisher of our club's favorite fantasy game Song of Blades and Heroes.


The Bikers

The majority of this gang is made of biker figures from EM4 Miniatures. These classic Mark Copplestone sculpts were originally sold by Grenadier for their Kill Zone game. The figures are great sculpts that hold up well even today. In fact, Copplestone has continued this line of figures with new and variant sculpts through his own company Copplestone Castings.

The figures are stock except that some of them had weird, large calculator-type things (maybe that's what they thought future computer would be in the early 90s?) attached to their belts. I filed these down into packs with no problems.



In the pic below, the biker on the right is a Warzone figure. His weapon is a bit out there, but it's very useful for a warband to have a miniature with a weapon that could be a heavy machinegun or a grenade launcher, or a....you get the idea.

The last figure in the pic below is produced by Mega Miniatures, one of my favorite small minis producers. It was formerly produced by Alpha Forge Miniatures for their Star Mogul Game.


There was an 8th member of the gang, but when I opened up my minis case today, it looks like he went missing after last week's game!

Except for the Warzone figure (that came in a mixed lot and might be available from Prince August), all the above figures are currently in production and retail for less than $2.50!

The Vehicles


These 3 trucks were each made to accompany a vehicle I already had. For the most part they were done with the same techniques as the other vehicles in this how-to article.

The Bug'gy

This vehicle started life as a 1/32 scale Volkswagen Beetle. Far too large to look right as a bug, I decided to turn it into an off-road monster.The wheels are from a 99-cent kids toy from Target. They are mounted on 3 layers of sprue glued to the bottom of the car. The decals are very old Games Workshop decals. They broke up while applying, but I decided to put them on anyway.


The armor plates are simply pieces of plastic packaging, the kind you might find on a typical blister pack of miniatures. To emboss the rivets, I bought a hand punch and filed the punch into a smaller rounded shape that makes the reverse rivet impressions that you see here (yet another tip I learned from Necromundicon).


The back of the bug was removed to make a space for miniatures. Wheel wells for the rear wheels (otherwise you'd be able to see right through the car) are made from the corners of blister packs. The Bug'gy was built as a companion vehicle for my Mahindra Scorpio conversion. Now they're a pair of dangerous-looking wasteland raiders.


The Hummer H2

This 1/46 Maisto toy car was smaller than the exaggerated (1/48 to 1/32) scale vehicles I usually buy — but at 25 cents in a resale shop bin, I couldn't pass it up. A bent axle (probably why it was 25 cents) was easily corrected and I set to work. No real conversion work here, just paints, washes and drybrushes.


The H2 was made to go with my Land Rover. A pair of vehicles suitable for paramilitaries, mercenaries, survivalists or defense contractors.


Chevy Pickup

This 1/32 beauty is one that I'm really proud of. Instead of my usual paint job of washes and drybrushing, I first brush-dipped this with Minwax Polyshades Antique Walnut. In the places where it pooled or lined, I heavily drybrushed on orange for the rust effect you see. The wolf decals are Games Workshop Space Wolf decals. The same design is included in mirror images, so both doors have the wolf facing forward.


I followed that with a heavy drybrush of tan for dust and a bit of watery brown paint in a few spots for dirt. After removing the pull-back motor (all these cars seem to have them) I was able to lower the bed quite a bit so it looks better when miniatures stand there. The grey plates at the wheel wells are once again made from plastic card. The little lights on top are covering up a hole where a surfboard was originally attached.


The pickup was made to match the style of my Volkswagen bus: a pair of vehicles that would be equally good for regular post-apoc survivors, hippies, rednecks, or just used as cool pieces of terrain.


I'm quite happy with the way these vehicles all turned out. I've really lucked out with the Kinsmart brand of toy cars. The VW bus, Chevy pickup and VW bug are all from this brand and each only cost me between $4 to $8 each. The brand is fairly common and shows up often online and elsewhere. I found these at a train shop, a grocery store and a neighborhood mega-mall in a Chicago neighborhood. As always, comments are appreciated and questions are welcome.

— Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

Where you'll find us this weekend

This coming weekend is the Games Plus spring auction, an annual event that draws gamers to suburban Chicago for 10 straight hours of auction fun. It's a great place to find deals on rare, OOP or just plain weird miniatures and gaming paraphernalia.

The event runs for four days, capping off the excitement with the miniatures auction on Sunday. It'll start at 10 a.m. this year and will probably wrap up around 8 p.m. A contingent of folks from Chicago Skirmish Wargames — including your intrepid blog editor — will be at Games Plus for most if not all of the Sunday auction.

Are you planning to come out? It's well worth the drive for folks in Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin. Post a comment here and we'll be sure to say "hi!"

28mm on the cheap: Fast and cheap fantasy buildings

For this installment of the "28mm on a Budget" article series, I'd like to turn our attention to the subject of fantasy buildings. Long a staple of fantasy gaming, fantasy buildings tend to come in three distinct varieties.

• Card buildings — Great looking from a distance and quick to assemble, these cheap buildings with their pre-colored surfaces tend to lose some of their charm when viewed up close.
• Resin buildings — Often pre-painted and typically incorporating textures, angles and layers that would be time consuming to scratchbuild, these buildings look great on the tabletop but make you pay for it.
• Scratchbuilt buildings — These models are affordable (like card buildings) and offer detail and textures (like resin buildings). Unfortunately, whether using card, balsa, or cast bricks, it's time consuming to go this route.

However: what if there was a way to get some of the textures, complex shapes and pre-painted-ness of specialty resin buildings, the speed of preparation of card buildings at a cost not much higher than supplies for scratchbuilt buildings....?

I give you porcelain Christmas houses. Usually scaling nicely with 28mm, and available after Christmas for $4 to $12 each, these prepainted houses are just the thing for populating your fantasy village.

OK, so they're not ideal right out of the box. There are 3 things you must know about Christmas houses.

• They often have snow and christmas ornaments molded on to them.
• Some are made of a soft plaster-y porcelain that can be sanded, but many are made of a porcelain so hard that it cannot be sanded and will resist all your efforts to modify them. The flip side is that the hard porcelain houses often tend to have sharper, more defined details. It is unlikely that you will be able to modify these to have accessible interiors unless your goal is to make burned out shells of buildings a la Mordheim. For recommendations on going that route, I highly recommned the resources available at Necromundicon.
• Some Christmas houses will require a bit of additional exterior work, mostly because some have holes in the back for lights (most are lit from below) and some have doors that are too small.

How to convert Christmas houses into Fantasy Buildings

What you'll need:

• Houses
• Paint — I use bottles of craft paint
• "Dip" (I use Minwax Polyshades) and mineral spirits. Alternatively, you can use acrylic washes
• Flocking material for vines and moss
• Bits for customizing if necessary. Doors can be especially useful.
• Tacky glue, PVA or scenic cement.

1) Choosing your houses

If your store's after-Christmas selection, or you're limiting yourself to resale houses, you may have to take what you can get. But if possible, try to find houses that are closest in scale to 28mm and as similar as possible to fantasy and medieval styles. Buildings inspired by the Christmas tales of Charles Dickens are often your best bet. Christmas decor and snow are easily covered up, but houses with protruding modern details molded onto them are unsuitable for our uses.

For sources, the best selection and prices occur at craft and hardware stores (like Menards here in Chicagoland) after Christmas, when $20 to $40 dollar buildings get marked down to 75% off.

Christmas houses often appear at resale shops year-round for pennies on the dollar, and asking your family and friends may net you some freebies.

The houses I used here are pieces that I collected as a child, mostly bought at Jo-Ann Fabrics. I've kept a few for Christmas decor, but there were far more in my mother's garage than any reaonable person would have use for.

2) Building modifications

Try to do as few of these as possible. Usually a bit of balsa or some model windows or doors are enough. A bit of plaster over the offending area covered in flock (see step 5) will often do the trick for areas needing to be covered.

This church had a large opening in the back for lighting, but it also had snow drifts along the edge of the building. I had to break away the bottom — unfortunately it's made of the hard plaster and a large area broke off. I repaired it by gluing some of the shards back on and gluing a plastic door over the opening.

3) Paint touchup

The paint jobs on these houses are often rushed affairs. Use your own paints to quickly touch up the paint jobs. Don't worry about an exact color match, as the dip or washing step will tend to blend them together.

3) Drybrush the roofs
You can do more drybrushing and highlighting if you wish, but we're going for fast prep, and drybrushing the roof tiles is a quick way to really sharpen up the look of the buildings.

4) Paint over the roof snowdrifts and Christmas decorations

I used brown paint as it is a nice base for the dreary green-brown moss/ivy look that I'm going for. I even put brown paint over areas without snowdrifts where I wanted to later apply moss or ivy as it gives a bit more depth when you can't see the building colors under the flock.

5)Texture the ground snowdrifts

Using ballast, sand, or textured paint, cover over the snowdrifts on the ground and paint those areas a suitable ground color. They'll soon be covered in flock in step 7.

6) Dip or wash

I liberally applied Minwax Polyshades Tudor all over the houses and then dabbed up any pools with a brush. Its black pigments really darkened the buildings nicely and created nice shading effects. I tried Minwax Antique Walnut, a brown shade I use often for miniatures, on one wall, but it didn't look right to me.

I used Minwax because I'm very familiar with it, having used it to brush-dip hundreds of figures. Also, it's quick to apply — though it takes 36 to 48 hours to dry completely — and will add a very nice protective layer to the houses. That said, if you don't want to use Minwax, feel free to use whatever washes you are comfortable with. Here we see my buildings after dipping. Nice and shiny!


7) Apply flock

After 36 hours or so, you can paint tacky glue (a nice sticky PVA from craft stores) onto the Christmas details, snowdrifts, and anwhere else you'd like to see moss or ivy. Then sprinkle your chosen flock onto the glue. I used a simple brownish green foam-based turf, as I wanted a nice fast method that would bring a dark and dreary look to the buildings.

However, if you enjoy modeling foliage, feel free to be as creative with this step as you wish. There are a multitude of products for simulating moss and ivy available to today's hobbyist, and you can mix and layer these products to achieve a range of effects.

Here is the inn after flock. For some reason I didn't apply the dirt texture to the ground snow drifts until this step.

8) Last painting

For me, this step just involved drybrushing the ground texture, though you may find details you wish to paint or places that the dip or wash didn't reach.

9) Seal your buildings
I used a spray-on matte finish and a bit of brush-on matte finish to seal these. As well as sealing in the paint, it also adds an additional layer of hold to the flock and takes away the shine that comes from using Minwax Polyshades.

10) Done!
Here are my new fantasy buildings in all their glory. The figures for scale are a 90's-era Games Workshop Elf, D&D prepainted foot soldier, and an Echidnox by Reaper Miniatures.

Final Thoughts

I'm very happy with the results. The whole process was remarkably quick. By doing 5 buildings at once, I probably spent a maximum of 45 minutes of work per building! Though I didn't particularly liked the idea of working with hard porcelain buildings (the church and inn), in the end I prefer them for their crisper details. I'm considering basing these, though at this point, I like having them unbased so they can be used in city, country or farm settings.

The large vinyl cobblestone pattern mat is another Christmas house accessory. They can be routinely found for 7-10 dollars at after Christmas sales.

Also, for Mordhiem players and others who like their houses ruined and with accessible interiors, you need to check out Sean Patten's Necromunicon for the amazing ruined Christmas houses that first got me thinking about doing this project.

As always, your comments are appreciated and any questions are welcome.

— Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

Apocalypticum playtest, trying out vehicle rules

Last week we had our second playtest session for Apocalypticum, the forthcoming post-apocalyptic ruleset from Ganesha Games. Feedback from the game creator after our initial session helped us fine-tune our expectations for this game. We ended up devising a 3-player scenario — due to a snowy Chicago evening that stymied some gamers' travel plans.

The game started with a biker gang (using the Red Vultures stats from the rulebook; strangely there were no motorcycles on the table, so the gang must have walked in) guarding a collection of parked vehicles in the wastes outside Black Rain City. Presumably the vehicles' drivers were at a secret meeting and had left their armored cars and trucks under a close guard.

And that's a good thing, because two more gangs — KGB agents and Ruin Raiders — were approaching the impromptu parking lot from opposite sides of the table. Victory went to the first gang that could successfully start a car and drive it off the table. Here's the table near the start of the game. The vehicles are in the center and the two invading gangs are approaching from the left and right.


Karl played the biker gang in the center of the table, while Jon played the KGB team and I handled the Ruin Raiders.

Our opening moves saw Karl attempting to defend the vehicles by splitting his forces to engage both encroaching squads. Here my raiders take up positions behind a makeshift barricade to fire on the biker gang.


A melee quickly developed as the bikers moved closer to the raiders. What would have been a killing shot turned into a flub as the lead biker rolled a malfunction, causing his rusty pistol to break during the heat of the battle! The token next to him denotes his busted gun.

Across the table, Karl had a difficult time stopping the ceaseless advance of the KGB agents. After several rounds of ineffectual shooting (this became a theme for the night, alas) Jon realized he needed to go for the victory conditions and try to start up a vehicle. I tried to pace him by sending my raiders after the rusted vehicles parked on the battlefield.


In the Apocalypticum rules, vehicles are pretty much just scenario objectives on the battlefield. You can try to start 'em up, but you must roll a 6 on a d6. We modified that for this scenario to be a 5 or 6 on a d6, but we still found that not a single vehicle worked — so we further modified the scenario to say that the final vehicle, after all others had been tried, would be functional. In practice this meant that we tried the first 4 vehicles, to no avail, and then a mad dash began for the final, working vehicle.


(Sidenote: Black rain, a weather event that featured prominently into our previous battle report, came and went in the space of a single turn in this scenario, and it didn't have much of an effect on the game.)

Anyway, as the game approached its conclusion, my raiders desperately tried to stop Jon's KGB men from escaping in the last functioning vehicle, but we had spent too much time fighting off Karl's bikers. The communists started up the truck and rumbled off toward their side of the table — but some lucky shots from the bikers and raiders took out both tires on the vehicle, sending it skidding to a halt.

We called the game after this point. It was definitely a draw — Jon's KGB guys had claimed the functioning vehicle, but the combined shooting of Karl's bikers and my ruin raiders had stopped his escape.

Afterward we took stock of the game and discussed the rules. Here's something crazy — not a single figure was killed in this game! We each finished the game with the exact same number of guys that we started the game with. Where is the bloodshed and carnage? We unanimously agreed that Apocalypticum is just not deadly enough. No one could gain the upper hand because the combat stats were all compressed into a pretty narrow range of values. Guns that confer a +1 or +2 bonus to shooters didn't give us the sort of "outright death" results that should have come from a fast, furious gun battle in a post-apocalyptic car park.

I'm sure once the game is published it will have a much more detailed armory with heavy weapons, ray guns and other high-tech items to help increase the violence. I also understand that Apocalypticum is a campaign-oriented game, and in a campaign you don't always want your guys to die. But in this game everything felt extremely underpowered.

The vehicle rules worked OK, although they should almost certainly be modified for scenarios that require vehicles to be driven. We very nearly didn't find a single functioning vehicle on the battlefield. Here's the final shot of the game, showing Jon's KGB agents aboard a wastelands truck as they made their escape.


Despite the lack of carnage, we agreed that we really liked how the game played. It just needs a bit more brutality to increase the body count and make games more decisive.

— Patrick, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

Miniatures you've never seen: High Command sci-fi

Here at Chicago Skirmish Wargames, we're big proponents of 28mm scale tabletop wargaming — on a budget. As well as buying from affordable outlets like Mega Minis, EM4 and Denizen, we also acquire lots of figures from companies or model lines that are now out of production. This occasional series of posts will dig deeper into the great lines of OOP miniatures that we've discovered in bargain bins, swap meets, auctions, and the other seedy locales where miniatures are traded.

Today's miniatures you've never seen: High Command sci-fi from Folio Works

This shrink-card of miniatures was offered to me by a friend at Bartertown who knows of my fondness for odd sci-fi minis. These are High Command HC 3/2 Protectorate Officers.


It's marked at DM14.90, which I assume is Deutschmarks. This pack has been on quite a journey over the past 20 years — from England, to Germany and the USA! The rear of the card has neat pictorial instructions on how to attach the weapons to their miniatures, as well as details about the date (1991) and country of origin (England).


From what I've been able to gather, Folio Works was a relatively short-lived company started by two ex-Games Workshop employees. Birthed in the early 90s, it was gone before Rogue Trader gave way to 2nd edition Warhammer 40,000. They produced a Fantasy Warlord fantasy line and a High Command sci-fi line.

Though short-lived, the figures compare well to similar early-90s miniatures and were notable for including separate metal weapons for each pack of figures, a feature that wasn't very common those days. The High Command line had figures similar to GW's Space Marines and Imperial Guard, as well as sci-fi Ratmen and Lizardmen. Some of the fantasy figures are still rumored to be produced today by other companies. Click here for more information about Folio Works and their figure lines. (EDIT: Just a few hours after this post went live, we received word that UK-based Kennington Figures still produces most of the fantasy and sci-fi figures from this line! Thanks Mike!)

As mentioned above the figures themselves compare favorably to their contemporaries. These
Protectorate Officers seem like pretty blatant compatible-with-GW-figures aimed at the 40k market.


Clearly the two figures on the right are exactly the same figure with a coat sculpted over the one on the far right. This adding or subtracting of detail to make one sculpt go further was a fairly common practice in the past, as anyone who has collected Necromunda figures will attest.


They scale fairly well with current Games Workshop offerings. When the soles of the feet are aligned, the swordsman is the same height as the GW plastic Cadian Imperial Guardsman (converted with a Pig Iron head), and the other is slightly shorter. Of course, the sculpting isn't quite up to the standards of today's generation of miniatures.


The gun sprue is nice, featuring some pretty clear copies of a GW laspistol and autopistol, along with a third gun that is somewhere between an SMG and a bolter. I imagine that hobbyists wishing to use these figures for GW games might toss out the weapons sprue altogether and just use GW weapons.


All in all, I'm pretty pleased with these figs. They'll probably be painted up as commissars when I get around to completing my Imperial Guard platoon composed entirely of Demonblade Shockforce Troopers (now sold by MegaMinis).

Coincidentally, researching these figs led to the discovery of the origin of a couple of sci-fi Ratmen that I had recieved a while back. Apparently the critters below are Ratten from High Command, though I can't tell which pack they belong to.




So there you have it: Folio Works' High Command miniatures, a long-lost line of figures from the golden-olden days of Rogue Trader. Good luck and good hunting for these figs — and if anyone has a few more Protectorate or Ratten figures they don't need, I may be willing to take them off your hands...

— Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member