Marconi Plays The Mamba

Mullets and moustaches are no place to hide from the raging hordes of the undead and my internet research revealed that most zombie gaming terrain was, unsurprisingly, not built on Rock and Roll but was based on printable card terrain, plastic railway buildings or scratch-built masterpieces. After finding the incredible ZombieTown initially thought I was going to go down that route but the discovery of Vampifan’s Blog revealed the wonders of printable terrain and I figured I would be able to put a play set together a lot quicker that way.

It probably goes without saying that Worldworks Games produce some of the finest printable terrain suitable for modern settings. I decided to tackle a basic ‘flat’ first, something that would look good on a table but wasn’t going to require too much time to create. I settled on the Mayhem Downtown set and with a ludicrously plentiful supply of foamcore at my disposal I decided to make shells and simply print to paper and ‘skin’ the buildings. To keep cost down I settled on Tesco’s Glue Sticks for the large areas and Power Pritt for the edges and details. I printed and cut out the ‘skins’ first and measured and cut foamcore from those. The shells were glued with PVA and I used a little sellotape to keep them in place whilst drying.

Mayhem Downtown - Beige Brick

The first building worked out ok and only took a couple of hours to build and does the trick although I thought I could do better. For my second building I chose to add a parapet wall and simply cut up some test prints to skin the inside of the parapet wall. Note: I did 'miss' skinning the corners, as in the pics below, but I do plan to go back and fill them in.

Parapet Wall

It is worth noting that most of the Twilight Street range is designed for 20mm scale (although they do produce a ‘Heroic’ scale range), great if that’s your chosen scale but a simple trick for me, wanting 28mm compatibility, was to print to A3 and select ‘fit to page’. A3 is 1.5 times bigger than A4, therefore 20mm x 1.5 = 30mm; it worked out fine and what’s a couple of mm between friends? They are a little on the small size, so I ‘sealed’ the roof of Drakes (a bit too tiny for a full interior), but they add some superb character to the terrain set. I couldn’t wait to move onto other buildings in both of these retailer’s ranges.

Microtactix Free Download - Drake's

Matt over at ‘Too Much Unpainted Lead’ pointed me in the direction of the Microtactix Twilight Street ranges available through RPG Now. Their superbly evocative models have a more cartoony style that Worldworks but I felt they suited the theme perfectly and would bring some welcome variety to the table. Three Buildings, Drake’s TV and Video, Horseman’s Deli and Stinky’s Pizza, are also all available for free download, result!