A Car for Dark Future/Gaslands

I've been painting and converting some toy cars, as used in the old GW game Dark Future and the recent Osprey game Gaslands. I used to play Dark Future - many years ago, given that it came out in 1989.

Dark Future is, to modern eyes, quite an odd game for GW to make. For one thing, it wasn't set in either the Warhammer or Warhammer 40,000 settings (or whatever Blood Bowl is set in). For another, while you could buy a small range of models from GW, you were encouraged to convert Matchbox or Hot Wheels cars to make your own vehicles. As you can imagine, this didn't bring in a huge amount of money for GW, and it disappeared.

(Mainly, anyhow. A load of new Dark Future novels were published by Boxtree in 2005 or so, and the timeline and alternative history of the setting were revised and greatly extended. I started reading one of them, thought it was terrible, and gave up on that.)

Dark Future is rather more grown-up and down-to-earth than the big GW games. It's set in a near-future America, in a land racked by global warming, crippled by corporate greed and threatened by insane cultists. On the other hand, the US hasn't elected a dictator, so perhaps a modernised version would be called Somewhat Optimistic Future. On the highways, Sanctioned Operatives (the law) fight huge gangs (not the law) in armed and armoured cars, like a more gun-heavy version of Mad Max. It's got a fairly real-world look, with the Mafia, biker gangs, Bloods and redneck paramilitary types all being represented. 

Gaslands is one of those games from Osprey that fits into a gap that GW failed to fill. While Frostgrave is Substitute Mordheim, and Stargrave is to some extent a replacement Necromunda, Gaslands fills the "Mad Max with Matchbox cars" niche. 

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I was in Tesco recently with a friend, who suggested that I should buy some cheap toy cars and do them up. I thought I'd give it a go, so I purchased a pack of really naff, cheap toy cars. Each car seems to be based on a real-world vehicle, but they're not classy enough to actually say what they are.

One of them was a Chevolet-type truck that looked like this:

I split into its three main bits: the upper chassis, the silver plastic part that contained the interior detailing, and the metal base plate.

I put the upper chassis onto a base made of a bit of carboard, slightly roughed up to represent a crude road surface. I painted it all to look like a ruined, burned-out shell, somewhat overgrown.

That left the silver bit and the metal baseplate. While I couldn't think of anything to do with the baseplate (yet!) the silver bit looked like a crude, stripped-down buggy. 

I ordered the plastic "implements of carnage" sprue from North Star games, which comes with lots of bits of guns, armour and the like to Mad Max-ise your toy cars. I stuck exhausts, a ram and two guns that look like they came off a Flying Fortress onto the silvery shell. I added a driver from the sprue, which took quite a bit of cutting.

Then I painted it.

Oddly, these cheap plastic cars sometimes have some strangely detailed bits, often hidden away. This car had a bottle of extra fuel or nitrous oxide bolted behind the driver's seat, together with a tube that leads into... his bottom? Anyhow, it looked cool.

Well, I certainly got my money's worth out of this thing! It was fun to make and I'm pleased with the results. The other cars will be simpler conversions.