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. 

The War Rig

Last year I saw Mad Max: Fury Road in the cinema with an old wargaming friend of mine. Then I went to see it again with another friend who is very into board games. Then I saw it a third time with two other friends. Then I ran out of friends. As I was sitting at home in my endless solitude, I decided to make my own war rig like the one in the film.

I found a toy lorry on Ebay, bought it for £10 and got converting. I chopped off the spoiler and used it to lengthen the wheelbase of the cab. Most of the rest of the work was bits of sprue and plasticard. I made a false new grille out of plasticard and curved bits of sprue and blended it in with green stuff so as to lengthen the bonnet/hood. The air intakes were made from those smoke launchers you get on Games Workshop tanks.

 Then of course I wondered if I had just carved up a priceless Dinky Toy. But it was too late. Time for paint and suitably excessive weathering. Here we go, girls:

And from the side...

Not bad, but it needed a trailer to pull. The model came with a suitable plastic trailer, complete with some kind of buzzer that you could fit batteries into to make a sound, which probably delighted small children circa 1982. I never found out what the sound was. Another voice lost to the Wasteland.

Again, this is just a plasticard job. The car on the right is a Matchbox or Hot Wheels car, so you can see the scale. It's hard to make out in this picture, but there's a plasticard superstructure on the front of the trailer, which is supposed to look like half a VW Beetle, as per the film. I went for a blue-black colour rather than straight black.

Looking back on it, I should have raised the rear of the cab higher, and perhaps put something onto the front of the trailer to stop it being such a blank slab. But I think it's captured the rough look of the war rig. So far it hasn't had an outing in any games, but I'm pleased with the end result.

I added a second plasticard Beetle and some pennants to the back of the trailer. One of these days, I'll use some spare wheels and a ping-pong ball to make the fuel pod that gets pulled along behind the rig at the start of the film. But for now it's ready to strike down the unroadworthy! Do you see me, Toecutter?