Lead Adventure Forum
Miniatures Adventure => Post-Apocalyptic Tales => Topic started by: Manchu on November 30, 2016, 07:44:14 PM
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I'm not sure that "What's it do?" is the right question ...
From what angle do you approach designing post-apoc terrain?
http://lifeonjasoom.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-fuel-depot-part-1.html (http://lifeonjasoom.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-fuel-depot-part-1.html)
(https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kynwg_RYTnA/WD8ZJnClReI/AAAAAAAAACY/w6g1zQG8_GQseft1cvgFiop7izBEfDSigCLcB/s640/FD2.jpg)
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You hit the nail on the head.
I feel the same way about the "platformer" kit. Never quite know what to make of it, except for strange scaffolding!
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Sure, what is the point of a ramp that goes nowhere? I guess you could say, it's a junky tower. Seems a bit overwrought for that purpose, no?
I suppose this gets to the tension between the simulative and the abstract sides of the hobby. The point of scenery, in terms of abstraction for the sake of gaming, is to block LOS and provide cover and otherwise create interesting tactical choices. On the modeling side, however, scenery is supposed to support the verisimilitude of the spectacle.
For me, this is mostly a factor of scenery "telling a story." A stand of trees should look like they exist beyond the need to, for example, block LOS in a game. This is why I have to chuckle at the extremely abstract "terrain" you sometimes see used in Warmachine, for example.
With stuff like my trailers, there are all these elements that speak to specific human agency: a pile of cardboard boxes leads to the question, what's in the boxes? And who put whatever it is inside of those boxes and why? But with machinery, the questions are so much more complicated that we just sort of assume the agency without getting too curious. Why does some of this stuff look so bizarre, when you really look at it? I think it's easy to dismiss by saying, an expert designed it to do what it is designed to do. (This also explains our fascination with "how stuff works" type TV segments.)
For people living "after the fall," who are disconnected by whatever catastrophe brought society low from the kind of assumptions we can make, industrial stuff could seem arbitrary or maybe expressive as opposed to merely practical.
So designing terrain to capture that experience is sort of the reverse of what I would usually do. Instead of assembling things to tell a story I already understand, I assembled these pipes and tanks without any real reference to meaningful operation, at least so far as I could understand. So if there is a story there, it has to be discovered. Basically, I built something that I can look at in the same way that the characters in my post-apoc games would look at it.
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Awesome work! What's it do?
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Manchu,
You are on the money. 8)
Scurv,
That does the job nicely. :-*