Tadagdor - a Star Wars planet (New photos added 12/26/2023)

[FifteensAway]

The most unique element of Tadagdor, a desert planet with some areas of forest and a few swamps, are its outcrops of kyber crystals - it is the only known world with natural outcrops of the rare gems.  And always accompanying these outcrops are patches of Outcrop Vine. 

This fast growing plant has been found to be life sustaining for many of the creatures of the galaxy, both sentient and non-sentient, some say it has special qualities.  Those who are masters of the Force will tell you that this unusual combination of plant and crystal is a source of extraordinary Light power and, thankfully, completely immune to those who fall to the Dark Side. 

It is suspected - though not yet fully proven (an acolyte of the Dark Side who turned away but not back to the light got very, very ill) - that a Dark Side practitioner eating these vines will die a horrible and lingering death. 

The Great and Revered Master Yoda discovered this vibrant force center on a visit here and spoke of one day there being a place of learning and training for Jedi’s on this remote world once the Dark and Evil forces were well checked. 

Ever since, sentients from across the spectrum have flocked here, mostly in the one significant bit of civilization, the space port of Lost Wisely.  Sometimes these sentients brought non-sentient species who have naturalized themselves here and disrupted the native species.

But even Master Yoda knew that even such bright Light forces can never eliminate the Dark Side of the force.  The universe is forever seeking to be in balance.  No matter how much light there is, there must also be the dark.  It is an immutable essence. 

Evidence of this isolated world once being well known is an ancient debris field from a great space battle that fell to planet - a space battle that sucked ships in from varied dimensions of time and space and - as the evidence suggests - forced some through some sort of portal that at times expanded and other times shrank ships that passed through, giant battle cruisers shrunk to the size of landing craft and other craft many times larger than they should be while other craft were normal sized.  And somehow many of these craft fell out of the sky into one of the deserts on Tadagdor.  Equally strange, some of the craft seem nearly new and others suffering the ravages of vast time - but never really deteriorating.

It is an odd planet.  Lately, an outpost of Empire has been established - though hardly welcomed.

Stay Tuned for More...

[FifteensAway]

And now for that more - which took longer than expected because of an extended first round voting in this year's Build Something Contest.  I expected to get knocked out in the first round - and was - but for various reasons it took until a day or two ago to get results posted. 

So, here are some photos of my entry, the JBHU House of Worship, one of five buildings for the full university I built during the contest - JBHU standing for Jamaurie Boyanglaotze Hensonai University.



This shows all five buildings as designed to 'fit together'.  Note the building on the far right and the tree in green.



For scale, I included my first - and so far only - painted 15 mm Star Wars figure, a well-known Wookie.



And for further scale, a couple of AT-AT and AT-ST, the former from Disneyland, the latter from Hot Wheels.



An overall shot of the main contest piece.



Part of my 'conceit' in the build was that the university was founded in honor of Yoda (see first post here about Khyber crystals and outcrop vine).  That is why so many plants or plant-like decor on the buildings.  Except for the Ground Zero Game parts on all of the buildings - very cool stuff - almost everything came from the Jewelry area, sometimes related crafts, at large craft stores.  For photos of the build process, visit the 2023 Build Something Thread and look for the JBHU House of Worship.



The side to the left.  The posters - except for the Mandalorian ones because try as I might I couldn't find any proper Star Wars ones - turned out to all be related, as far as I can tell, to plants.  I just bought a pack with lots of little images; only after starting to glue them on did I realize they were botanical.  That was cool considering my inspiration being the whole 'life force'.  On all those posters, I figure there must be student association, faculty associations, and alumni associations all active and what with it being a galactic wide destination point, there are a lot of them.  Maybe a bit of overkill but still fun.



A close up of a Khyber crystal outcrop with its attending vine.  And that cool little space ship emblazoned with "I want to believe".  In my case the belief is that "Yoda Lives"!



The rear view.  I wanted animal life, too, but all I could find that fit were the dinosaurs, several per building.  I'll come up with a story for that somewhere along the way.  That wookie was very busy during the photo shoot.  The sign above the door is in Linfragal, a language that relies on size, shape, orientation, color, and distance for meaning and takes one hundred years to learn properly and at least two hundred years to master.  [Should be obvious but in case not Linfragal = Lingua Franca Galactica]



A close up of a couple of those GZG details.



Another close up of another space ship.  Every building has at least one space ship and/or space traveler.  I think my favorite, on a different building so for a different post is the giraffe in a space suit!  I have a vague recollection that someone else used that piece here on LAF.  And it looks like I either missed the other side of the building or didn't upload the image from my phone.



May only have one figure painted so far but more in the works.  These are all principle characters - though I would have preferred Lando Calrisian over Boba Fett.  I do have a Lando figure in resin, though.  Quite a bit out there in 15 mm for Star Wars.  I have more - A LOT MORE - to paint, might get them done by the end of the - decade!  Yeah, that many.

This is just a sample of the 80 photos I took while I had this setup.  I will post more as I have time.

Edit: Found an image of the missing side of the building.  The plants and their colors were meant to give a bit of 'other world' feel to the ground.  Being a university, it has good resources including water so more plants here than on many parts of Tadagdor.

[tomrommel1]

nice start, especially the backgroundstory about "your own" planet is a nice idea. 

[FifteensAway]

I guess I should note that the snowy mountain top in the background painting I did recently is not related to Tadagdor - just had it set up for the photo shoot.  Though I suppose I could posit a story to go with it but unlikely.  Being a fan of the Dune books and understanding how much inspiration for Star Wars came directly out of those books, I like the desert planet concept only with a few areas of swamp and forest to accommodate my gaming world.

I have one or two more sets of buildings I will scratch build for Lost Wisely and several sets of commercially produced buildings to paint up - and one 3D print set of structures due to be delivered by Friday.  It will be a pretty good sized town once completed.  Hopefully it will host many games over the forthcoming years.  Of course, many games will be in hinterlands and some in that debris field.

[Cacique Caribe]

Awesome collection!  I can’t wait to see more.

No idea where you got that miniature UFO next to the Wookie?  I would love to get my hands on one of those!

Dan

[FifteensAway]

Hi, Dan,

The little spaceship was found in the jewelry department either at Hobby Lobby (probably) or Micheael's (maybe).  It is hinged and opens.  I had to - very carefully and with eye protection - Dremel off the various connecting elements of many of the decor items I bought since they were mostly meant to be added to bracelets or necklaces.  Don't recall if the spaceship had that or not.  Hope you can find one for your use.  I weathered the one in the photo - it comes looking 'new'.

Did you ever move forward with the 15 mm Yoda or is that too much for your hands these days?  No worries if not.

[FifteensAway]

No, this project is not abandoned, just on the back burner for a while.  While sorting and assembling all in one place (I hope!) for temporary storage, I laid stuff out to see what was what and took a bunch of photos.



An overall view of all the various items that are not figures - those are all sorted into boxes by units or hero/villains, etc.  The boxes you see in this photo are mostly scatter terrain or scratch building materials.  I hope to build maybe another dozen buildings.

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A lot of the parts are metal but there are some in resin, too.  I bought a lot, maybe more than I will need.



The focus here is on the model railroad bridge that I am going to turn into part of a rebel base - the door is one of my scratch building items.  Probably build it as part of a cliff.



JS Wargamer Printing, I think?  A cool bit of giant beast remains to add a little atmosphere.



Not so sure about those green foam bits, a bit too porous and don't take spray paint well.  We shall see.  More on the other buildings below. 

But, first, some aerial/space craft - and some surface craft, too:



Not quite all of them in this view, another shot below with the balance.  And, yes, some things are WAY out of scale but many of the items will be used to build that debris field described in the OP.

The following are just 'closer' shots grouped, more or less, by alliance - though still a work in progress on that front though some should be pretty obvious.









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I have another one of those pods with more pieces to assemble - if it gets too fiddly it might become a crashed pod!



Those bobble heads will be removed.  And the shelf with the curved handle will be turned into a gravity bike servicing facility (I believe I have 24 of them including a couple with my Ewoks) using some of those scratch building components - and some 'found' items.  Somewhere there is an antenna that is such a found item, not the blue one, that is a 3D print I purchased pre-printed.

And now for the buildings.



Those five central structures are the Yoda University, see 2023 Build Something Contest, JHBU Hall of Worship.  Only one of the buildings was in the contest but I built the other four at the same time.  Entered more to propel progress than to win and, to put it mildly, I didn't win - unless bringing up the rear has some sort of prize of its own. 



These foam items, the green, should work much better - note the dome that was spray painted.



A few 3D prints, a repurposed toy to become some sort of power station or something.  The white domes were from a cheap kids game that I will turn it to homes for economically challenged space folk.



There are a few found items here - the antenna mentioned above, the item inside the 'track', and the track - which wasn't found but purchased for the locomotive (to be used for pulp Banana Wars setup) - will be used to create a space port landing and servicing spot, maybe for the Milennium Falcon?



A different set of 3D printed buildings, 5 types, the little plastic bag holds the doors for the buildings.



The white buildings are a commercially produced item, I bought 2 of each of the 'domicile' sorts.



A slight variation in angle. 



And finally - and not yet assembled - are some rectilinear metal buildings which I will use to create an Imperial station on the outskirts of Lost Wisely, which is what all this is intended for.  Of course, many of the items might make guest appearances in other locations for games.

Some of the stuff has appeared in another thread but I am hoping to center by Star Wars posting in this thread.

We are not going to go into much detail on the figures, suffice to say that I have considerably more than I really need but enough to have some pretty exciting games with lots of players.  I do have 46 alien non-sentient 'beasts' of various sorts - though not generally from the Star Wars world, just what I could find.  Still hoping to find some 'naked' Bantha - have seven with riders and a few more on order if my local 3D guy I get stuff from gets healthy enough to do them along with some more Ewoks and a couple of other bits.  I do have quite a few Star Wars appropriate sentient aliens, mostly through either the local 3D printer or JS Wargamer Printing: https://wargamerprinting.com.  Proprietor of latter company converted - and they are now on site as on option - a number of items to 15 mm.

edit: come the morning hours I did a bit of editing to correct some errors.

[Kourtchatovium104]

What a collection! I can't wait to see what you are going to do with it 

[The_Beast]

What he said!

Hadn't seen this before, so still absorbing.

By the by, I thought prepping foam usually involved covering with a thin coat of PVA glue, no?

Of course, few of my projects even get that far...

Keep sharing, please!

Doug

[FifteensAway]

While this collection is on the back burner for a bit, I did just come up with something fun.  BaronvonJ of Fistful of Lead fame has a planet named Corona Prime for one of his games (maybe Star Wars canon, I just don't know but will find out in a bit).  From it I've decided to add in a wee place, maybe just a settlement rather than a planet, to be called Corroded Slime - rather sounds like a hive of more than villainy and less than scum.  Or maybe it will just be a portion of the town of Lost Wisely.  Perhaps it is just an unsavory establishment. Don't know yet but it sure sounds fun to me!