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The Protectorate demands mineral resources! We've seen the work their employees do in the asteroid belt before. Welcome to Xipetotec, in the Huitzilopochtli system. It sucks here! A Mole Person could get along here, but humans who get sent here must have gotten in the Protectorate's bad books. Hey, look, it's those two guys again! Survival on such an awful sphere is hard, so the Company pumps its workers full of Brute Juice. ("Brute Juice: You Know It's Healthy 'Cause It Glows!") Crosswire (50018) is a prime example of what Brute Juice does to a body--he's a burly specimen. But Oleg here makes him look positively puny. Oleg is an Ogryn Heavy Trooper from CP's alien line. The mask, armor, and Brute Juice tubes make him fit in perfectly with the other Space Roughnecks. The girder-sized object he totes had a flat end, so I tacked a GW greeble on it to make some sort of futuristic space welder or gauss-field gizmo. Also gave him a GW Ork knife, which would be a machete in a smaller figure's hands. Anyway, for impressionable readers I should mention that Brute Juice is habit-forming, and the Company will deduct it from your paycheck, and no it is not cheap. Anyhow, these shock-troops of labor will work like hell until they have got the mining and smelting processes automated. Once the machinery is set up, it's a few days off-planet R&R and then on to the next site. The pension for this kind of labor is very generous indeed--it's not like most of the workers will collect. But perhaps that's spoilers for another post! The Ore Orb is a 'moon ball' bouncy toy with a touch of paint. The apparatus in the last picture is a partly-finished GW Ferratonic Furnace; more of that to come. Remember, cadets! Brute Juice--Not Even Once!

Matthew Beauchamp recently sculpted an excellent line of Dragon Men for his Retroverse. I had to get them--and they are massive and burly, about 45mm or so! Great scaly brutes, But the heads were a little less reptilian and more orcish than I would like, having committed to the Antediluvian aesthetic of Buckland Rogers. Don't worry, I'll find a use for that head somewhere. So I took a couple of hours with Green Stuff and a dental tool and made a new hunchbacked crocodilian/mosasaur head, scarred and with a toothy muzzle. This is a prominent NPC in my spacefuture games, Atrox the weapons merchant. He is about nine foot tall, cheerfully violent and moderately amoral. Won't sell biological weapons or anything with long-half-life decay products, but otherwise it's fair game if you have the credits. Pretty scarred about the face and neck, because he's a professional and insists on testing each type of weapon before selling. Also from ritual Laser-Glaive duels. I have decided his species mostly practices gigantocracy: whoever is biggest gets to rule. Not a perfect system, but very good at supply logistics and famine avoidance. "Perhapf sir would care to infpect our line of Deathshead blafters? Only the finest quality!" "Flamerf, zapperf, plafma-bolterf, we got it. Throw in a laser free with every third purchase." "We think thif one is from the future. I call it an Ontological Disruptor. Dunno HOW it works, but push thif button and the target vanishes from the physical univerfe for 6.3 secondf. The savvy tacticianf can immediately fee the poffibilitief." "Or perhapf sir would like a more ELEGANT weapon, from a leff civilized age?" "Clubf, maces, nooses, axes single or double, goads, prods, glaivef, fpears, throwable mambelef--oh, the Vault?" "I see that sir is a discerning customer! Only the moft DEVAFTATING beam weaponf and mortarf to be found thif side of New Xibalba!" "But don't juft take MY word for it! Liften to the teftimonialf of our satisfied customerf!"

Yet a third, and thus far final, spacefuture character from Antediluvian Miniatures. He is billed as a bounty hunter and comes with two pauldron-mounted plasma cannons, but I wanted more of a blue-collar look. The industrial armor suit with its huge digging claw is amazing. The Miner is dwarf-sized, likely from a high-gravity world. It's a tough life, prospecting for minerals in the asteroid belt. More turnaround pix: Especially when the ore vats start acting up. BUT! once in a great while you strike paydirt. And with the credits from a haul like that, even after the Protectorate takes its cut, you're set for a Martian year of good times! Oh yeah, it's animal protein and Ganymedean moonwine from here on out! And the FLAVORED nutrient paste, every day! Success breeds envy, though...keep that exosuit on. Featuring guest appearances from Crosswire (50018), the robot from Briony, Cybertechnician (50064), some Mantic mining terrain, the previously posted Buckland Rogers, and some Hydra Galacteers, as well as Reaper's shipping crates, soda machines, and starship generator. The rusty shed is corrugated cardstock; the bar is mostly a repurposed toy-car blister pack with some wire and gewgaws, plus the Starship Door. This guy and Crosswire really would make a good pair of recurring bounty hunters/mercenaries/roughneck profiteers now that I think of it. The physical contrasts really sell them as a classic set of Those Two Guys.

WHO GOES THERE?! Another alien, "The Assimilator" from Antediluvian Miniatures. This sculpt is based on the THING from "Who Goes There?" as interpreted by an Classics Illustrated cover artist. The illustration (pretty true to the original text!): The mini: The sculpt alone is delightful, but the opportunities for paranoia in your space opera or horror game are just too good to pass up! Crash-landing in Antarctica: "well this sucks." An encounter with the locals (featuring a Grenadier Elder Thing by way of Mirliton): "You must be new here." Guest appearance from Antarctic Explorer, 80072. (on left. OR IS HE?!) Side note: It is left unclear in the Campbell story whether the form of this thing ever belonged to aliens that were not THE THING, but if there were non-THING aliens with this body plan I'd guess they were related to Rhan-Tegoth from "The Horror in the Museum." Another polar three-eyed monstrosity with writhing tendrils all about it, with mental powers and an appetite for dogs and men? And published five years before "Who Goes There?" Probably an influence at least. Perhaps THE THING is an assimilator on the meta-textual level too!

Antediluvian Miniatures is probably best known for its lost-world anachronistic reptiles, but they also have a space opera line! And in my opinion "Buckland Rogers, Bounty Hunter" is one of the best. A great crocodilian brute with gorilla arms and a face straight off of a Crystal Palace Megalosaurus reconstruction. Also a cybernetic reticule monocle and a three-barreled weapon of sinister design. Perfect for my retro spacefuture universe. Look at those savage jaws, the muscled neck-hump, the jaunty little jumpsuit! A great fit with my Galacteers (guest appearance from Betty, Space Heroine 50150) "gOOd dAycycle neighBoR maY i bOrroW a cUp of dEpROtonated anTimaTTer" Or with a rogue's gallery of other zoömorphic space aliens/a ragtag band of space pirates (featuring a Space Mouseling, 01434).

This was an excellent opportunity to practice some effects for marble. Also, a tip for anyone else working on this mini: if you have a dental tool or other means of prying, the water comes right out. I painted shiny metallic fish on the undersurface of the water and their shadows on the fountain. The wash on the water kind of obscures it though; next time maybe I'll put the blue-green tint on the fountain's bowl itself and leave the water clear. AP Bright Gold, some Reaper sample blue-green, and some Nihilakh Oxide got the statue taken care of. A Reaper sample of almost-flesh-tone-pink was the basis for the marble. Then some subtle streaks of a gray-blue and a white, each mixed with the pale pink, glazed with a touch of pinked-up Apothecary White finished the stonework off. This looks pretty fresh; there's plenty of room for weathering later. The upper basin on mine was warped a bit, but the tentacle bas-relief is worth the price of admission. Click for full turnaround: Click for some in-progress pics: But let's see it in action! This looks like a late-Renaissance or Classical project for a Western Mediterranean port town, now probably relying more on tourism than shipping and fishing. Picked up some more useful backdrop paper from my local hobby store (not my preferred one, but they have more things). I've posted all of the human minis before, except for Antediluvian Miniatures's Professor Cushing (the gaunt fellow with the umbrella and monocle). He's a marvelous sculpt, very directly lifted from "At Earth's Core!" The sort of character who would appreciate all the aesthetic features of this fountain, and probably investigate its history until he uncovered the terrible maritime cult it celebrates. Oh, yes, and I also got another public-utility structure, this one considerably quicker to paint up. No, not a stage. Pan back: Click for turnaround of Madame la Guillotine:

Realized my collection had some major lacunae in world cultures, and needed more pre-modern Mesoamericans! So I got these Aztec feather suit warriors from Eureka. Tried using mostly GW contrasts on them; can report that the red and blue work AMAZING. You can tell the fella in green is in charge, both by the high-status turquoise cloth and by the rad shield. I had fun with these. Gender diversity is important, so I also picked up Caroline here from Antediluvian Minis' Lost World line. She is shown with a mini-Couatl from the Familiars 2 set (77196). More pix in the spoilers box. And if there are macahuitls involved. I'd be irresponsible not to include the very representative of the Winged Serpent on earth! (Turnaround below.) Now for some invaders! I wanted some conquistadors for Weird West purposes (Zamacona-types as in "The Mound," ghosts of Cibola-quests, etc.) Picked up a set from Eureka of the most recognizable and armored. Painted as fancy as possible, An unexpected Other from beyond the bounds of the known world, with impossible weapons and unheard-of beasts. This seems like quite the problem for our Aztecs! Well, early-modern-era problems require early-modern-era solutions. Nanahuatzin, the Chancred God, isn't the most glamorous in the pantheon, but he *gets the job done.* (This is Antediluvian's Pestilent Lich; both he and the Conquistador Zombies are from Antediluvian's Conquest of Maztlan line. What a magnificently rotted and pustule-ridden sculpt.) Backgrounds and props include GreenStuffWorld rollers in clay and foamboard, Hydra's Saurian Idol, those Nolzur's cannons, and a skull from RAFM. I enjoyed this one a lot. C&C welcome!