On The Painting Desk- Ferals for Under the Martian Yoke

 

I have been working on various projects to help support the releases of my own games on the Wargame Vault.  Today, I am focusing on creating adversaries for my game Under the Martian Yoke.  It is a survival horror game set after the Martian Invasion of the Orson Wells' broadcast.  The game is designed to be a solo/co-op/versus experience as the survivor's of the Martian attack struggle to escape Martian territory and to freedom.  

The game has a number of adversaries that survivor's may encounter.  The biggest and most dangerous are the Martian Tripods of various types.  Thankfully, I have a variety of Tripod models from the now defunct All Quiet on the Martian Front.  However, there are a variety of other tripod models available on the market as well.  

In addition to the the Martian Tripods, there are smaller foes as well.  That includes various drones, animated human corpses, modified animals, and even wild, feral dogs to face off against.  I have a few drones from Alien Dungeon and plenty of Irish Wolfhounds thanks to my Dark Age Irish army from Wargames Atlantic.   

Last time, you may recall that I was working on building up my adversaries, and created various cadaver troops to oppose the human survivors.  These foes are re-animated human corpses operating on Martian technology.  These undead troopers roam the Martian control zones to track down and kill lone or small groups of humans.  Worse, they can flush out humans for the Martians to capture for their own nefarious purposes later.  

In addition to reanimated humans, the Martians also reanimated various animals using their advanced, Martian technology.  It is unclear if the Martians actually know the difference between humans and animals, and if they even care.  These re-animated animals are known as Ferals.  They will viscously attack any humans they come across! 

You may recall that I made two Ferals out of Irish Wolfhounds from the Wargames Atlantic Dark Age Irish kit.  Plus, I also use these as wild dogs.  With some green stuff, and paint they ended up looking like this....

 My initial plan to expand my Feral collection was to get a box of plastic barnyard animals and convert them in a similar manner.  However, a fellow hobbyist was taken by the idea of barnyard astro-zombies and decided to design some for 3D printing!  You can find them on CookAndrewB's Thingiverse page here.  There is a ton of cool stuff, so check it out.  

A Feral bull that was 3D printed

So armed, and after a bit of trial and error, I was able to print 1 Cow, 2 Goats, and 4 chickens.  Suffice to say, I am not very good at 3D printing yet so this project was a huge learning curve for me.  However, at the end of it, I feel like I have a good idea of printing projects going forward.  I look forward to continuing to press my boundaries here.  

From there, I set about painting up the Ferals.  This time, I was able to base coat them with grey seer primer.  Then, I painted them various shades of brown.  The metal was plate mail silver with a red ink wash.  Then, the traditional Martian eye of red, white, and black.  Then, I gave it all a nice light tone wash to finish it up.  Here is what they ended up looking like.  

 

The bases I just painted brown with a few dabs of green here and there.  Nothing fancy.  Then, a black ring to help set them off. 

I took a lot fewer pictures of the Goats and Chickens, but here is an action shot of the "Barnyard of Martian Terrors"!  With these new additions, my Cadaver troops, the Drones, and the Alien Dungeon Tripods I have enough foes to keep going with some great games and a plethora of opponents.   

You can find the rules for Under the Martian Yoke on the Blood and Spectacles Wargame Vault page.  

Finally, I also spent some time painting up a team of "Knights" to help me keep play testing Darkest Knights.  These are all Reaper Bones (White) models that I then painted with various Armypainter paints.  Two are from the Savage Worlds lines, and two are from the Chronopia line, I think.   

A friend of mine, The Painted Dwarf; showed me that GW's grey seer primer does a great job prepping Reaper Bones White models.  I had trouble getting good undercoats on them in the past, but the GW primer did the trick. This made them MUCH easier to paint. 

 I also got a bunch of portals and enemies from the Hellboy board game to use as Shadowpoints and potential enemies.  I still need to get those painted up, but I think you can expect to see some more playtesting on that system soon too.  

Onward! 

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