Tag Archives: Planet Mercenary RPG

Yes, You Read That Correctly…

Sergeant In Motion: Schlock Mercenary Book 20, will be the last book in the Schlock Mercenary “mega-arc,” the unbroken¹ string of 7,300-ish² days of daily comics airing here at schlockmercenary.com. At that point the continuity of the Schlock Mercenary universe will include those twenty books, assorted bonus stories (which appear in the volumes in print), the Seventy Maxims book, and the Planet Mercenary RPG materials.

Many of you may be asking (and indeed, many of you have already asked) “what comes next?”

Good question.

The answer requires a bit of cold, calculated business stuff. See, it’s much easier to sell a collection of stories in print when you can tell a potential buyer that the collection is complete. So no matter what comes next, it won’t make the twenty-book story feel incomplete. I’ll be leaving lots of room for readers (and RPG players) to tell their own stories about what comes next for such characters as survive the events of this final book.

That sounded a bit more ominous than I meant it to. But only a bit.

Also, all I’ve done is answer the question “what DOESN’T come next?” and that’s not what anybody is asking.

In the face of a crassly commercial decision about what NOT to make (and let’s be blunt here—between the words “schlock” and “mercenary” there is a broadly telegraphed justification for me to be crassly commercial) I need to give people a reason to keep showing up. So here is a bulleted list of things that will definitely be here after Book 20 wraps.

  • Sense of wonder
  • Witty dialog
  • Punchlines
  • High stakes adventures
  • Interesting characters
  • Schlock
    • and Schlock will still be a mercenary

It’s far too soon to go into much detail about any of this. I have a book to finish, and it would not be overstating things to say that I’m feeling a bit of pressure to brilliantly stick the landing after spending twenty years tumbling through the air pretending I know what I’m doing.


 ¹ Past results are no indication of future performance. I plan to not miss any daily updates during book 20, but blah blah mice men etc. 
² June 12th of 2020 would be day 7,306 of Schlock Mercenary, and that date falls in about the right place for me to be ending a book. Dates aren’t important though. The story says when it’s over, not the calendar.

Designing the Bristlecone Ship Coin

As part of the Random Access Memorabilia (Book 13) Kickstarter we’ll be doing a ship coin for Bristlecone, which featured prominently in books 12, 13, and 14.  I’ll be drawing this ship again for the coin, and doing so for the first time in a couple of years at least.

In order to get it right, I made a model sheet from some of my favorite drawings of the ship.

The image in the upper left was rendered by Jeff Zugale¹, who did all the ship design work for Planet Mercenary. Everything else was my line art.

I’ll probably be drawing the ship using a camera angle similar to the upper center, but with more detail, like the images in the lower left (in front of the tufted wing shark¹) and lower right corners.

In the Planet Mercenary RPG, Bristlecone is defined as a Celeschul Orbital Foundries Wyvern-class vessel. The hull and A.I. were built and integrated in the 26th century, but improvements in annie-plant tech led to numerous upgrades. The full history of the ship won’t fit on the coin, but we’ll hit the highlights.

The tufted wing shark² won’t appear on the coin anywhere.


¹ Jeff “Starshipwright” Zugale is doing an art book Kickstarter WITH SPACESHIP TOYS right now, and you should go look at it.
² McConger named the tufted wing shark “Kong,” but xenobiologists ignored the precedent he attempted to set and went with something more descriptive.³
³ At least to humans, who know what the word “shark” means. 

Planet Mercenary is Shipping!

If you backed the Planet Mercenary role playing game on Kickstarter, your rewards (books, cards, dice, tokens, etc) are on their way. Many of you have already gotten packages, but many more of you are waiting on things that are still stacked at the Hypernode Media shipping center awaiting their turn in the “shipping and handling” portion of this process.

It’s a complex process, and Sandra is running it brilliantly. A decade ago we ran things like this with the help of an ad-hoc team of volunteers.

Not pictured: 75% of the team, and 95% of the contents of the warehouse…

These days we have a warehouse¹ and a press-ganged team of minors². The biggest limiting factor is that we’re shipping in the summer, and the warehouse is not air-conditioned. Shipping days begin at 8am, and end by noon, just before the team begins dripping sweat onto the merchandise.

My role in this is pretty simple: stay out of the way, and make comics. I’m leaving for four weeks of travel on July 26th, and must fill the buffer with at least five weeks of comics by that time, so while Sandra and her crew endure the heat and heavy lifting, I’m enjoying the A/C and my collection of art supplies³.

It is not fair, and I do feel a bit guilty about it, but it’s the only way through.

On that note, today is Friday, and I need to create an entire week of comics between now and late Saturday night, so it’s time for me to go to work…


¹ The warehouse costs almost twice as much per month as our first house did. Running a business is expensive.
² It’s not entirely comprised of minors, and everybody is paid at least minimum wage, with all of the accompanying paperwork. Again, running a business is expensive. 
³ Sometimes I draw on the couch in front of the TV, enhancing that air-conditioned, seated feeling of guilt. 

The Rusty Wrought-Iron Game Screen Mod

In this post I’ll explain in detail how you too can turn your fancy Deluxe Game Chief’s “Handbrain” Screen from slick, dry-erase-compatible ABS plastic to a battered, rusty piece of equipment that has seen better centuries.

A Disclaimer Meant to Give You Hope

Sandra did all the modding work shown here, and she is a beginner. I explained the processes and provided tools, but she is the one who applied all the paint. This was her second experience with spray paint, and her first experience with glazing and dry-brushing, so while the results are perhaps a bit less polished than if I’d done the work, they’re easily within the reach of somebody who is new to hobby painting.

This tutorial is long, but the actual process goes very quickly, and most of the time you spend on the project will be spent waiting for things to dry between steps.

Let’s go!

Modding Your Handbrain

Supplies & Tools

Supplies for the “Rusty Iron” mod

You will need the following:

  • The Handbrain Screen (or anything else that will take spray paint, and that needs to look rusty)
  • Two large pieces of cardboard (work surfaces)
  • Paper towels
  • Letter or A4 paper, folded or cut in half.
  • Scissors
  • CA glue (“Superglue”)
  • Sandpaper or a sanding sponge
  • Ultra-flat black spray paint (Rustoleum® Camoflage Black is my favorite)
  • Testors Dullcote spray lacquer
  • P3® hobby paints: “Bloodstone” and “Pig Iron”
  • Two paint brushes—one for the rust wash, and one for dry-brushing.
  •  Water for thinning paint and rinsing brushes
  • Q-tips (not shown in photo)
  • Something to mix paint on (not shown in photo. Sandra used a paper plate.)

With the exception of the paint, brushes, and sanding sponge, everything here is probably already in your house. If not, the total cost of these supplies is between $20 and $30, unless you go all-in on fancy brushes, which we did not.

The P3 paints are available from your friendly local game store, and from lots of online shops as well. Each bottle costs about $4. Any metallic acrylic hobby paint can be used in place of the Pig Iron, but I have not found an acceptable “rust wash” substitute for Bloodstone.

Phase 1: Surface Prep

In which we add a little of our own texture to the surface, and get it ready for paint.

  1. Sand the corners of the screen
  2. If you’re feeling really plucky, take the scissors and score some “battle damage” in places.
  3. Wipe it down with a damp paper towel, and then wipe it dry. This is the only critical step here. The sanding and scoring is just for show.

Phase 2: Patch and Customize

Superglue + paper = welded metal patch

  1.  Cut paper patches for the eight holes in the corners of the screen.
  2. DO ALL GLUE THINGS ON DISPOSABLE CARDBOARD WORK SURFACE. Because superglue is forever.
  3. Carefully, drop-by-drop, create a bead of superglue around the hole.
  4. Lay a paper patch over the hole. It will wick up the glue and change color.
  5. Using a Q-tip, flatten the paper. As necessary, add another drop of superglue, and spread that with the Q-tip.
  6. Repeat steps 3-5 for the remaining 3 corners on this face.
  7. Wait for the glue to dry. It will dry faster in humid environments because superglue does not “dry,” it “cures” by bonding with water. (This, incidentally, is why you don’t wash wet superglue from your body using water. Wipe it off with a dry paper towel. The driest you can find, but be quick…)
  8. Flip the screen over, and repeat steps 3-7 for the four corner holes on the back.
  9. Feeling plucky? Cut some more paper into cool shapes, and glue those down. By now you’ll feel pretty confident in your process. Sandra did!
Roughed up with sanding, and custom-textured with superglue and plain old paper

Phase 3: Spray Paint!

If you’ve spray-painted things before this whole section will seem like too many words. 

  1. Find a good place, like and outdoor place, to paint. Use your cardboard to prevent painting things that should remain unpainted.
  2. Stand the screen on its base, and insert a sheet of paper to mask the inside surface of the screen.
  3. Apply spray paint to the front of the screen and the back of the base (but not the back of the screen) according to the instructions on the can
  4. Wait for it to dry. Ten to twenty minutes, unless you over-sprayed and made puddles. The ultra-flat finish paint is only shiny when it’s still wet, so you don’t need to touch the surface to check for dryness.
  5. Flip screen in stand. Paint the back of it (now that it’s at an angle which is easy to get at.)
  6. Again, the waiting.
  7. Remove the screen from the stand. See the bit that was masked by the base? Very lightly spray that part, front and back.
  8. More waiting.
  9. Ready for Phase 4!

Phase 4: Getting Rusty

Thanks to quirks in the formulation of P3 Bloodstone, this step is like magic. It looks terrible, and then suddenly it looks perfect.

  1. Closely consider this picture of wet paint.
  2. The upper puddle is P3 Bloodstone with a little water in it. The lower puddle is water with a little P3 Bloodstone in it. You’ll be using the lower puddle. 
  3. Get your brush sopping wet in the watery Bloodstone puddle. Generously apply that to the Handbrain. You’ll need several brushloads to get the job done.
  4. Keep going until the whole front face is wet, and you’ve got decent puddles hugging the details of the screen (including the details you made with paper and superglue.)
  5. Wait for it to dry. While you wait, look at these two pictures:

    The back of the handbrain, before and after the Bloodstone wash has dried.
  6. Feeling better about the mess? Keep waiting for it to dry. You’ll know it’s dry when you begin wondering where this rusty piece of metal came from.
  7. Repeat steps 3-5 on the back of the screen, complete with more waiting. Also, do the stand now.

This is what the back of Sandra’s screen looked like in bright light. That’s ABS plastic, superglue, and paint. No slabs of iron were oxidized in the making of this photo.

Phase 5: Shiny Metal Shows Through

In which you learn to drybrush, and possibly get frustrated about having ruined the whole thing, but that’s normal because there’s a learning curve.

  1. Read this aloud: “Learning to drybrush will take a few minutes, and even if I already know how to do it on miniatures, drybrushing something big and flat may prove different.”
  2. Look at this picture (click to enlarge). It is from Sandra’s first-ever drybrushing, and it has awesome bits, and some mistakes.
  3. Realize that by showing you our mistakes, we’re giving you permission to make a whole bunch of your own. Relax…
  4. Get a little paint on your big brush.
  5. With a rapid, back-and-forth motion, paint the paper. You’re getting all the wet paint off the brush, and getting air between the bristles. Keep going until no more paint blotches appear.
  6. Pick up the stand (not the screen) and with that same motion, brush against the “grain” of the screen, your strokes moving at 90° to any raised edges or details. You’ll know you’re doing it right when the edges look shiny, but the flat areas have very little metallic sheen to them.
  7. When the shine no longer appears as you brush it is time to reload your brush. Repeat steps 4-5.
  8. Aren’t you glad you practiced on the small piece? Feeling confident? Good.
  9. Pick up the screen, and drybrush it until you’ve made all the edges shine from the wear-and-tear that shaves oxidized metal away, and polishes what’s underneath.

Here’s what Sandra’s looks like without the paper mask in place. The grey is naked ABS plastic. The rusty metal is not actually metal. Neat, huh?

Finished dry-brushing!

Phase 6: Make It Durable

Because you want to play with it, not just put it up on a shelf for display, right?

  1. Return to your spray-painting place. It needs to be ventilated well, because this paint is pretty smelly.
  2. If you removed it the paper from the screen, put it back in now.
  3. Lightly spray the screen and its base with Testor’s Dullcote spray lacquer.
  4. Make sure to spray the part where the base covers the screen.
  5. Let it dry.

Testors Dullcote is my absolute favorite protective finish for models like this. It drys to leave a very flat, matte finish. Reflected light won’t be obscuring the paint job you worked so hard on. It shows off your work, while protecting the model from ordinary wear-and-tear. I like it so much I’ll totally shill for it, as evidenced by the linked text. I’ve used other matte finishes, but none are as purely non-reflective as Testor’s.

Summary

I often refer to this process in a way that omits all the persnickety details: “base coat, wash, drybrush, done.” For folks familiar with the hobby, that’s enough to get the point across.

This process works quite well on 28mm miniatures. Often I’ll start by doing the rusty look, and then add colors to the parts of the mini that are not supposed to be weathered metal. Sometimes I’ll forget that the model isn’t actually finished, and it’ll stay in the rusty metal state for several years. Yes, Cygnar Lancer warjack, I’m looking at you. As is everyone else…

Cygnar Lancer warjack from Privateer Press. Photo, May 2017. Stopped painting sometime in 2013, or maybe earlier.

It’s not the only way to get this look, and it’s not even necessarily the best way, but after lots of experimentation, it strikes the right balance between “easy” and “the right look,” at least for me.