Photography: Jon Hodgson Backdrop book

Lexico Arcanus Tsuchinshan 9981600.11Z/f (Leica M4 + 90mm f2.8 Elmarit, Tri-X 400).

A while back, Trench Crusade teamed up with Jon Hodgson from Handiwork Games to create a series of backdrop books to enhance miniature photography, funded via Kickstarter. Recently, I saw that Julian Wild (@hightechoger), an incredibly talented photographer, got some of the backdrop books and used them to amazing effect. This inspired me to order one of the books, World War Ruins Backdrops, in their smaller A4 size. I received the book quickly and wanted to share a few images I created with it.

Gaming with Brad: GorkaMorka

Feeling so weighted down.

Anyone following our blog for the last few months has undoubtedly noticed that we have been gearing up to start playing GorkaMorka. Having just created some scrap tokens, we decided there was never a better time to collect an assortment of the Rebel Grots and play a game with our friend Brad! The last time I seriously played Gorkamorka was in the late 90s after the game was released. After all of the elapsed time, reading the rules was an interesting experience. What surprised me the most was the organization of the book. After reading about ramming and vehicle combat, you would expect to find the associated damage tables nearby in the text. Instead, you would often have to flip through multiple sections and pages to find the relevant information. This can make it difficult to find specific rules when you need them. The rules also aren't always consistent in their terminology, which can be confusing. For instance, the Rebel Grots have a limit on who is able to carry guns (and how many), and confusingly, the pistols are not considered guns (or gunz). Importantly, though, the game is still as enjoyable and funny as I remembered it. Even in the first game, Brad and I were constantly laughing about the weird and comical stuff happening. Additionally, we really got a kick out of how many different dice rolls and tables were needed to accomplish even the simplest tasks.

Resin Casting: more Rebel Grot molds

Several Got Away.

After finding a host of old GorkaMorka Rebel Grots, and converting one of them, we wondered which to convert next. To make this easier, I decided to make some simple one-piece cut molds so I could create resin copies of the models. I also decided to create molds for the recent Chaos Cultist and Rebel Grot conversions. In short order, I was able to cast a variety of grots for future projects!

GorkaMorka: Scrap token conversions

Land of Some Other Order.

For the last few months, we have been converting and casting Rebel Grots in the hopes of eventually playing GorkaMorka again after many years. When looking through boxes of our old things, we found our old trukks and halftraks. To our delight, we also found a trio of scrap tokens we had made in the late 90s. In GorkaMorka, Orks fight over collecting pieces of scrap metal from their crashed space hulk, intent on repurposing it for their own ends. We thought this was the perfect opportunity to create a set of new tokens for future games!