ralf | July 6, 2011 | Deadlands, Paper Models

This month’s Annual issue on paper modeling is not the first time I’ve messed with Dioramas Pro, paper, glue and a trusty hobby knife.

t all started with our Deadlands: Reloaded campaign. Savage Worlds was our first game system that put a really heavy emphasis on miniatures, and I started painting a few Western miniatures for our characters, as well as investing in some fitting paper minis. Then Eric Hotz’s beautiful series of Wild West buildings (Whitewash City) caught my eye and soon enough I was busy building paper models for our game.

This was all well and good until our posse ventured south and into Mexico, and the American-style buildings suddenly didn’t fit the mood anymore. When it became clear that our characters would have to free a rebel leader from a fort, I started out by drawing a Mexican fort in Perspectives Pro. This came out very nicely, but it wouldn’t really help out on our gaming table.

Dioramas Pro then came to my mind and I asked myself, why I shouldn’t be able to design and build a few mexican-style buildings myself. They’d not come out as marvelous as the Whitewash City models, but probably good enough for ourselves. So I fired up CC3, loaded a Dioramas Pro template for the first time in quite some time and set about designing my own models.

There was a lot of trial and error at first, the project grew and grew, the paper bin overflowed, but I finally managed to create the complete set of buildings as shown in the Perspectives Pro map. I even added some extra goodies like cannons, the village fountain and a graveyard.

We had a blast in the two game sessions our posse stormed that fort and successfully freed the captive. The time I spent on building the model is of course way beyond what you’d normally spend on preparing one or two game sessions, but I had a blast and learned lots about paper-modeling (and Dioramas Pro) in the process. The fort even served as a display piece at Spiel’10 in Essen. And here it is on all its glory:

More images of the fort and other props of our Deadlands campaign can be found in my online gallery.

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ralf | July 1, 2011 | Annual, dioramas

Dioramas Pro is one of the more rarely used add-ons of CC3 – rather undeservedly though in my opinion. With a little care and patience it can create some spectacular setups for your gaming table.

This month’s Annual provides an example of what can be done with Dioramas, plus the tools and templates to create more paper models. So, break out those hobby knifes and glue bottles and start modeling…
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ralf | June 14, 2011 |

CC3 can be put to many uses apart from mapping, especially if you take some of the more specialized add-ons into the mix.

Several years ago (lots actually), when I was into naval miniature games but lacked the funds to collect pewter miniatures on a larger scale, I resorted to scratch-building ships from sturdy paper, toothpicks and paper-clips. The design process was laborious and I had to keep the little paper parts around for future rebuilds of the models.
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