PLASTIC BASTARDS

This one is a real labour of love.

Some of you may know that, while I write roleplaying games for a living (somehow!) my hobby is making toy soldiers. I've been playing around with war dollies for twenty-five years, and it brings me tremendous joy to do something creative that I don't have to be professionally good at. (Please enjoy the pictures of some of my toy soldiers throughout this post.)

So: I make toy soldiers. And I don't make armies of toy soldiers because I don't have the patience, and also because I don't like spending a whole afternoon playing a sort of oversized unbalanced chess analogue. I make little groups of guys through a process called kitbashing, which consists of mushing models together in ways they weren't intended to be built. I make little groups of guys who might be friends, and then paint them and shove them in a box and never really do anything with them.

I've experimented with scrappy indie games in an attempt to fulfill the desire to actually play with my toy soldiers - Space Weirdos and The Doomed foremost amongst them - and I've had a lot of fun. But I wanted to make my own, because that sounded interesting.

PLASTIC BASTARDS is the end result of this. It's not a balanced wargame - it's a narrative miniatures game that happens to be about fighting each other. The idea is that you make the models first and then work out what it is they do on the battlefield; the rules are kitbashy too, and each guy is made up of a selection of abilities and equipment instead of chosen from a list.

I hope it's fun. And I really hope that it inspires you to have a go at making toy soldiers, because it's such a joy to do something creative with no particular aim in mind, and if you happen to play a game with them too that's fine. The physical edition comes with a back page which is a quick guide to kitbashing, which includes full details of what to do when you accidentally cut your finger on a scalpel. You know. The important stuff.

Mina did the layout on this one which is why it looks nice; it's three pages and change, which is three times the usual length, but I had a lot I wanted to say. And as I march onward to my hundredth and final one-page RPG, I say: fuck it, why not? 

All the pictures of minis on the game are my own; you can't legally use miniatures that someone else has made to illustrate your game, so these are ones that I made myself from putty and wire and gumption. Which is ironic, because the game's about kitbashing, but here we are.

Right. God knows what I'll write about next month.

Much love,

- Gx