Prepping For Pulp Alley

The past week has seen me working on finally getting Pulp Alley on the table. I've been re-reading over the rules (I think finally playing X-Wing with the matching dice mechanic has helped me a lot) and doing a ton of work on scenery and terrain. Plenty more work to go though!

I started off by finally completing my palm trees that have been sitting in a drawer for probably two years now. I got 20 of them off Ebay for around $5.00 or so. Obviously at that price you get your standard "wow, what a great deal" but also "how good can they possibly be for that price?". Well, I can say for that price I got a steal. The leaves themselves are absolutely brilliant and after a coat of Army Painter Goblin Green spray paint (I wished I got a before photo because they were a bright green) they really looked amazing. The trunks... well, that was a different story. Some had an obscene amount of flash on them (in the photo above, the trunk on the square board hanging part way over was the main culprit), and I'm not sure if because of the type of plastic they are, but they didn't trim easily with an X-Acto knife. The best I could come up with was to use sand paper to clean them up as much as possible.

Here is a before (on the right) and an after photo of the trunks after I painted them with some Valejo Air Model light camo brown.

I cut a bunch of MDF into different shapes and sizes for the plates for the palm trees, trimmed and sanded down the edges; something I've never done before and I now see what a huge improvement it makes in the overall look of the terrain piece - now the big question is do I go back and do that on the 20+ 4Ground Old West buildings I have? Not looking forward to that. I also pre-drilled holes for the trees and threw a random rock on this plate; the rock has since been toned down a lot to a more yellow-ish brown instead of the grey seen here.

I added some wheat tuffs that really look more like dead tall grass to my eye above.

For the "sand" I originally started out with real sand, but just didn't like the look at all. I rummaged through my box of flocking material and found some Woodland Scenics Fine Turf Yellow Grass and again, couldn't be more pleased with how it looks! Looks the part of sand much better than actual sand to me.

The last two plates I decided to try to build little hills on them. First I used some crumpled up newspaper covered it with tape to get a rough idea of the shape of the hill, and then glued a plaster rock into the side.  Next I used some cut up strips of Woodland Scenics Plaster Cloth to create the actual shape of the hill. Pretty easy stuff with a great end result.

Above is the end result after a quick coat of spray paint. I then flocked all the plates with a coat of the yellow turf. When they were dry I put a second coat of yellow turf on, added some Army Painter tufts, and the wheat tufts.

And a couple of close up photos of the finished product.

I finished up these super cool beetle swarms from Reaper; I always loved the beetle swarm sequences in the first Mummy movie and can see me buying several more of these little guys. They come two to a package.

Next up I went back and gave all my barrels a wash of GW's Agrax Earthshade, and wow what a huge improvement that made! It's really kind of hard to tell in the photo's but believe me the difference is amazing. I cannot recommend this product enough!

I put a wash on all my boxes and crates as well.

Next up was basing and priming a bunch more of my pulp figures. I'm on the fence regarding the clear bases; I did it with my Ghostbusters figures and really liked it, but not a big fan of trimming metal from figures feet and then you have to be careful with the amount of glue used on the clear bases otherwise you end up with a "frosted" base. Lots and lots of painting in the weeks ahead; I've got a whole box of Perry's Afrikakorp I need to build as well, which will be trying to keep a certain professor of archeology away from certain mystical artifacts.

Here are my five plot points for the upcoming game; the major plot point is the mummy in the coffin, there is an incomplete map there. The other four are minor plot points; there is a mysterious journal hidden in the piano, a stolen canister (yellow item), an ancient key (round item), and the old stand by 'foreign agent'. I've got some small round bases from my Perry Afrikakorp that won't be used that I think I'll end up using to base plot points for Pulp Alley going forward, especially the small ones anyway.

And there you go, all set to try and finally play a game of Pulp Alley, more than a year later. The buildings are from Cresent Root and I have to say they are quickly becoming my favorite buildings. The quality is absolutely amazing and they are ready to go right out of the box. I can't recommend these buildings enough and Mark at Cresent Root is a top notch guy!

Hopefully the next post will be our first Pulp Alley AAR!

As always, thanks for looking.

Ivor