***Note: This thread is mirrored on the Lead Adventure Forum, you can see some more "flavour" pics over there ;)
link
***
Most of you will know the comics or the movie, I always was a fan of all artwork that is stylistically unique, and Sin City's stark black and white contrasts is one of my favourites.
While playing around in Photoshop I somehow thought about playing Sin City on the tabletop, recreating all those great fight scenes from the movie; Marv beating up a bunch of riot cops in an apartment building, Dwight and the Girls in a shootout with a team of foreign mercenaries at the tar pits, and so on.
There is, in fact, an official Sin City boardgame, but it's pretty abstract with the Sin City theme pasted on to cash in on the franchise. At least that's what I think about it from reading the description and looking at the game board without having played it. Cards… Counters… NO MINIATURES?!? Thanks, but I'll pass ;)
So as usual I had to build my own game components. I used the tried and tested TLX system by World Works Games and converted the textures to Sin City's pure black and white style, using custom textures from free web sources where needed. I guess it's heavy on the black ink cartridge, but luckily I have a spare b&w laser colour printer that is just fine for the job and in fact prints large black areas (such as on the streets) better than my Canon inkjet printer.
Instead of the TLX anchor system (which is the only thing I hate about it, those anchor tabs looks out of place once folded up), I again used rare earth magnets for the posts and tiles, a system I originally used in my Mayhem: Apartment TLX Promo build… Revisited! project.
link
Of course, Sin City needs it's corrupt cops, desperate dames and hard-boiled detectives, so I converted a bunch of suitable Standees I already had on my hard disk to the same black and white style as the scenery.
Enough talking, let's see some damn photos!
Today, I quickly threw together (actually it took the whole day) a small scene of a mysterious murder being investigated by the police in a dark alley. I put a little piece of cardboard with a chalk outline on the ground, with a puddle of red blood that is the only thing that's not black or white in the scene, keeping in line with Frank Miller's style of only using color for important elements, and the movie that used red blood in the "The Hard Goodbye" segment.
The car is from World Works Games' Mayhem Bank set, also converted to black and white, of course.
I set up a single LED light source and increased the contrast of the photo, everything else is just as it looked in reality.
Below you can see the whole uncropped scene to get an idea of the setup I used. Obviously I only used the most bare-bones amount of elements needed in order to complete this scene as fast as possible.
Now, as for the game itself, I haven't dug deeper into what rulesystem to use or what style of game to create. It will most likely focus on very limited skirmishes with a maximum of four characters on the "good" player's side and roughly double that amount for the baddies. The terrain will also be limited in scope to get to the action quickly without wasting turns sneaking around the board with no enemy in sight.
The "hero" characters will have various special abilities and equipment and of course be very hard to kill. Scenarios could be anything from the iconic fights from the source material mentioned above or entirely new settings with fresh characters.
Two rulesystems I've looked into are .45 Adventure and Savage Worlds: Showdown. I'd ideally like to have a system that supports campaign play and character advancement. Maybe I'll also take a look at The Department and just disregard the SciFi stuff Smiley
I really don't know where this project will end up and if I'll ever get so far as to be able to play it, so for now I regard it as a pure "fun project" like my Hired Guns project.
link
So long! See you in Basin City! ;)
P.S.: You can see more of my Standee projects here:
link
