Perilous Tales: A Rough Night in Devil's Gulch

 I finally finished the Sarissa "Atomic Gas" gas station, and was eager to get it on the table, along with some recent scatter terrain I've done - some trash bags and a couple of pallets of cocaine from Miniature Building Authority and a humvee from Crooked Dice. Looking over the painted miniatures I had immediately available, a game of Perilous Tales began to present itself.

Years ago, I ran a B-horror movie review blog, watching and reviewing hundreds of horror movies over a period of about 7 years; why I stopped is too long a story to tell here, and not particularly interesting, but one thing I fell in love with during that project was 1970s made-for-TV movies. While the crown jewel of these is probably "The Night Stalker," starring Darren McGavin and introducing the world to Carl Kolchak, one that I really enjoyed was 1972's "Gargoyles," starring Cornell Wilde and Bernie Casey as the leader of the gargoyles. It's most notable for being the first film to feature the work of Stan Winston, who would go on to work on movies like "The Terminator," "Aliens," and "Jurassic Park." Now, Perilous Tales offers up Gargoyles as a villain for games; I had some gargoyles painted up. And I had some desert terrain pieces available. 

While the film mostly follows an academic as he races to prevent the gargoyles from producing an army, I decided the cartel members I'd recently painted from Brigade Games' "Drug War Z" line would be my protagonists this time around. 

So I had my set-up: a cadre of cartel soldiers, sent on what they believed would be a routine pick-up, instead encounter monstrous gargoyles at an isolated gas station in the American Southwest. Objectives would be Forbidden Knowledge (collect an esoteric artifact that one of the villains drops when slain), Flip the Switches, and Escape.

left to right: Marcus, Javier, Carlos, Ramon, Hector

The cartel members advanced slowly towards the abandoned humvee and scattered cargo of cocaine. As they began to fan out, Marcus spotted something beyond the cactus patch - a winged humanoid figure, standing stock-still.

He opened fire, but barely grazed the creature, which seemed to teleport closer in short bursts every time he blinked. Meanwhile, a ground tremor knocked Hector and Ramon off their feet.

The sound of gunfire brought out a crazed, sunburned man in a pith helmet - an archaeologist who had been working in the desert and fallen under the gargoyles' sway. He swung wildly at Marcus.

The crazed archaeologist eventually fell beneath the fists of Marcus, Javier and Hector as the gargoyle slowly advanced towards them. Meanwhile, Carlos and Ramon circled the back of the gas station, encountering another gargoyle, standing frozen, glowering at them, just as night fell.

Carlos knocked over a weird stone obelisk, the destruction of which seemed to bother the creature. He and Ramon then opened fire on the beast, wounding and eventually killing it; the creature dropped an odd golden statue depicting a four-winged demonic figure. Shoving the statue into Ramon's hands, Carlos told him to get out of here, and to take the statue back to the cartel.

Carlos then circled past the gas station towards the next strange obelisk, disturbing a swarm of bats in the process. To make matters worse, a second swarm almost immediately showed up. Weathering the bats' onslaught, once they'd had their fill Carlos pushed over the second obelisk and left, following Ramon back towards the cartel headquarters.The bats then moved on to harass Hector and Javier.

Marcus, Javier and Hector, meanwhile, were doing their best to kill the gargoyle crouching on a pallet of carefully-packaged bricks of cocaine, but were ineffectual at best; at least they had the benefit of the creature not being able to move while being observed, and even in the darkness of night they were close enough to keep the gargoyle contained. Eventually, however, the threat just became overwhelming, and the scene fades to black.

So that was a good time! We got two of the three switches flipped, and two heroes off the board, including one carrying the Esoteric Artifact; technically nobody died, so we scored some bonus victory points there. I'll be honest, when the second gargoyle and "Darkness Falls" both triggered at the same time I expect it to be a wash; the gargoyles are hard to kill because they have a lot of hit points, and darkness limits heroes' ability to observe (and thus control the movements of) the two gargoyles. Somehow I managed to keep at least two heroes close enough to pin the gargoyles down for the entire game. It was a nice hour and a half this afternoon and damn, that table set-up looks good if I do say so myself! I'm really pleased with the growth of my terrain collection, and this gas station is definitely worth the almost-four weeks I spent  slowly building and painting it.

WIP - Sarissa Precision "Atomic Gas"

 Call it a Gas Station, Petrol Station, Fuel Parlor (someone probably calls it that), it's a must for any urban or post-apocalyptic table. My wife was kind enough to get me Sarissa's "Atomic Gas" Gas Station for my birthday last month, and I've been slowly working on it over the past few days.

the catalog image, non-derelict version

 

I say slowly because the weather's been really uncooperative, with days and days of smothering humidity punctuated by torrential rainstorms. Which has made getting things primed extraordinarily annoying!

Worse, I'm nearing a point where I'm going to have no choice but to stop until the weather cooperates; I don't want to glue the walls together until I have plastic sheeting glued into place for the windows, and I don't want to glue the windows in until the walls are varnished (so that the varnish doesn't frost the windows). And I can't varnish the building when the humidity's sitting at 86% for 12-15 hours at a time. So I'm painting as much as I can, getting the paper flooring glued down, and obsessively rechecking how the parts fit together. 

I'm also working on some furnishings (purchased from Miniature Building Authority) as you can see here - out front there's a locked cage for propane tanks (not yet primed), as well as a reach-in freezer filled with bagged ice. Inside, I've got a top-down freezer filled with ice cream (placed in impulse-buy range of the front counter, just like in the gas station up the street from my apartment) and a vending machine:

There's a bit of a story here - "Big Red" is an American cream soda, only available in certain markets, mostly around Texas and Kentucky. The flavor is frequently mistaken for bubble gum, but is apparently a mix of lemon and orange oils and vanilla - and it's awful (or at least, a not-easily-acquired taste). My wife's father loved Big Red, and more than drinking it, he loved tricking other people into drinking it. I'll never forget his booming chuckle as he watched me take an unsuspecting sip of it. 

So presented with the flat expanse of the front of this vending machine, I knew I wanted to paint something, and while looking at photos of '90s era vending machines I remembered this syrupy nightmare drink, and decided it would be funny to have a vending machine filled with nothing but Big Red (and a discontinued variant, Big Blue) awaiting the unwary, thirsty customer. The red also pops against the green-and-white scheme I chose for the gas station as a whole, drawing even more attention to it. 

Looking at the weather forecast, I don't expect to be able to do any more priming or varnishing until Friday at the earliest; I might try assembling a delicate resin chair to put behind the counter, and I'm waiting on a resin cast toilet to arrive to put in the back room. I'm hoping I can maybe have *most* of the gas station done by next Monday.

Guard House (Sarissa Precision)

 I received a couple of MDF kits from Sarissa Precision in 2021 as part of the Brush Wielders Union Secret Santa program that year; I built one, a helipad, pretty early in 2022. This week I've built the next one in order of perceived complexity of the kit - a dandy little guard house from Sarissa's WWII range, which I'll be using in modern-set games of Fistful of Lead or Perilous Tales.

 

 

I built and painted the kit in sub-assemblies before completing the assembly and putting some final touches on it. The slots on the roof have been filed to make it easier to pop the roof on and off so that I can easily use the interior as a playable space. I'll be picking up some printable acetate sheets to fill in the windows, and I've ordered an assortment of furnishings to let this building serve multiple purposes - meth lab, hostage storage, or just the leasing office for a scummy trailer park. All in all I think you can expect to see this little piece in a lot of AARs going forward.