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Under the Sea

So, what's good for underwater adventure and warfare? Well, there are a few existing things and a couple simple, fun, and really good looking ways you can create an underwater environment for your mayhem. The following set of pics show some just-buy-it, repaints, mild conversions, and full up builds that allow you to populate the undersea environment. What to do when you get there? Well, after the last picture is a set of simple suggestions that can make gaming underwater easy and actually fun ... but first, the eye candy!

Starting simple, here are some Mage Knight and HorrorClix figures ready to play denziens of the deep right out of the box. Right out of 70's D&D. Right out of 30's Lovecraft. Still, well executed and lots of fun.

Also, not much to say here. There are lots of dollar store toys out there ready to be mounted up. Some requre painting. Some, like this figure, are ready to play.

Dreamblade minis (remeber Dreamblade?) this time. Just a small paint job to make them look more like live fishmonsters. Also, that's not redeye photography. Since fish (especially deep water fish) look OK without irises and pupils, different eye color on bunches of identical models is an easy way to tell the "leader" fish from the regular old fishsticks.

Straight out of the sewer. OK, these are not the best conversions, but they're not bad for being done by an 8 year old several years ago. The point being turtle conversions (ninja or not) can be done with nearly any figure and a puff of putty.

P.S. (No, I'm not done yet, but I forgot about these guys when taking pictures for this article. Due to the magic of editing, they can appear in sequence where they belong. Due to the magic of me being lazy, they can appear with an old picture instead of one with a background that matches the others.) Forcs! That is frog-orcs. Tim Barry orc bodies with dollar store frog heads put on them. The simple flip-side of the TMNT converion.

Sharks with lasers! These guys were simple assembly conversions. All I had to do was decapitate a few Safari brand mini sharks and pop the heads on some Khorne torso, Tau leg bits, and Tim Barry shocktroop arms from Hoard o' Bits . Just grab, glue and paint.

Of course, the problem now is I have a bunch of shark bodies lying around after making sharks with lasers. So I made some more ... sharks with lasers. These are miscelaneous weapon bits I had lying around, attached to the headless sharks. And also...

... eels and "seahorses" made with spare lizard heads and left over horse heads.

I don't know what is more amazing ... how good these look or how little effort they took. A two or three dollar bag of seashells from your friendly neighborhood craft shop provides a ton of options for creepies and crawlies. I just filled the gap with some kneadatite (green stuff) and shoved in miscelaneous limbs and other parts.

Since the big ones looked (enough) like Garathim from Labyrinth, I left them all black. The other shells had such nice texture, I felt the need to drybrush some dark grey one them for highlights. Of course, you can also skip the painting ...

... and make armoured jellyfish warriors! These are just three shells glued together with a dab of air-dry clay (Crayola Model Magic) to hold the tentacles (and floral wire) in place. I went with three large tentacles and five pieces of floral wire to keep these guys away from bilateral symmetry. I think that makes them more creepy. But not more creepy than ...

... a siren of the deep. This is the most complex conversion, requiring pairs of shells to be glued together in various states of being open and some marginal molding of the clay (as opposed to just shoving it in the crack of a shell). Again, floral wire comes to the rescue for tentalces. The siren figure is a Tim Barry sculpt of Boudica from a chariot set, but pretty much any female figure would do. Tentacle optional.

Again, simple yet nice effect. The hardest part of these guys is you need to lean the shell up against something while the clay dries. I had a half a dozen failures before I figured that out. Must have run me almost 10 cents worth of materials...

OK. I don't know what I was thinking. But the spare GW carnifex head looks really menacing on the snail. Also, the mechanized snail of doom ... Well, I said I don't know what I was thinking, right?

These guys, however got good old Fimo clay. You can cook the shells with the clay inside, no problem. I also cooked the spare arms (everyone has spare mini arms, right?) right on the piece. When I used the 265F/10min directions, no melting. When I used 275F/15min, melting. Results are representative. Mileage may vary.

And sci-fi snails, too. Gotta have a sci-fi snail army.

This is just a size comparison with a couple of representative GW figures that I thought would provide a bit of perspective. I recommend taking a Joe Nobody mini with you to the craft store and lining it up with the different bags of shells available until you find the match you want. I do this a lot with a lot of different things I am looking for at the craft store. People stare. I don't care.

I think part of the problem with underwater RPGing and wargaming is the inordinate complexity of the rule systems. With a little bit of brain grease and a lot of trial and error, the following simple ideas are offered to make underwater gaming fun and easy enough to actually play without learning a new game.

To start with, lets just use regular figure stats from your game, and count them as aquatic natives. You don't need any special rules for them. (We will give our invading non aquatic natives (NANs) penalties for being out of their environment, which gives the aquatic natives, operating without penalties a decided advantage.) F'r'ex, if you need a school of sharks, how about use a pride of lions instead? The regular guys who are encountering them will have to deal with the following issues ...

• First, let's assume that your warriors aren't stupid enough to try to dive 100 fathoms down and fight underwater for two hours while hodling their breath. They have some technology, magic, or assistance that is letting them breathe and function (albeit in a hampered manner) in this environment.
• If someone is going to run out of air, it should be a major plot point, so no air counters unless it is intentionally part of the scenario. A good counter (if your system of choice doesn't already have a count down built in) is to take a stack of (10? 14? 7?) playing cards and turn one face up at the end of your turn. If you run out of cards, you run out of air.
• Instead of running out of air, you could use your stack of cards as a hit counter and divide damage taken between the figure and the breathing apparatus. Or combine the two so when figures take hits, they loose air faster.
• If you have to have the ocean run in on someone (like you were counting air and they ran out or the magic user that let a team breath got killed), that figure can't attack and looses half its strength (rounded up) each round. No fixing things, just run away. You loose.
• Movement is another big problem. If you use some gaming system that measures movement in inches, it's simple. Aquatic natives use inches. NANs use centimeters. And, if you really, really need unaided and aided NAN movement (like some guys have a special piece of gear), aided NANs use centimeters, but move twice per turn. They're still slower than aquatics, but faster than their unaided peers. Otherwise, you should just go ahead and do the math (I recommend 1/2 move for all NANs and no aided bonus) ... or take your ruler to a copy machine and make a copy, but scale it down to 40% and let the aided guys move twice again.
• What about vertical movement? Well, underwater, vertical movement is exactly the same as horizontal movement on land. That statement isn't even close to true, but if you use the same movement distance and measure along a diagonal for movement, it should be close enough. An "altitude" die showing a figures height off the ocean floor can help here. You could also grab some of those Mage Knight 2.0 flight stands, or just make some flight stands of your own (You will need them for advanced aeronautic skirmishes, anyway...) While having stands for multiple heights adds some time to prep, it really doesn't slow down play.
• Ranged combat can be done with pretty much the same system. NANs use centimeters instead of inches. Aquatics still use inches.
• Hit rolls aren't as easy, but still can be done fairly simply. Just roll one extra die for every five rolled, and discard that number of the highest rolls (f'r'ex, I normally roll 8 d6 for my squad's attack; underwater, I roll 10, and discard the highest two rolls.). An alternate method for single die to hit systems, if you are using a d8, d12, or d20 for combat rolls is to substitute the sum of 2 of a die of half the size (f'r'ex d20= d10 + d10). If you really wanted to, you could make some d3 and d5 (if you haven't already...).

In summary: count down air; use a smaller ruler; roll some extra dice and throw out the extra high rolls. With just these three ideas, you can make a fun and easy underwater fight that plays fundamentally differently than land battles. Enjoy!

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