Vampifan's Views 21 - Happy 3rd Birthday

This is a special Vampifan's Views post for two reasons. First of all, as you can see from the title of this post, my blog is celebrating its third birthday. On Friday 16th March it will be three years old. I have to say that I am very proud of my blog and it has pleased me no end to see it grow from strength to strength. What makes me most happy about my blog are the amount of wonderful friends I have made. Even though I have yet to meet any of my followers I feel that our friendship is something that will endure for many years to come, and that is something that money can't buy. So, I'd like to say a big thank you to all my followers. You guys are just the best! It's thanks to you that this blog is regarded so highly in the zombie gaming community.

My second reason for this post is to make a special announcement. Last Sunday I posted a review of the book, Can You Survive The Zombie Apocalypse? by Max Brallier. I received a pleasant surprise that evening when Max sent me an e-mail thanking me for the very positive review. He also asked me if I'd like to do an interview with him for my blog and would I be interested in receiving five autographed copies of his book? Hmm, tough decision there! Of course, I said yes. Okay, so this is where you guys come in. If you can send in a question (or more) to ask Max, I'll compile them all at a later date, say a week from now, and send them off to him. Those who ask the most interesting questions, as judged by Max, will receive a free autographed copy of his book, Can You Survive The Zombie Apocalypse? How cool is that? And, you have to admit, what an incredibly generous offer by Max. I'm sure that Max wasn't aware that his message coincided with my blog's third birthday, but I must say, the timing could not have been better. If you want to be in with a chance to win one of Max's books just leave your question in the comments section of this post.

Can You Survive The Zombie Apocalypse? by Max Brallier

Can You Survive The Zombie Apocalypse? by Max Brallier is a throwback to the old fighting fantasy books that were popular in the 1980's, where you chose how the story progressed. You were presented with numbered chapters that ended with a choice you had to make like for example, if you want to fight the orc go to 234, or if you want to run away go to 89. I quite liked them but found that their biggest drawback was that most combats had to be resolved by rolling a dice. This meant you couldn't read them anywhere as you needed a dice and somewhere flat to roll it. Plus, your fate was often decided by that very roll of the dice.
Thankfully, Can You Survive The Zombie Apocalypse? avoids that pitfall by getting rid of all dice rolls. You survive or fail purely by the decisions you make. This is actually a two-edged blade, as sometimes the "right" decision can get you killed.
The story is set in contemporary New York and you're a twenty-five year old office worker, living in an overpriced studio apartment in Manhattan. Nothing exciting has ever happened to you, until that fateful July morning when everything changes and the dead return to life.
I read this book once, with every intention of surviving and reacting to situations as I thought I would if the hero was me. To my delight, I did survive the zombie apocalypse. Then, I realised I'm going to have to review this book and that means reading it again and again and again until I've read every chapter. I'd note where I was and if I died, I'd just go back to a previous point and make a different choice. This wasn't as big a chore as it might have been. After about two weeks of reading I eventually covered every choice you can make in the book. What made the task so enjoyable was mainly down to Max Brallier's writing style. He writes with a lot of humour and the story can head off in directions you'd just never imagine. There are a lot of pop culture references and loads of imaginative ways to kill a zombie, or be killed by a zombie. It is a very easy book to read and due to the nature of the narrative, it's a book you can read anywhere - in bed (as I did), whilst travelling to work (although not if you're driving!), in a waiting room  or even whilst sitting on the toilet. Once you've survived or died, just start again and choose a different path to take. There's enough to keep you entertained for many an hour.
I should point out that if you are a parent and you think your kids might enjoy this, then think again. The gore and violence probably won't bother them but be advised, there is a lot of swearing in the book and adult situations like drug taking and visiting a strip club.
There are two explanations given for the zombie apocalypse, which you can discover if you make the right choices. One is the boring old chestnut of a secret laboratory experiment that went wrong. Hardly original! The second explanation is so far out of the field, I'm sure that Mr. Brallier had to be drug addled to come up with it. Should I tell you it or not? Oooh, decisions, decisions! Okay, I'll fudge it. If you get to meet Tom Savini (special effects make up maestro) he'll tell you a very interesting story about George Romero. If you want to know more you'll have to buy the book, but as far as zombie apocalypse origins go it is one I guarantee you'll never have heard before!
One thing that I did find strange about this book is the cover. I have no complaints about the artwork, but it has been done in a style that makes it look distressed. There are crease marks painted down the spine to make it look like a second hand or much used book. Why the publishers would want to present the book in this manner is beyond me. But be warned if you see the book in a shop and think it looks tatty, it is meant to look that way!
The blurb on the back of the book states that there are 100 paths to take and 50 endings to choose from. This is wrong. There are 150 paths and 75 endings. Of those endings, 40 end in death, 20 end in zombification and just 15 end in survival. I thought this was a fun book to read and I certainly enjoyed reading it multiple times in my quest to discover every ending. Even if you're not a fan of these types of fighting fantasy books this one is better than most. I'm fairly sure it is unique in using this format to cover the zombie apocalypse and so I'll happily give it an 8 out of 10 rating.

WWG Police Station part 2

As promised on Sunday, here is part two of my review of my World Works Games 28mm scale Mayhem City Police Station. This time, I'll concentrate on the ground floor interior.
This is the overhead view that I left you with last time as a teaser shot. Well, no more teasing. I'll tell you what each of the rooms represents, starting in the top right hand corner and moving around clockwise. First up is a detective's office, followed by a second detective's office. Next is the corridor to the cells. There are four cells, and each one can hold four prisoners. Next, we come to the corridor leading to the rear exit and to the stairs to the first floor. The processing room and identity parade room are side by side. Above them are an interrogation room and a connecting room, which leads to four other rooms. In the top left hand corner is a third detective's office, next to the public toilets and the entrance hall.

Let's take a closer look at the rooms, starting with the pair of detective's offices next to each other. Against the far wall of the office at the top of this photo are a filing cabinet with a computer on top of it, a wall-mounted bookcase and a selection of wanted posters hanging on a wall board. The far wall of the lower office shows a photocopier machine, a fire extinguisher and a large wipe-board.

I did not want each office to look the same, so I rearranged the placement of the furniture in them, even though they all contain common elements. Both have their desks behind a window but due to the placement of the windows the desks are at ninety degrees to each other.

Against the far wall of the office at the top of this photo are a filing cabinet from my Mayhem Industrial set and a bookcase, which this time, I have placed on the floor. As in part one of my review, all furniture items came from the Mayhem Police set, unless I note otherwise. The far wall of the office at the bottom of the above photo shows a large filing cabinet in the corner and on the wall, a poster of Great Cthulhu. Apparently, he has been linked to a number of ritualistic murders. Police advise the public not to approach him!

This photo gives a good overview of the layout of both rooms. They each measure 6" by 3". Nothing more to say, so move along now.

The entrance hall is the second largest room in the building (after the first floor squad room). It measures 9" by 6" but loses a 3" square for the toilets at the bottom right of the above photo. The giant shield mounted on the far wall lets visitors know in no uncertain terms that this is a police station. In the public toilets, the checkered floor came from the TLX Mayhem Armoury set. The two wash basins in the toilets are from the Ebbles Ambient Elements - Barracks set.

You can see that the room is dominated by the huge reception desk, upon which I have placed a computer keyboard and monitor, and a telephone unit. The computer stack stands off to one side of the desk, near the coffee dispensing machine.

I cut out the clock from the entrance wall, glued it to mounting card then stuck it back in place. This gives it a 3D effect, as it sits away from the wall. The two red leather seats either side of the main doors are for the comfort of waiting visitors. The three toilet cubicles came from the same Ebbles set as the wash basins. I suspect that Mel Ebbles aka Christopher Roe never envisaged anyone making them with open and closing doors. But I did, and whilst I realise that the doors should open inwards that was physically impossible and so I had to compromise and make them open outwards.

The short wall by the toilets shows an array of wanted posters, pinned to a board.

Moving ever onwards, we come to a small connecting room with a door in each wall, a small interrogation room and the third detective's office to be found on this floor.

At the top of the picture, in the detective's office are a bookcase with a telephone unit on it, a small filing cabinet and a taller bookcase.

As you'd expect, the interrogation room is very spartan, containing nothing more than a desk and two chairs. In between the two front windows of the detective's office is a photocopier machine.

In the detective's office, a computer keyboard and monitor take up half of the desk. The computer tower sits at the side of the desk next to the wall. I added a motivational poster to the wall behind the desk.

From left to right in this photo are the stairs to the first floor, the processing room, where suspects are photographed, finger-printed and their details entered into the computer. At the far right is the identity parade line-up room. Against the far wall of the processing room is a storage locker from the Ebbles Ambient Elements Workshop set.

The identity parade room contains no furniture. Its two-way mirror is actually a window printed onto transparency paper. In the processing room, the desk and chairs are from the WWG Police set but the other items come from the Ebbles Ambient Elements Workshop set. In the upper left corner is a filing cabinet. In the centre is a computer terminal and in the upper right corner is a workbench.

I'm not exactly sure what a processing room should look like but this set-up looks fine to me and I'm not going to change it now.
Against the far wall of the identity parade room is a height chart stuck to the wall to measure how tall the "usual suspects" are. It can also be used to photograph single suspects against it.

Finally, we come to my cell block. These are the holding cells to retain prisoners before they are transferred to a more secure prison facility. I normally reinforce my walls with mounting board, but I knew that if I did that with the "metal" bars, it would make cutting out the holes a majorly difficult task. So, instead, I reinforced the inner and outer printouts with thin card. The upper walls above the bars are reinforced with mounting board. Even so, cutting out 192 holes was a complete chore. The walls between each cell could also be made of bars but I thought, sod that, and made them brick walls instead!

The eight double bunk beds that occupy the cells came from the Ebbles Ambient Elements Barracks set. The beds that come with the WWG Mayhem Police set are good, but they are only single beds and I wanted my cells to hold twice as many prisoners, which is why I chose the double bunks.

Each cell contains one toilet and one sink unit. The cells measure 4" by 3" each and the corridor leading to them measures 12" by 2".

Many of the cell walls are covered in graffiti, which I like. There was no way that I wanted my cells to look pristine and clean.

And that concludes my tour of my police station. Hopefully, it may inspire you to have a go at making one yourself, but be warned this is not a project for the faint-hearted or novice. The amount of work I put into this project was staggering but I think the end result was worth it. It is a building that I am immensely proud of and I'd like to thank everyone who has left a comment for your kind words.

WWG Police Station part 1

Okay, folks, here it is - my largest ever card building and without doubt, the most eagerly awaited. It is, of course my World Works Games 28mm scale Mayhem City Police Station.

Here it is in all its glory. Those of you who can remember my work in progress shot that I showed last year will notice a few changes, most notably the first floor parapet, two air-conditioning units, a communications dish and tower and a set of ladders to the helipad. There is one external prop that I have deliberately omitted and that is the searchlight. I honestly couldn't see any need for adding one (or more). If ever I do need one or more, I'll add them as non-permanent features.

Three of those four new items came from the Mayhem Police set. The ladders, however,  came from the original Mayhem Armoury set. The Mayhem Police set does come with a rooftop access structure for the helipad, but to be honest, I thought it looked naff and so went with the external ladder option instead.

The set comes with a wide assortment of signs to put above the entryway but I've gone for the most basic of them all, which is the "Mayhem City Police" sign. This is generic enough for me and doesn't tie the building to a specific location as some of the other signs do. Almost everything you see in these photos has been stuck onto thick mounting card. The parapet was glued to foamboard and the upper floors/roofs are reinforced with foamboard. This allows them to fit in place. All doors, the front entrance circular columns and the communications dish have been reinforced with thin card.

The building sits on a base that measures 24" by 15". The ground floor has a footprint that measures 21" by 12". The first floor (sorry American viewers, I'm going with the English convention where the first floor comes above the ground floor) has a footprint of 15" by 12" and the second floor measures 9" by 6". Each floor is 3" tall. Overall height, if you measure to the top of the communications tower is 12"

The rear of the building shows that vandals have been busy daubing graffiti on one of the walls. In my opinion, that lends the place an air of realism. I decided to add a footpath along the back of the building, but grass verges to the front and sides, thus ensuring that the station will not be abutted by another building.

One of the things that I am most proud of this building is the first floor parapet, which is a very clever piece of design. Because of my external ladder to the helipad and the access to the first floor roof I knew that I wanted to fit a parapet to the first floor roof. From a Health and Safety point of view, I'm sure it would be a legal requirement. The only problem was that the set didn't come with a parapet. Or rather it didn't come with one per se. What it did have was a sheet of roof edgings, which, if turned through ninety degrees, made for a perfect parapet. This, my friends, is called lateral thinking, or thinking outside the box. They are glued onto strips of foamboard and they make a perfect parapet.

Whenever I do my building reviews I always start from the ground floor and work my way up. This time, however, I'm going to work my way down from the top floor. Given that the ground floor is the largest of the three floors, that will be covered in part two of my review. The photo above shows an overhead view of the second floor interior, consisting of three rooms. To the left is the landing leading to the stairs down to the first floor and showing the door that leads outside to the first floor roof. The small room is the access corridor to the evidence room. Here, anyone who wishes to enter the evidence room, must sign in. The largest room is the evidence room.

The evidence collected by detectives is bagged and tagged and stored in here on one of eight shelf units. These shelf units came from the Ebbles Ambient Elements Storeroom and Workshop sets. Likewise for the two cardboard boxes I've added atop the shelves. Unless I mention otherwise, all furniture items come from the WWG Mayhem Police set. The low wall at the top of the staircase is the same design as my parapet, only not as wide. The wall was stuck to a piece of mounting card rather than foamboard.

The desk is actually made up of two small Ebbles desks from his Barracks set, glued together to make one long desk. The laptop computer is also from one of the Ebbles sets. The chair and telephone unit are from the Mayhem Police set. The filing cabinet in the corner is from the Mayhem Industrial set. Note that the door to the evidence room is kept locked at all times, but like all of my doors, it will open and close.

Moving down a floor, this photo above shows an overhead view of the first floor of the building and now things really start to get interesting. Starting at the top left hand corner and moving clockwise we have a detective's office, a small office, the CCTV monitor room, the Captain's office, the Captain's toilet and washroom, the squad room, the stairwell leading to the ground floor and the second floor, and finally, the locker room and armoury.

I'll begin my tour of the first floor with a look at the Captain's Office, a room I am very proud of. It is jam-packed with stuff, especially on the walls. The Captain sits behind an L-shaped desk, upon which are his computer keyboard, monitor and lots of papers. His computer sits in the corner of the room on top of a filing cabinet. On the wall behind him is a classical landscape painting, showing he is a man of taste.

On the wall in between the two windows is a large map of Mayhem City.On the wall with the exit/entrance door is a small bookshelf, a wall-mounted flat-screen TV (this came from the Mayhem Mega Mall set), a photo of his father hangs above two of his numerous certificates and sitting above the door, a Mayhem Police shield.

A huge bookcase (from the original Shellendrak Manor set) dominates the far wall, next to his own personal washroom and toilet. Actually, you can see what's inside the washroom far better from the overhead view that I posted above. The room is 6" square, with the washroom occupying a 2" by 2" corner.

Next door to the Captain's Office is the Close Circuit Television (CCTV) monitor room. This is where police operatives monitor and analyse footage from lots of CCTV cameras dotted around Mayhem City. It is not part of the WWG Mayhem Police set, but is something that I have designed for my police station.

The long desk, the two chairs and the two phone units are part of the Mayhem Police set. For the wall of TV screens I used a piece of black mounting card cut to the length of the room and stuck on 12 images of WWG scenery taken from their website and shrunk to fit, to represent various Mayhem City locations. Obviously, I chose images that had no writing on them. The result looks very effective and just shows what you can do with a bit of imagination.

This photo above shows the CCTV Monitor room and two offices used by some of the station's detectives, one small and one large. You can also see part of the L-shaped corridor that connects all the rooms on this floor.

In the small office, you can see a desk, with an Ebbles laptop computer on it, and two chairs. From left to right in the large office are a small filing cabinet, upon which sits a telephone unit; a computer stack, a wall-mounted bookcase, and in the corner, a larger filing cabinet.

In this photo above, you can see the desk in the large office has a computer keyboard and monitor on it. This room measures 6" by 3" whilst the small office and the CCTV monitor room are 3" square.

The rest of the small office is taken up by a small filing cabinet and a blackboard mounted on the wall. Next to the window in the large office is a photocopier machine,

Moving on, we come to the locker room and armoury. The two lockers shown above, one open and one closed, contain body armour, helmets and equipment for this station's SWAT team.

 

The eight lockers shown here are those used by the street cops. I'd have liked to have added more of both types of locker but I didn't have the space to.

Along the short wall at the far end of the room is the gun cabinet. This is kept locked electronically. It contains pump-action shotguns, sniper rifles and sub-machine guns.

 

Finally, on this floor, is the squad room, the largest of all the rooms in this building. It measures 9" by 6". This is where the street patrol cops receive their briefings and where they type in their reports. 

There is a lot going on in here. Against the long wall at the top of this photo are a long rack of filing cabinets (taken from the Mayhem Industrial set). A water cooler sits on top of the cabinets, off to the right, Above the cabinets is a long wall-mounted bookcase. Towards the right top corner is a photocopier machine and a coffee vending machine. Cops do like their coffee!

At the top of this photo you can see the desk and chair used by the duty-sergeant to give out the daily briefings and announcements. "Let's be careful out there!" At the top left corner of the photo is a large board showing a map of Mayhem City, identical to the one seen in the Captain's Office.

The room is dominated by four double desks, with seats and Ebbles laptop computers for eight cops. A pair of room dividers have been placed between each pair of desks.

I thought I'd leave you with a sneak preview of the ground floor interior. I'm sure you can identify many of the rooms yourself from this overhead photo, but I'll give you a much more detailed review in my next post in a few days time.