Sprawl Gangers (& Miniatures!) Update

Been a number of months since the last update on Sprawl Gangers. Since it has been a while, gonna be a big update here…so brace yourself…

Why the long delay…production issues. We haven’t been able to produce the miniatures and without that, the game simply has been in a holding pattern.

We are excellent at making books. We are just starting to reach a points where we do card games and boardgames. But miniatures, particularly high quality miniatures, have kicked us in the teeth for years. For those that have following our BattleTech problems (which have finally been fixed!) and especially our Leviathans troubles (which are still unresolved), you know this has dogged us for a while.

Despite this, caught up in the enthusiasm of trying to do a plethora of crazy cool stuff for Shadowrun, we moved forward with Sprawl Gangers thinking we had a solution for miniatures. Not only did that burn out, but we’ve since gone through several other aborted attempts to find the appropriate combination of cost vs. quality.

That being said, we do appear to have finally met a team that may just be the ones we’ve been searching for for years. I was waiting to reach a few milestones with this company before I started talking about this. And since we’ve reached those milestones, well, I can start talking.

First, the team we’re working with is Jeff Gracia and Jed Wahl at Green Brier Games. If you’ve not heard of them before, feel free to check ’em out.

Second, as I’ve previously mentioned, we love being audacious and challenging ourself with aggressive schedules and really cool, big games. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. After spinning our wheels for far too long on Sprawl Gangers, part of this process has been to scale way back on what we want to do “right now”, and instead take the entire process in steady but bite-sized chunks.

What exactly does that mean? We are hard at work on an “experiment” of just a few miniatures to ensure that neither side is taxed too far and there’s not too much of a commitment to get anyone into trouble should things go sideways (its Shadowrun after all). The miniatures ultimately will be released as a “roleplaying game aid” boxed set (no, no dates or anything yet this early in the process).

However, one part of the experiment is to produce a single Sprawl Ganger miniature and move it through the entire process to a rapid prototype.

We just received rapid prototypes of two miniatures, which I immediately shipped off to Peter Wort, one of our fantastic camospecs.com artists, who’ll clean up the burs on the miniature and base coat it so we can really see what it will look like.

While I don’t have photos of that rapid prototype just yet, I can share the details that moved us from concept sketches into a miniature on my table (and when I get the miniature back, have no fear I’ll share photos right away!).

So first of all, the Sprawl Ganger. Here’s the fantastic concept sketches for a Halloweener that I’ve been sitting on for over a year…

And here’s the 70% render:

And then the near final renders came in:

Almost leapt out of my chair with a shout. So amazing…and funny thing is, I think her hair might be the best part…so much motion captured in that hair. Brings the model to life in a fantastic way.

But remember, this isn’t just about Sprawl Gangers at this stage. It’s about those small bite-sized chunks, so it’s about creating a pack of 5 “RPG Game Aid” miniatures. We’ve been creating a cast of characters that will visually bridge between Shadowrun, Fifth Edition, Shadowrun: Beginner Box Set, Shadowrun Runner’s Toolkit: Alphaware, Shadowrun: Crossfire and even into Shadowrun: Hostile Takeover and Shadowrun: Sprawl Gangers. So it was logical to start with those images as the basis for our first pack of miniatures.

First out of the gate is our Dwarf rigger, Hardpoint. Here’s the reference art from both the Beginner Box Set and Runner’s Toolkit: Alphaware:

Brent then turned that into an appropriate orthographic that Jed could use to start his render process:

Jed took that and turned over an initial render:

Obviously the first attempt to create “smoke” for the drone wasn’t working well, so some good brainstorming resulted in this near final render:

Obviously we are incredibly excited about reaching this place and so far working with Jeff and Jed at Green Brier Games has been fantastic. Can’t wait to see what the final rapid-prototypes look like once they’re cleaned up and show them off (fingers crossed we’ll have them at Origins for those attending…and I’ll share photos as soon as I have them).

“So, those are really awesome looking, and RPG game aid miniatures is a cool idea, but what does this mean for Sprawl Gangers?” It means that we can potentially have an end in sight for production. However, this does not mean we’ll suddenly see Sprawl Gangers by Gen Con. Remember, this is about taking it slow and then appropriately spinning up to the type of production that Sprawl Gangers will require. This will ensure that the game gets the quality miniatures it deserves, while also helping to ensure that once we announce that “this is the date”, we’ll be able to hit it and support it.

Thanks to everyone that have continued to wait patiently for this update. It’s perhaps further out than you’d like, but we are still completely committed to getting this game out and ensuring that not only will it be well worth the wait but that we’ll be able to fully support the game.

Thanks!

Randall