The Lanista Aeries.
The command module boards where you keep track of your Helot’s health, its Trait Reserves for performing various special moves, its overall status, as well as the Turning Point counters and stuff like turn to turn Initiative order. It’s basically an ever-evolving cheat sheet for the game state and holds A TON of info right in front of your eyeballs, easily accessible and wonderfully tactile.
While the black plastic these things are made of is sturdy and nice and the whole frame is magnetic, snapping into place either around the regular cardboard arena or the deluxe plastic one, the lettering is a little hard to make out because of that same sturdy, black plastic. That’s partly dependent on lighting, but seeing as it’s very easy to make it pop, I decided to go ahead and do that, trying out various levels of fiddling.
First of all, there’s the slightly more involved, texturising style of customising these. I opted to go two different ways with it: have a marble effect aerie with gold trim, and a regular old stonework one.
The stonework end had its plastic head bashed in with a big rock for that extra “realism”, real as intergalactic space combat between genetically engineered monsters can be, and while I initially took care not to break anything, these things are so sturdy they’ll probably outlive us all along with cockroaches and belly button lint. So, I just bashed away with abandon until I got some nice looking scuff marks and cuts on the surface.
I took care to file down the edges so the magnets easily snapped together and weren’t prevented from doing so by extraneous, damaged plastic bits.
I then coated the whole thing in a regular old black paint from a rattle can and went about building the grays on top of that. The happy accident with the rattle can was it was either not properly shaken or the temperature was off, so it came out looking gritty and bumpy (see above), which would only help with the dry brushing.
To that end, I used some cheap textured paint I got in a pack of four from Lidl. These have two great stone tones (one a bit more sandy in feel, the other slightly more running cement-y), and two decent metallics I’ve previously used as base coats on some statues I put together for my RP sessions. After I was done with the grays, I used simple white to drybrush some of the edges more and bring out the lettering and numbering.
There’s no real need to go easy on the paint because the dice and coin trays have enough leeway in them to allow for a bit of build up without preventing anything from fitting nicely into the slots. Which is great, because I actually had some big primer deposits in some of the coin slots. Whoopsie!
The marble effect was done via the old tissue method, exemplified in the following pictures, which are hopefully self-explanatory. Just rip the tissue paper, lay it out onto the thing you’re trying to marble up, and let the primer rip straight from the can (or, if you’re a rich fucker, the airbrush).
Just make sure not to break the damn tissue apart as you’re teasing it into shape. It’s probably a good idea to do the spraying in one go, but laying the tissue down in multiple spots doesn’t really add up to a poor looking result, if you ask me. Bear in mind that the result will look more flaky or grainy if you’re using a rattle can rather than an airbrush with properly thinned paint inside. But the results are great either way.
This marbled aerie wasn’t primed, just hit with a Vallejo white primer for the effect. After that I took some gold craft paint and started picking out the lettering with a brush, which ended up looking… less than ideal, and less than readable.
I then redid most of it in metallic marker, which should’ve been my go-to from the start. Unfortunately, I was also less than careful while doing so, and I had to go back and redo the areas around the lettering, which had gotten smudged and dirtied in a way that looked out of place.
So, I plopped down some black, and then used the patented brush-thumb-stroke-flip method to get some watered down white paint on a flat brush and flick its hairs in order to cover all the black up in spots that would closely mimic the rest of the marbling.
All in all, this wasn’t a bad result, and while I did have to go back with the metallic marker and pick the letters out again, this was a much cleaner and better looking result than I could have hoped for after the initial screw-up.
And speaking of metallic marker…
I used silver and gold on the other two aeries to craft up a fast, low-effort mod that both looks good and helps with readability. Both of these second styles probably took 10 minutes to pen altogether, and set me back the $5 I spent on the markers, so if you’re looking to do some fast custom work on your boards, this is the second, (much) faster way you can go about it. And it still looks great.
Finally, what I worked on in order to bring this whole together were some custom dice for each of the more involved aeries, i.e. gold dice for the marble side and stonework dice for the stonework one. All of these were just regular, cheap Chessex dice at one point. I took some Vallejo gray primer and plain metallic craft primer to them, and did further work on getting them up to snuff in terms of shading and coverage with golds and grays, respectively, both dry brush and wet.
I then inked the numbers on the stone effect ones because there was no way anyone would be able to read that shit after what I’d done to them…
Some people might argue that adding paint to dice, especially texture paint, as with the stonework ones, will unbalance the dice and result in skewed rolling results.
I wouldn’t piss on those people if they were on fire, I had a full bladder, and we were the only remaining humans on earth. I’m a gentle soul, I don’t need that sort of negativity in my life.
But, more to the actual point, between the innate chaos of Nexus, the already-unbalanced, cheap dice I was using, and my notoriously shit rolls, adding layers of paint to these won’t really make a difference one way or another.
The more astute of you may have picked up on the custom gold coins splattered around this post. It was my first foray into customizing my copy of Nexus, back a few months when the aeries were still in the planning stages.
Another easy mod, using cheap metallic rattle can paint, and probably some brush touch ups to go if you feel like it – and I do feel like it and have to go in and do, but it seems like a chore so for now I’m avoiding it like the plague.
For handling purposes, all the dice and aeries (and, eventually, coins) got a clear matte varnish once they were done up properly, to help keep them looking good and shiny for an extended period of time.
Until such time, though, there’s still work to be done, not the least of which are some repaints and mini repairs which are already underway, so I’ll return to this particular segment of the project once more progress has been made.
Hope it inspires!
Cozzy