advertisement
22 October 2024
Exciting times are ahead as we gain momentum on our Hovertrain car painting progress. Today, we’ll feature a classic that most certainly offers all sorts of fun one-off encounters for travelers of The Forgotten Rails. Grab your favorite travel pillow, and let’s “sleep in.”
The Forgotten Rails prides itself on its hovertrain engines. They’re an absolute industrial marvel with mysterious technology restricted to a limited few (aka 3M). However, their trains can only go so fast, and the Sword Coast spans a tremendous land mass (with grandiose plans to expand as quickly as possible). A massive improvement from traditional travel by horse and even airship, getting from Point A to Point B can still take time, and that’s where our Sleeper Car snugly fits into the DnD narrative.
Our beloved Sleeper Car comes from Aether Studios and their fancy Pegasus Line set. This particular Hovertrain series is for those fancy-pants travelers who demand the highest level of comfort wherever they go. Things like fancy upholstery, actual sleeping quarters, oversized chairs, intricately carved decor, lush curtains, and spectacular skylights. These VIPs expect nothing but the best at every turn.
Now, please go easy on novice painter DM Ben here. He’s graciously taken on the tremendous ongoing weekend task of painting each Hovertrain car, but his older eyes and Wisconsin meathook hands can only do so much. Plus, our zoomed-in digital pics will naturally show every imperfection. Still, we’re all about a rugged train vibe here, so the overall look and feel match the campaign’s intentional grubby theme.
Plus, our Hovertrains are no fun sitting on the sidelines with a filament grey color. We want ’em on our game table and campaign as fast as possible so there’s a balance to painting everything (while staying within our hobby budget).
As we said, one overarching theme we established for our Hovertrain series is that this method of transport is anything but clean and proper. The engines kick up enormous amounts of dirt and leave layers of grime, so our cars will always lean toward the messy side. Still, we can use colors here, like gold and purple, to hint at the level of fanciness for its passengers. We decided to stick with the steel exterior (rather than a color like dark green or red)…we didn’t want too many competing shades here.
For the tricky interior, we did some Google Image searches to see what kinds of colors were prevalent back in those glorious train heydays. We found a lot of dark woods, dark reds, some tans, purple fabric accents, and some lighter greens. That research gave us a lovely color palette to work with here. The only problem with this idea exploration (and this entire series) is now we’re constantly jonesing for a train ride. 😉
So we decided to use lighter green for the fancy trim, dark wood for the planks and carvings, dark red for the padded walls, purple for the curtains and sleeper compartment doors, and gold for any trim decor. We almost dropped some light gold on the middle floor design, but that felt like it would be too much, so we kept it as a classic hardwood.
You’ll notice the sleeper compartments are relatively small, so the only gameboard move is for players to drop their miniature in whatever bunk they ultimately pick. Space is naturally at a premium for these Hovertrain cars, but there’s still plenty of room overall for an encounter to unfold. The padded doors slide in and out to represent whether or not the “privacy light” is on.
We’re slowly building up our scatter terrain arsenal of Hovertrain doors, so anything we show for a car’s end pieces can always be easily swapped out. One encounter or travel route might not feature any VIPs so that you could change from a first-class car to an everyday folk car in a snap. Naturally, more often than not, the plebes just have to sleep in their seats.
We always try to keep the opposite sides of any train car open so we have enough room to add miniatures and complementary scatter terrain. Aether Studios always offers “open” train tiles and all sorts of additional intricate, detailed STLs in case you don’t want to add standalone pieces like tables and such. We’re looking forward to sharing both types of setups with y’all.
So, just as we took an ongoing inventory of all the different Hovertrain cars we 3D printed, let’s do a quick check-in of all the cars we’ve painted!
This list truly warms our souls and is on top of all our fun NPC Forgotten Rails miniatures. All our hard work and due diligence are starting to pay off in the happiest of ways. This list is so darn satisfying and will only grow from here. 🙂
Until next time!
advertisement
sponsored
