Zona Alfa: Creepy Crawlies In The Zone

About three months ago, I started dabbling with what minis I had on hand that I could use to explore the Exclusion Zone that is the focus of Zona Alfa.  I started to make some headway, but things kind of stalled out after pretty quickly.  Since I started picking up the brush again, I think it's time to start looking into some of the ideas that I had oh so long ago.

Out of the book, Zona Alfa lists the possible hostiles as vermin, dogs, zombies, ghouls, bandits, mutants, or large mutants.  These categories are nice and vague though, so all it takes is a little digging and some imagination to come up with the an appropriate mini from you collection.

Looking at my own minis, fielding zombies is going to be a piece of cake.  Heck, even ghouls will be easy too since I started collecting minis for the Plague faction in Deadzone.  I had already painted up some of my type I Plague in different colors schemes which is perfect for this.  Initially I had tried to do more of a traditional zombie look and they didn't turn out too bad.

The normal skin tones are not very sci-fi though, so I decided to play around with some Citadel shades that I had picked up and I really like how these ones turned out.

I'm thinking that for Zona I will use the regular zombies as... well, zombies.  Creative, right?  But the purple skinned ones are going to be some kind of rad ghouls.  They look similar but different enough that I like how they will look on the board.  I do want to paint up some more of each though (I'm thinking six each so I can cover up to threat level 2) but this gives me a solid start, and once they are assembled painting them up is pretty quick.

Next up were the vermin.  I think everyone think instantly of rats when you say vermin, but as the rules point out, it can be any thing in your collection that you feel fits the bill.  Digging though the old minis box, Two of the five threat level one hostiles done!  That still leaves the vermin, dogs, and bandits.  Since they are the most common, I had planned to start with the vermin.  Thinking of these as swarms of rats, insects, or some other nasty creepy crawly, I grabbed some old Tyranid ripper swarms and based them up.

Still need to get some paint on these gribblies but you get the idea at least.

It was after I got them onto the bases that I realized that if these were some kind of swarm, then it would make more sense to do 40mm bases with groups of them on each bases.  I'd already popped some of these off their original bases so this would mean rebasing them again which I wasn't looking forward to, plus I'd used plastic cement this so who knows how cleanly they would have come off!  This is when a thought struck me; maybe these would work better as "dogs"?  Given their size and having two on a base it seems like the perfect option.  Plus, I've been trying to figure out where to get dogs/wolves that weren't zombified so going with the rippers instead eliminates that whole problem.

So what about the aforementioned swarms?  I was stumped at first but then realized that Reaper Miniatures has the perfect solution for these; actual swarms!  I'm thinking I'll go with either the beetle or spider swarm, I just need to dig them out of the bin first.  That said, I did see a pretty awesome post on the Zone Alfa Facebook group that featured some rad spiders.  His were printed but I happen to have some small Halloween spiders floating around still...  Something to think about there.

For the next bunch, I went way back to 1999 as I dug out a couple of Neo-Soviet rad troopers from the miniature game Vor: The Maelstrom.

I bought a couple of the starters at a discount after FASA went belly up, mainly for the Growler minis that come with them.  The Union troops aren't bad either, and I might pull some of those out to fill out my crew or maybe as a military force patrolling the Zone.  But the Neo-Soviets?  I really liked the aesthetic of these guys though I never did pick up too many of them.

Thankfully they are still available through Iron Wind Metals so I'm thinking I'll pickup a some more from the Neo-Sov range.  In particular, a couple more rad troopers but equipped with SMGs this time.  Besides the rad troopers, I like the looks of the cyclops for a large mutant and either some of their mutants or perhaps some rad hounds to fill the role of mutant on the table.

I also really like the look of the chemgrunt (maybe count the sprayer as a flamer?), plus maybe a few of the Vanguard soldiers.  The downside to these minis it they are metal mono pose figures, but I like the look of them and I think there are at least a couple of different poses for each trooper so there will be a little bit of variety.

The only downside to using these is that I don't have them yet.  Unfortunately Iron Wind is experiencing shipping delays right now, so even ordering them might take a while.  I don't know when I will be getting this to the table, but for now I think I'll dig into the minis box to see what else I have on hand.

And as for the mutant and large mutant?  Haven't gotten that far yet, but they are something I can dig around for as well.  I also got to thinking about terrain for this and had something of an epiphany.  Zona Alfa is by default set in the Russian exclusion zone, but the setting is very open ended and people are doing Zones all over the place.  I had been thinking if not Soviet, then at least someplace with temperate terrain... until this morning.

What about the United States southwest?

There is a whole lot of nothing out there, and between the terrain, the weather, and the critters it could be an interesting place to explore.  Not to mention who knows what might have wondered out of a certain Area out there if everything fell apart.

This is definitely a theme I am going to look more into as it just feels like it would be right, but we'll dig more into that later.  Until next time...