Making Zombie Spawn Points

I bought Zombicide earlier this year, and really liked the idea of zombies appearing out of manhole/drain/sewer covers. This post describes how I built some sewer covers and associated zombies for use in other games.

I had initially thought about making the covers round. However, on my walk to work, every drain cover I saw was square or rectangular. Given that squares are much easier to cut than circles, I settled on squares. My first plan was to create six pieces in three different states: closed; open and empty; and open with zombie crawling out. However, I realised that if I made the covers removable and mounted the zombies on small pieces of plasticard, one piece could represent all three states.

These aren't big scenery pieces, just small, potentially dangerous areas on the board. They will start out closed in a game, and be randomly diced for when a figure first sees them. If the manhole is empty, its cover will be removed, but, if it's occupied, then one of the zombies will be placed into it and it will be treated as a spawn point.

One of my aims was to try and make sure the piece was as unobtrusive as possible, so I wanted to keep its height under that of a slottabase. I also wanted the cover to sit in a frame, which meant that I was going to have to build up the area around the frame. A road surface would then be applied over everything, giving a nice smooth appearance. That was the theory...

The components I ended up using were:

• 0.5mm plasticard for the overall base and the zombie bases
• 1.5mm L-shaped plasticard strip for the cover's frame
• 1mm plasticard to bring the rest of the piece up to nearly the same height as the frame
• 180 grit sandpaper (which happens to be 0.5mm thick) for the road
• 0.5mm embossed plasticard for the manhole cover
• spare zombies I could cut in half

Measurements

I decided on ten pieces, so I made a test piece to check my measurements, then built the other nine as a group.

Each piece was 40mm x 30mm. As I mentioned, they're meant to be dropped on the road and blend in, not to be anything noticeable.

The manhole cover was 12mm x 12mm, which meant the L-shaped pieces had to be 13mm x 13mm, as the L-shaped pieces are 0.5mm thick (and 1.5mm high). The plasticard zombie base was 10mm x 10mm, so it would sit inside the space left by the frame (13mm - (2 x 1.5mm)). Hopefully the pictures below will make that a bit clearer.

The components that made up the frame of the cover

A completed frame

Tools used

One of the tricky bits was that the L-shaped pieces had to be mitred to fit together properly. I decided to make a mitre guide using some plasticard, which would give me a better chance of getting the angles correct.

It ended up being fairly basic, with 45 degree angles marked out and some plasticard glued along the lines to stop the pieces slipping while I was cutting them. Cutting was done with a scalpel. The non-45 degree line on the mitre guide was designed for rectangular covers. However, I decided they weren't worth the extra effort so dropped the idea.

The other main tools used were a plastic scriber and the NWSL Chopper. The scriber was used to score the plasticard, which made it much easier to snap, and gave a very clean cut. The chopper has a couple of adjustable stops on it. You set it to the length you need and it enables you to quickly produce multiple copies of an item.

The build

One unfortunate problem I hit was as a result of some of my size decisions. With the frame being 13mm x 13mm and the base 40mm x 30mm, this left 27mm x 17mm to fill. I didn't trust my measuring skills to accurately gauge 0.5mm, so I ended up cutting separate 14mm and 13mm filler pieces for the sides (and 8mm x 9mm for the 17mm spaces). It wasn't the end of the world, but it did make management of the pieces a bit trickier than it should have been (remember, I was making nine of these at the same time).

A combination of bad gluing and dodgy measuring (some of the filler pieces were a bit too small) left some gaps. However, as the "road" would be going over the top I didn't worry too much.

The components of the height filler and the parts glued in place.

The "road" was 180 grit sandpaper, as my hope was that the texture would be picked up by drybrush when I painted it. In the end this didn't really happen, and if I was to do it again, I'd probably just use 0.5mm plasticard for the road surface.

By the time it came to the road, there were sufficient discrepancies in the pieces that each road section had to be measured separately and kept with its corresponding other bits. As I was marking the back of the sandpaper, there were also left/right/top/bottom issues (another place where the 1mm difference in the pieces caused me problems). Once I'd finally decided on where the hole should be, I used a scalpel to cut it out. That part at least worked well, and the holes look neat, even if they don't all fit properly.

I used double-sided tape to attach the paper to the plasticard, and this was probably my biggest mistake. By itself it was fine, but when I undercoated everything it started to warp and I had to glue a few edges down to the plasticard. If I was doing this again with sandpaper, I would glue the sandpaper to the plasticard rather than use tape.

Zombies

The zombies were a mix of Wargames Factory Men and Zombie Vixens and Mantic zombies. I used a razor saw to cut them at various angles, then stuck arms etc. on. Some worked better than others, but they're okay. As usual, the Wargames Factory male zombies are just rubbish, but they do.

Test fitting the unpainted zombies to their covers

The drain covers on their painting bases. These were painted on both sides.

Painting

With everything built, it was time to paint stuff. This part was uneventful, with the only problem being some of the road pieces were slightly too big around the cover's frame, so bits of the filler pieces underneath showed through. Getting black paint into those areas was tricky, and would have been much easier if I had undercoated before I attached the road. However, it looks okay.

I went with Vallejo SS Camo brown for the drain covers and frames, and Andrea Black 1st Shadow (from their Black set) for the road. The white and yellow lines were weathered using a chunk of blister foam dipped in the road colour and dabbed on (a less aggressive stippling method).

Finished zombies still on their painting bases

Picture of bases and their drain covers. Some of the warping caused by the sandpaper is visible in this photo.

View of the bases, in closed, empty and occupied states.

Epilogue

I was going to call this a tutorial, but that seemed a bit presumptuous, given some of the problems I hit. However, there should be enough information if you want to have a go building your own. The main things I would do differently are:

• increase the base size to 41mm x 31mm, to avoid having different sizes for the filler pieces. Alternatively, cut the road piece directly from 1.5mm plasticard. However, cutting the hole in the middle would be difficult without the correct tools
• use plasticard rather than sandpaper for the road surface to prevent warping
• paint the base filler parts black before attaching the road piece, to hide any problems with them showing through

Still, overall I'm happy with the results, and they're certainly going to be used in my games - assuming that I ever get around to playing any...