Kickbashing: Beyond the Gates of Eisenkern

Rick Priestley’s Gates of Antares Kickstarter is struggling. Struggling hard.

That does not mean that it doesn’t have potential. Quite the opposite. I’ve tried to pin down some of the things that are keeping Rick Priestley’s Kickstarter down so far.

I’ll do it a bit different here. I wanna pitch an idea (originally by Theophony of Dakka) to merge two ambitious miniature wargaming projects, whose respective strengths and weaknesses are near-perfect complements to each other: Rick Priestley’s Gates of Antares and Mark Mondragon’s DreamForge miniatures, which kickstarted last year.

It is an exercise in blue-sky-thinking, admittedly. But wouldn’t it be awesome if it would work? It could quite possibly break a lot of Kickstarter-records. Here is why!

#1 – DreamSpaceCorp WarDrones

For one, Gates of Antares has a Drone-challenge to master.

So far, the Gates of Antares team revealed only one miniature, Hansa Nairoba, sculpted by Hasslefree Miniature‘s Kevin White. He turned out to be a great, grim techno-primitive sci-fi warrior with one mean mustache. I look forward to seeing more.

Yet, as a character, he’ll only be one miniature on the table. The real stress-test for this Kickstarter are the so-called ‘WarDrones’.

Drones
These include all kinds of sentient machines including WarDrones. All human factions have type of drones and can have WarDrones, although not all factions have equally effective WarDrones.

Why?

Because unlike Hansa, everyone pledging high on this Kickstarter is getting a lot of drones!

Admittedly, the Gates of Antares Kickstarter says these drones would be multi-part, multi-option plastic kits. Yet as talented as guys like Hasselfree are for cool, thematic characters and more individual models, nobody demonstrated skills for perfect, multi-part miniature kits from the latest steel-mould slide core tooling like DreamForge-Games did.

#2 – Beyond the Gates of Eisenkern

I have to wonder what the potential of this Kickstarter could be, if guys like Hasselfree sculpted the unique characters for Gates of Antares, and Rick Priestley could get Mark Mondragon from DreamForge-Games on board to do plastic kits – full of DreamForge’s trademark abundance of bits, options and conversion pieces – for the rank and file units, mainly the Drones, which will appear in multiples in every Gates of Antares army.

And it doesn’t need to stop there.

Mark Mondragon is developing (with a community-based approach) his own game setting: Iron-Core. I hope he continues to do that.

But past Kickstarters demonstrated that cross-Kickstarter cooperations work and can be very popular. Kingdom Death, for example, paid respect to Sedition Wars, Relic Knight and others with special miniatures.

Rick Priestley could do something similar, just not with miniatures, but with his expertise of rules. How would that work? Well, how about some “Rick-Priestley-official” rules supplement to use DreamForge Leviathan Titans in your “GoA Apocalypse” games?

In short, Dreamforge + Gates of Antares would be the near-perfect kickstarter-bash. State-of-the-art multi-part plastic minis from digital sculpting meet the hobbies premier rule-making authority in a perfect storm of Kickstarter-madness.

#3 – The Tale of Hansa and Ada

And as we’re blue-sky-thinking anyway, why stop there?

Whey not have some Shadokesh hide behind one of the more obscure “Gates” in Gates of Antares. Or the whole Iron Core? License to use some of the GoA miniatures in the Iron-Core game (and perhaps even a Rick Priestley game-design consulting via Skype) could boost the other games popularity too.

One could even match up characters; turn Hansa and Ada into former lovers, suddenly finding themselves on opposing sites in the shadowy war for the Baldegunt Cluster, or some such.

Hell, someone tweet ADB for the kick-off novel. He’s in the Kickstarter I hear!

Anyhow, I am starting to ramble.

Thoughts?

Z.