The Martian Manhunters Join the Ranks of DreadBall

When I completed my pledge for the DreadBall Xtreme campaign on Kickstarter a while back, I added a Martian team. It sounded like fun, having the scrawny little dome-heads running around the pitch shooting at people and/or getting smashed to death. The team pack came with the shipment that had all of the Season 4 items. It included a set of ten Martian figures equipped for DreadBall - 2 strikers, 2 guards, 4 jacks and 2 down markers.

The figures aren't a huge departure from the ones in my Mars Attacks! core game, at least the jacks aren't. The guards and strikers look to be different, but I think they might be based on the science team from one of the expansions. Sadly I only have the Mars Attacks! base game so I can't really be sure.

I wanted to make them interesting, and always try to think about who the coaches might be for a team. In this case I decided that DC Comics' Martian Manhunter would be a fun choice. It's a departure from my Masters of the Universe theming, but none of my research turned up any references to Mars or similar types of people within the various incarnations of MotU.

For inspiration I looked around online and found a version of Martian Manhunter's costume that I thought would make a good sports team uniform. This is the one I ended up choosing, but went a little lighter instead of black.

I've never been a huge fan of the wounded markers, simply because you have to remember which player you've put the marker on the pitch for. I was also sad that there were no extra players included in the pack. Most of my DreadBall gaming is league play, so not having any extra figures for my team wasn't really an option. So I took another look at the wounded markers to see if I could make them into more players.

They would both need a left hand, so I found the smallest ones I could from some of my Deadzone zombie bits. The left legs were also missing a piece below the knee. I chopped the right leg off of one, trimmed the foot a bit to make it look a less like a right foot and glued the whole thing in place. The upper leg from that guy ended up on the other model, with lower legs from another zombie. He got some shoulder pads from my Judge Dredd zombies and looks like he could be a guard or even a keeper.

Posing the other guy was a challenge and he appears like he's winding up for a kick. For anyone wanting to customize these, the material takes super glue very well. The material is easy enough to repose with hot and cold water but I just couldn't get that left foot into a good position. Maintaining all the other posing I had already done AND getting the foot into place just wasn't going to happen.

The rest of the figures were easy enough to paint.

The helmets are a bit of a pain to glue on. There isn't a lot of clearance to work with, so I ended up with a few that have glue on their brains. Since white glue dries clear it's not a big deal, but it's worth keeping in mind.

I had a chance to try half a game with them while demoing DreadBall to a friend the other day. They were quite fun to play, but your players will be getting kicked out of the game for cheating, or smashed to the ground and dying horrible deaths pretty often.

Bonus Item:

I have had the MVP Firewall painted up for a long time, and forgot to post it. Here he/it is, painted up to match the colours of my Etherian Horde robot team.