The Making of the Midnight Riders Serenity Campaign: Part 1 The Puddlejumper

The UD12 Chickenhawk Ultralight Transport "Puddle Jumper"

I always use miniatures when playing RPGs. Mostly because they make combat much easier to keep track of. That and they look cool and I enjoy that aspect of the hobby as well. Midnight Riders is a Greenhorn campaign though it would seem that most GMs give their crews a nice shiny ship what can fly from one end of the Verse to the other easy peasy. Well....Homey don't play that. I like my crews to earn their keep and if all they can afford starting out is an over glorified long range shuttle that's all they get. Enter the UD12 'Chickenhawk' class ultralight transport. This one's affectionately named by it's owner Ben "Puddlejumper" because he used it to make short hops from one planet to the next from Ariel all the way out to Beylix. While these ships can usually make the journey from one planet to it's closest neighbor they are really not designed for that purpose. They are however excellent craft for transporting cargo and or passengers between a planet and it's moons or to a larger ship in orbit and as such they are popular on planets with a larger number of terraformed moons or space stations in orbit. Because of their small size they often serve as heavy shuttles or captains launches on larger ships.

This excellent paper model can be downloaded from this site. The UD12 was originally designed as a model for the Infinity miniature combat game but we felt it really had a look that fit the Verse well. The site and the instructions are in Spanish but the instructions included some great visual clues as to how to put the ship together and oddly enough all the parts on the download were in English so that helped as well.

I'm quite bad at assembling paper models for some reason. I always make a mess of them. I can do plastic models. I can paint and convert pewter miniatures fairly well. I'm pretty good at building terrain and I can even scratch build ok but with paper models I'm all thumbs. My wife is very good at them though so I get to enjoy these kinds of highly affordable and attractive despite being completely incompetent at building them myself.

Point of fact: My wife Michelle is also playing Toni the crew's mechanic so in fact this ship was assembled by it's mechanic and I'm quite lucky to have such a lovely and talented wife who enjoys cutting folding and gluing little bits of printed out cardstock the likes of which make me crazy.