The Operator Tactics field guide to kitbashing gene-forged operators from whatever you've got.
Operator Tactics exists for a lot of reasons. A game, a world, a ruleset. But if you want the truth about where this whole thing actually started — it started with a parts bin and a set of clippers.
Kitbashing wasn't an afterthought here. It's a core design principle. The factions have visual identities distinct enough to read across a table, but they're grounded enough in real tactical military aesthetics that kitbash sources are everywhere. Your 40k pile of shame. Modern military kits. Near-future sci-fi lines. Plastic dinosaurs from the dollar store. All of it works — and the reason it works is the Gene Forge.
This zine is the manual for that. No official miniature line. No required components beyond dice, a tape measure, and something to stand in for your units. The rules care about the footprint and the keywords. Everything else is yours to build.
The figures already exist in the world as the correct figures. Operator Tactics is built on salvaging and repurposing consumer culture's plastic waste. We designed around what already exists.
| Title | BUILT TO BUILD |
|---|---|
| Series | OT Field Manual / 01 |
| Subject | Kitbash & Dead Shelf doctrine |
| Stock | printed on whatever you've got |
| Faction | None. That's the point. |
PREDATOR · PREY · MASCOT · MYTH — ALL WEAPONS NOW.
Two halves of one table. The front is doctrine and culture — why this game wants you to build. The back is the manual — how to actually do it, with a real model torn down step by step.
The Gene Forge program is the single element of this world most deliberately designed to unleash your dopamine drive for kitbashing. By 2066, every major faction fields gene-forged operators — bipedal soldiers built from apex predator genetics fused to a human body architecture. They walk upright, carry weapons, use tactics, take orders.
But the gene-forge programs produced a lot more than battlefield predators. Military apex stock is just the start. There's commercial stock — gene-forged built for entertainment and luxury markets that ended up carrying rifles when the world went sideways. Bespoke commission stock — one-of-a-kind creatures built to some oligarch's very specific taste. Black-market deviation — unlicensed builds from underground gene-smiths answerable to nobody.
Paleo-stock — yes, actual reconstructed prehistoric genetics, because the SCA has been sitting on the richest fossil deposits on the continent and somebody was eventually going to do it. And aberrant stock — gene-forged whose templates mutated beyond their original parameters in ways nobody planned and nobody can fully explain.
That is not just flavor. It is a structural invitation to kitbash anything you can get your hands on. Whatever you built, from whatever sources, has a lineage waiting for it. The lore wrote the permission slip before you reached for the clippers.
There are two ways into Operator Tactics as a physical game. One starts with sprues. One starts with a figure that already exists. Both arrive at the same table. Both are correct.
Sprues, clippers, 40k piles of shame, military model kits, near-future sci-fi lines, dollar-store dinosaurs. You start with raw material and you build. The Gene Forge provides the in-world scaffolding: whatever you kitbashed, from whatever sources, is a gene-forged operator with a lineage, a history, and a faction origin story.
→ starts with a sprue
You start with a complete figure that already exists — a thrift-store find, a blind box you bought for another reason, a figure salvaged off your own shelf when the excitement wore off. You don't build the figure. You re-context it. You give it a card. You give it a name. You put it in a splice.
→ starts with a figure that already has a life
The parts-bin builder and the Dead Shelf salvager are both running splices. They both have operators with names and lineages and gear. One of them started at a hobby shop. One of them started at a Goodwill on a Tuesday. There's no gap to close.
A unit is anything with a rectangular footprint that fits the size constraints. A movement tray of 15mm infantry. A repainted mecha kit. Three die-cast cars glued to cardboard with a pen-cap turret. A stack of poker chips labeled DRONE INFANTRY on masking tape. All valid. The rules care about the footprint and the keywords — not the model.
The 40k pile of shame. Out-of-print ranges, broken blisters, the bits box. Heads, torsos, arms, weapons — the raw vocabulary of a kitbash.
Modern military kits, near-future sci-fi lines, model cars and armor. Real tactical aesthetics that ground a gene-forged operator in something believable.
Pop Mart blind boxes, Quiccs platforms, Kidrobot customs, half a Labubu series from the donation bin. Commercial stock, ready to re-context.
Dollar-store dinosaurs, kids'-meal robots, plastic spiders, animal figurines. The Beast-Mech and Paleo shelves of any toy aisle.
UNIT TYPES YOU'RE BUILDING TOWARD → Drone Infantry · Assault Walkers · Siege Walkers · Scout Swarms · Strike Vehicles · Gun Platforms · Beast-Mechs
TC·BTB010Whatever you build has a category waiting for it. Pick the lineage that matches what your bits already want to be — then let the build language do the rest.
The military standard. Apex predators built into a human body plan: NAF fields wolves, the SCA fields jaguars, the EO fields bears, the Void Walkers field ravens — the full roster is the stock table on the next page. State cohorts are mono-type by doctrine. Your splice doesn't have to be.
Gene-forged designed to be appealing, accessible, safe for the public — chibi proportions, expressive faces, calls everyone "buddy." Built for theme parks and corporate spectacle. Commercial stock is the answer to any figure that doesn't look like a battlefield animal: if it wasn't designed for the field, it wasn't designed for the field. Extraordinarily effective at close-range urban clearing, because nobody reads it as a threat until it's too late.
The SCA sat on the richest fossil deposits on the continent, and somebody was eventually going to do it. Reconstructed prehistoric genetics — tyrannosaur, velociraptor, pteranodon, whatever the fossil record provides — walked upright and handed a rifle. The D-Rex on page 20 is exactly this: a cybernetic triceratops soldier built from a toy and a fistful of grit.
Not unlicensed — unplanned. A stable template that drifted past its original parameters under stress, expressing sequences the gene-smiths thought were inert. Extra limbs, wrong proportions, asymmetry that shouldn't function — living proof the tech everyone depends on has side effects nobody is publishing. They should look wrong. That's the point.
Built to a single buyer's very specific aesthetic. Luxe, ornamental, unrepeatable. If your build is the most over-detailed thing on the table, it's bespoke.
Unlicensed builds from gene-smiths working outside every program. Mismatched, illegal, untraceable — no clean faction lineage, by design.
Every region forged its own predators. Same human architecture underneath; the faction gear and the apex template do the talking. Read these as build references — silhouette, palette, and the one detail that makes each one unmistakable.
A NAF wolf operator isn't just any wolf — it's wearing dark olive modular armor with a drone mount and an AI targeting visor. Aurora Rangers doctrine made visible. An SCA jaguar in a minimal chest rig and jungle camo moves through terrain like a jaguar. Faction visual language is what separates a gene-forged operator from a generic furry miniature.
Faction stock is narrative — mechanically, every gene-forged operator runs the same rules. But for a builder, the stock list is a literal parts order. Each program forged from a different set of apex templates, which tells you exactly which toy heads to drop in the cart. Pick the animals; the doctrine picks the gear.
| Faction | Gene stock | Profile | Kitbash it |
|---|---|---|---|
| NAF | Wolves · Shepherds · Golden Eagles | Pack doctrine. Sustained ops; holds ground. | Canine + raptor heads; olive modular armor, drone mount, AI visor. |
| SCA | Jaguars · Caimans · Capuchins | The close fight and the quick vanish. | Jungle-cat heads, croc snouts; minimal chest rig, jungle camo. |
| EO | Brown Bears · Boars · Siberian Lynx | Heavy frames, cold-adapted. Soaks fire. | Bulkiest bear/boar toys; slab armor, craft-felt fur. |
| PCU | Jackals · Fennec Foxes · Peregrine Falcons | Heat-adapted, patient. Deadly at range and in the dark. | Fox/jackal heads, falcon beaks; desert wraps, long-barrel rifle. |
| PRC | Siberian Tigers · Macaques · Pangolins | Competing programs. Some cybernetics-fused. | Tiger/monkey toys, armadillo-as-pangolin; bolt-on cyber, exposed wire. |
| Void Walkers | Ravens · Spotted Hyenas · Monitor Lizards | No faction, no program on record, no paper trail. | Corvid heads, lizard/hyena toys; stripped unmarked gear, matte black. |
| Nordics | Polar Bears · Wolverines · Snowy Owls | Independent. Not exported, not for sale. | White-bear/owl toys; winter-white kit, bone-white accents. |
Gene-forging is opt-in, and the standard table is one or two gene-forged among three or four baseline humans. Every gene-forged runs the same class, attributes, and wound track as a baseline — the only mechanical difference is a single Augment Tag carried for the campaign. Nothing in the rules reads your silhouette. That's the whole license: build the wildest thing you can, and it still just plays as an operator.
Walk into any thrift store in any mid-sized city and you'll find them. Pop Mart blind boxes, half a Labubu series, a Skullpanda with a missing accessory, a Quiccs TEQ63 a kid detached from its base. Fifteen-dollar figures sitting in the bin for two. This page is about that bin.
First: the figures already exist. Two decades of blind-box culture means hundreds of millions of these figures are already in the world. The supply chain for Dead Shelf miniatures isn't a production pipeline — it's the existing waste stream of consumer culture. You don't wait for a new kit. The material is already there.
Second: the aesthetic is already correct. Designer vinyl — the chibi proportions of Labubu and Skullpanda, the tactical urban edge of the TEQ63, the surrealist darkness of Finding Unicorn — maps directly onto the Splice Punk look. Pop Mart figures already look like they exist in a near-future contested zone. The Splice Punk aesthetic was in the toy bins before this game existed.
Third: this is the setting made material. In Terra Conflictus, the Upheaval didn't destroy everything — it repurposed it. Commercial stock built for theme parks ended up on the battlefield because everything ended up on the battlefield eventually. A player reaching into a thrift bin for their next operative isn't doing something the game allows. They're doing something the game is about.
That's what separates the Dead Shelf path from miniature-agnosticism. Miniature-agnostic is a rulebook concession — "we won't gatekeep your models." This is different. It's "the figures already in the world are the correct figures. We designed around what already exists."
A Pop Mart Skullpanda on your splice's roster is a commercial stock operative. The in-world explanation was already written. You don't need to paint or modify anything — the figure reads. You just need to know what card to hand your opponent when they ask what it represents.
"Built to work a theme park in Neo-Tokyo. Now here on the battlefield. Still delighted as it flanks you and lets the SMG rip."
The whole kit fits in a shoebox. Start here; add as the build demands. Nothing on this page costs more than a blind box.
Flush cutters for pulling parts off the sprue and trimming dino toys clean. The single most-used tool you own.
A fresh blade for mold lines, seam cleanup, and carving a join until two unrelated parts agree to be one.
Plastic cement for styrene, super glue (CA) for everything else — resin, metal, vinyl, dissimilar materials.
Cures hard under a cheap UV light in seconds. Gap-fills, builds lenses and eyes, and gives optics the "live" look.
Drill a hole, drop in a wire pin, and a heavy head or arm stays put. The difference between a kitbash and a pile.
Super Sculpey for custom limbs, bio-armor, and bridging gaps. Sculpt it, then bake the whole figure at 275°F.
For the player who wants to go further, designer vinyl and resin both respond beautifully to modification. These five moves, in order, turn a bare figure into something that looks gene-forged for contested-zone work.
Thin passes, built up gradually. Preserves the sculpted detail instead of drowning it — the difference between "primed" and "clogged."
Body, cloth, and skin tones — the same materials the mainstream vinyl-customization community already uses. Forgiving, layerable, water-cleanup.
Weapons, cybernetic joints, hard kit. Enamel reads as battlefield-used metal in a way acrylic silver rarely does. This is where the operator stops looking like a toy.
A drop on eyes and lenses, cured hard, for depth and the "live" look designer toys already exploit. Tint it your human accent and the figure suddenly has intent.
Super Sculpey (cure 275°F) for robotic limbs and bio-armor sculpted right onto the surface. Or bolt on 3D-printed tactical accessories, scaled to ~85% to fit chibi proportions.
A Kidrobot Munny blank — a featureless white vinyl form made for artist customization — is a ready-made armature for an operator built entirely from scratch, no donor kit required.
Every donor takes paint and glue differently. Match the method to the material and nothing flakes off in round three.
| Material | Found in | Glue | Notes for finishing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hard Vinyl / PVC | Pop Mart, blind boxes | CA / epoxy | Wash first. Lacquer or vinyl-safe primer; flexes, so avoid brittle coats. |
| Soft Vinyl (Sofubi) | Larger designer toys | CA / flexible | Flexible — use a primer that moves with it or paint will crack on handling. |
| ABS | Action figures, model kits | plastic cement / CA | Takes primer well. Tough; sands clean for seam work. |
| Polystyrene | Wargame sprues, scale kits | plastic cement | The friendliest plastic. Cement welds it; primes and paints with no fuss. |
| Resin (3D print) | STL prints, garage kits | CA | Wash off release agent / uncured resin. Primer mandatory. Layer lines = texture, or sand smooth. |
| Lacquer | Primer base, thin coats |
|---|---|
| Acrylic | Body, cloth, skin |
| Enamel | Metal, gear, weathering |
| UV resin | Eyes, lenses, gap-fill |
| Pigments | Mud, dust, contested-zone grime |
Standard blind-box figures run 75 to 85mm tall. Traditional 28mm wargames aren't built for that — the multiplier is roughly 2.6×, which throws off movement, terrain, and footprints.
Operator Tactics fixes it with one line. The Vinyl Scale variant: wherever the rules print a distance in centimetres, read it as inches. A 6cm move becomes a 6-inch move. It scales naturally to larger figures and bigger bases with zero math at the table.
| Class | Square | Round |
|---|---|---|
| Operator | 6.5 cm | 70 mm |
| Heavy / large commercial stock | 8 cm | 80 mm |
| Vehicle / emplaced | 10 cm | 100 mm |
Terrain scales up with it — Vinyl-Scale terrain sits closer to 1:18 diorama scale, which makes model-railroad, architectural-miniature, and prop-making suppliers your best source. The same thrift stores that stock the figures often stock the terrain.
A cybernetic triceratops soldier, built paleo-stock. This is the practical centerpiece of the zine — one real model, the concept that drove it, and the finished build turned all the way around.
Species: cybernetically enhanced triceratops hybrid. Role: heavy assault / siege breaker. Black plated armor with integrated power systems, a G9 heavy plasma cannon, and the one detail that makes it ours — the bio-frill, reforged and lit up in human-accent pink.
LINEAGE: PALEO-STOCK · SCA FOSSIL PROGRAM
The concept sheet opposite is the design target. The model on the next page is what came off the bench: a 3D-printed dino body, cleaned up, based, and given the Splice Punk pass. Concept and object don't have to match exactly — the gap between them is where the build becomes yours.
Here's the model off the bench — a rough-textured black 3D print, based and given the pink pass. Walk around it. The grit in the print is the finish: it reads as scarred hide and battlefield wear, not as a flaw to sand away.
Black body, base coat to grime. Then the human accent goes on only where it counts: the frill, the open mouth, the tail-tip, one leg panel. Four touches of pink turn an anonymous black print into a faction-marked operator. Restraint is the technique.
The detail that separates commercial stock from a prop is gear — and you don't need to repaint a figure to give it an allegiance. You add an identifier and let the context do the work.
A small painted shoulder patch or chest decal in faction colors. The smallest possible commitment; reads instantly across the table.
Work faction colors into the rim of the base. The figure stays exactly what it is; the base declares the side.
A printed card beside the base showing affiliation, name, and lineage. Zero paint. Pure re-context.
Want NAF? Add a drone mount and an AI visor. Doctrine made visible — one bolt-on bit signals the whole faction.
Your unit is a Splice — a small, independent contract unit of freelance operators with no shared flag, no shared lineage, and zero obligation to look like anyone else's standing army.
State military cohorts are mono-type by doctrine. NAF fields wolf formations. The EO fields bears. The Void Walkers field ravens. Your splice can be those things. Or not. Your splice is whatever you build.
A wolf operator from a dissolved NAF contract. A raven intel specialist who answers to no flag now. A baseline human breacher who's never been gene-forged and never wanted to be. And that cheerful commercial-stock operative on your right who looks delighted by everything? Built for a theme park. Still delighted as it flanks you. That's a splice.
Pick 3–6 mismatched operators. Mix lineages on purpose — the contrast is the aesthetic. Name each one. Write the backstory on an index card. The splice is a collage, and the seams are the point.
The best armies in this game will not be the most expensive. They'll be the ones somebody stayed up too late building from junk, gave a faction name, wrote a backstory for on an index card — and then watched get flattened in round three. That's the hobby. That's the whole thing.
So earn the badges. Build one operator from a dollar-store toy. Run a splice that's never matched. Give a thrift-store figure a name and a card. Each one is a small dare to put something built, not bought, on the table.
This is the Dead Shelf path as a first-class principle — not a workaround for the miniature question, but the setting itself. Pick up what's in front of you and put it to work.
Built, based, marked, and deployed. This is the contested zone your operators were made for — mood, not instruction. Steal a lighting idea. Steal a basing idea. Build toward one of these.
ONE STARTED AT A
HOBBY SHOP. ONE
STARTED AT A GOODWILL
ON A TUESDAY.
BOTH ARE CORRECT.
Commercial stock: gene-forged built for entertainment markets. Ended up here. Still delighted. You have no idea what it's capable of. — Dream it, salvage it, build it, put whoever the hell you want in your splice.