Stuff to fight on/around.
A long term goal of mine is to build a tropical island game board for my 28mm games of Star War Legion (Scarif) and Legends of the High Seas. The most obvious part of the landscape of any tropical paradise is palm trees and other lush ferns and bushes. So I set about creating some … Read more
My main motivation for this project was to make a modular 3 foot by 3 foot board for Frostgrave. I’ve played plenty of Frostgrave in the past but I have never had the feeling of fighting in the streets of a fantasy city with the usual gaming mats I use. So this project was aimed … Read more
This is one of those side projects I’ve had going on for a long, long while. One of the games we play from time to time is Hind Commander: a modern era 3mm wargame focusing on helicopter operations. While another game I’d like to play is Modern Spearhead, again in 3mm. One thing that both … Read more
Unfortunately there is still no opportunity to do any physical wargaming with Melbourne still in Coronavirus lockdown. I have played a couple of games of Battletech using Tabletop Simulator. While satisfying and a good chance to catch up with my gaming mates, I do miss rolling dice & moving miniatures. In between games & waiting … Read more
Very happy with today’s mail call After painting up the Gas Lands wrecks I thought I would grab some proper Gas Lands gates & dice. Found some “factory seconds” on Etsy and thought I would give them a go https://www.etsy.com/listing/624738520/ … aslands-ho https://www.etsy.com/listing/768344129/ … -skid-dice While I was on the web site & already paying … Read more
Who doesn’t like a graveyard setting in their favourite fantasy skirmish game?! I certainly do, so I went about making a few for my current favourite games of Frostgrave and Kings of War: Vanguard. My first step was to find some plastic kit grave stones, since it takes more skill than I have to sculpt … Read more
Frostgrave‘s first scenario is called The Mausoleum, and it requires, you guessed it, a Mausoleum as the central terrain piece. As I am totally into Frostgrave and Kings of War: Vanguard at the moment, and the fact that cemeteries make great backgrounds with fantasy skirmish games, I needed no other motivation to get stuck into … Read more
A while back I had the need for some sacred stones for both Frostgrave and Kings of War: Vanguard. I decided to make two, a rune engraved stone block, and a more elegant obsidian monolith. As with most of my projects I started with one of my favourite materials, XPS foam. For the stone block, … Read more
Buildings are possibly the most useful and versatile pieces of terrain you can have in any 28mm game. If you only have one, it could be the farmhouse in the middle of a field. If you have a few they could be the edge of a town. If you have a lot they could be … Read more
One of the things that came from Mantic was a few of their terrain packs. These feature special terrain pieces that are used for most of the scenarios in the rulebook. I think this is really cleaver, aligning the random objectivy sort of things you get with the rule book is not hard to do, … Read more
Once again, Frostgrave‘s Ulterior Motives gaves me another opportunity to make some interesting terrain. This time its Arcane Circles. In this post, I’ll show three different types I made. The first is the simplest. Its just two circular pieces of XPS foam glued together. A table hot wire cutter makes it super easy to produce … Read more
If you play Frostgrave with Ulterior Motives, you’ll need a pit. If you play Rangers of Shadow Deep you’ll need some fly holes. I play both, so I decided to make some of these important holes in the ground. For a fly hole or crater I started with a piece of 3mm PVC sheet and … Read more
I recently began playing Rangers of Shadow Deep, a game by Joseph A. McCullough of Frostgrave fame. As with Frostgrave, Rangers of Shadow Deep is full of scenarios that provide plenty of opportunities to make interesting terrain pieces. The second scenario in the core rulebook is set in a forest with some “nest trees”. So … Read more
I say Frostgrave, but this is a generic 28mm pool/well/fountain for whatever tabletop game you’re currently playing. KoW: Vanguard anyone?! I started by cutting out three discs of XPS (insulation) foam on my hot wire cutter. I have a homemade circle cutting jig, which is just a piece of 3mm MDF with a pin in … Read more
I’ve always had a thing for Battletech, but I’ve never had a thing for flat, paper maps. So I thought I’d try to make those paper maps more interesting by adding some scenic trees. Whenever I have looked into buying 1/300 scenic trees I was never able to find anything I liked. I did eventually … Read more
One of the things I like about Frostgrave is that it gives you so many opportunities to make stuff. When I started playing, one of the first things I made was a Giant Worm for The Worm Hunts scenario from the original rulebook. After some googling I came across The Sword and the Sprue website … Read more
I recently started playing Gloomhaven, which has me hooked. As with any tabletop game I play, I thought it would be fun to build some terrain for it and help make each game a bit more visually interesting. A simple build to begin with are the damage traps. The Gloomhaven token for damage traps depicts … Read more
The French Corner Shop is by a company out of Perth, in Western Australia. Called JTC Laser-cutting and Design. It is a quite an attractive building, and being an Aussie startup I should support them.
It is a good looking building. and will look great with some furniture inside of it as well.
I recently got hold of the 4 Ground Damaged Detached building 1, I really like the pre-painted pieces of terrain, I am not sure why, as I hate pre-painted miniatures, but the terrain works for me. That doesn’t mean I wont repaint it at all.
More Terrain, yep I have been flat out building and painting terrain, why cause I really couldn’t be stuffed with painting minis for the moment. So while I lack the motivation for Mini’s I have worked on some terrain. This is more a dump of everything I have not done in a full post. So there are a few pieces in here that over all look great and I want to see how they look on the table.
Batman week continues with another scenery item. Our simplest piece yet – the Gotham Phone Booth. Sure it’s not much to look at, but it was a fair bit of work to put together. I had a couple of issues with this model. The main one being that it hadn’t been cut through all the way; it wasn’t too bad, but it took a fair bit of work to get the pieces out and clean up. The other issue is that there is an acrylic box that goes on the inside. This is made up of 4 sheets of 3mm thick acrylic and it’s just a little too big. As a result it had to be filed down to get it to fit. Neither of these was a big deal, but it did mean it took about as long to put together as the SWAT van and it’s a fraction the size.
The good people at Knight Models were generous enough to send a few terrain pieces for use at PAX Australia. While most of these are being assembled by Mind Games Melbourne (who are helping me out). One of the items I am assembling is Knight Model’s SWAT Van. This model is laser cut from 3mm MDF and went together really easy. I smoothed out the edges with some Squadron Green putty and added clear plastic sheet windows (old blister packaging). Aside from that it’s pretty much just been assembled and painted straight from the kit.
Tree’s, Tree’s everywhere. On the Terrain building exercise, this week it is all about trees. I have been working to get as much done as possible over the last week, ready for a big day here playing some Flames of War.
http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x78/thefloppy1/Minatures/Terrain/20150828_161947_zps9dwjijt8.jpg
4Ground Ruined House is the start of some World War II 28mm Terrain, I picked the kit up at the LFGS when I was in there to get some paints, yep impulse buy is there nothing better.
I’ve been working on a few terrain pieces the last couple of weeks in preparation for Conquest 2015 where I’m running a tournament. One of the scenarios I’m planning on running is Moving Target which require a monorail/train to act as the moving target. Hawk Wargames sell a Monorail that fits in perfectly with the Art Deco vibe of the buildings. I wanted something fairly modern looking and not too bright – public transport is usually fairly subtly coloured. I spent a bit of time browsing various real world liveries and eventually settled on a two-tone grey scheme with red accents. A bit of time with the airbrush, masking tape and brush provided me with the following.
One of my Cancon acquisitions was a couple of 4Ground’s new buildings for Dropzone Commander. These were a prize supplied by War & Peace Games. These kits come flat packed in a zip-lock bag and are made up from pre-painted MDF and thick card. 4Ground have used a number of different thicknesses and colours to provide some texture and depth to these buildings. Something that is noticeably lacking from most MDF kits, which have a habit of looking very flat.
I’ve finished this relatively small little project to build a 2mm terrain hex for use in various games from Hind Commander to Modern Spearhead. The buildings are from Brigade Models, while the greenery is made up of various Woodland Scenics foliage products.
It’s been a little while since I posted anything much here. It’s been a case of too many projects on the go and I’ve not knuckled down and actually done much with any single one. That and I was demoing games at PAX Australia last weekend, which pretty much knocked me out.
My plan is to build some developed sectors using Brigade Models’ 2mm buildings. These will be perfect for any Hind Commander games and also any other 2/3/6mm Microarmour I end up playing with. One of the games I’m thinking of trying is Modern Spearhead, which uses 3″ square urban sectors. Now, in my last post I discussed my distaste with squares so it’s going to be hexagons. After some playing around I also found 3″ (75mm) to be a little small for what I wanted to do. So I ended up going with 90mm hexagons. I think 3″ squares to 90mm hexes is a perfectly reasonable progression.
Hexagons are awesome: there one of only 3 regular polygons that tessellate (the others are triangle and squares). What makes them unique and awesome is that there are no diagonal neighbours. For example, each square has 8 neighbours: the 4 that share an edge and the 4 that share a corner. What makes the diagonals difficult is that there not the same distance away as the edge neighbours. If you’re trying to move around a square grid then you need to have rules that deal with diagonal movement and that’s messy. However for hexagons there’s no such issue: each hexagon is adjacent to 6 others and there are no diagonals.
With Littlewars this weekend there has been a lot more modelling than posting. It’s been a little frantic with trying to do all the usual life stuff and also squeeze in getting as much as possible ready. However, I did take one quick picture this evening of the work on the objective so far. If you’ll recall from an earlier post this is meant to be a statue that will be what everyone’s trying to get close to in our King of The Hill style game. I’ll post some information after the event when I have more time, but it promises to be pretty cool so anyone in the Melbourne area should get on down this weekend.
The Littlewars event we are running is a King of the Hill style event where the aim is to be the only side close to an objective at the end of each turn. As such we need an objective that’s worth fighting for. With the plan to have the fight occurring in a city it seemed natural to have a square with a statue or fountain in the middle and that would form the objective.
A fountain seems a bit dull, and while a group of children playing ring-a-rosie a la the centre of Stalingrad might be poignant I’m not sure how I’d pull it off.
I posted a picture of one of these buildings about a week ago. These are being painted for a Dust Warfare event at Little Wars that I’m running with a couple of others. The plan is to have an urban fight over the ruins of Zverograd (an imagined Russian city from Dust) and so we need ruins.
These are good little buildings coming as laser cut MDF. The one you see here is in 6 parts and all together are 22cm by 38cm. They’re the result of Commission Figurines KickStarter. They don’t yet have them up for sale on their website, but I’m sure they will soon. Any way on to some pictures.
I received some laser cut MDF buildings a couple of weeks back. These are from a Kick-starter done by Commission Figurines. They’re 28mm scale which is ever so slightly on the small side for Dust, but really it’s not very noticeable and without the height boost provided by the figure base would probably be perfect. These buildings are really just WWII, but I’ll be using them for Weird WWII, as I don’t play WWII.
I’ve been doing some other projects for a little while, including working on my photography. However, I have done one little 3mm project: a small Middle Eastern town to act as both a strategic objective and small piece of obstructing terrain for Hind Commander. After all, what else would you do with a USMC force? … Read more
