The Great Terrain Build Off - Part 5

The Bakehouse is now complete, I just need to paint it and base it.

I used the thick card from envelopes again for the tiles. I had planned to use cereal box card, but I think I prefer the slightly thicker tiles.

Rather than stick individual tiles on I cut strips. Each was 15mm wide and overlapped the roof by 5mm either side. 

I have a craft guillotine, which makes it quicker and easier. 

Then taking three strips at a time I cut in every 8 to 12 mm (roughly) and then clipped off corners, shortened some tiles and generally made them look uneven.

Preparing three strips at once helps add to the random look. 

The main roof and the extension had strips glued on every 7.5mm, I had the lines as guidelines, though they were every 5mm, meaning a bit of fudging, but again, that helps with the hand-crafted look. The lean-to had smaller tiles, I imagine it's a recent addition.

The ridge tiles were glued on as individual tiles, I used one of the folds already present in the envelope, great for this and also for gluing on the edge of buildings. 

I've also gone over the daub, adding a second coat to fill the panels out a bit, and added card hinges to the doors. 

Just the painting to do now, oh, and a base of course. 

The Great Terrain Build Off - Part 4

I see Merlin has been working on his cottage, so I've got a bit further on the Bakehouse.

Like him I have made the windows separately, they will get glued in place as I timber the building. 

I like the effect that Merijin of 'Another Wargames Blog' gets in his Warhammer Townscape builds (he talks further about it here), so I bought some plasterboard tape and cut coffee stir sticks into 2mm wide strips to build some frames.

I laid two 15mm long strips down on masking tape 5mm apart, then cut two more strips for the top and bottom of the frame. 

Then plasterboard tape was carefully placed on top, using the tape to represent glazing bars. The tape is slightly sticky on one side, so this helps keep everything together. 

Then I ran a thin bead of superglue over the joints and the tape where it touched the wood and gave a quick spray of superglue accelerant. 

Apologies for the blurred photo, I hope you can see what is going on here.

Two completed windows

Once I had the windows built I was able to start the timbering. 

I started with the timbers along the base of the building, I presume the builders started out with a wooden frame marking out the footprint of the building. I then moved on to the corners, which ended up as pretty chunky bits of timber. 

I then superglued the windows in place then added balsa around, roughly matching the pattern of the original model. 

I used three different thicknesses of balsa to try to emphasise the main frame and the secondary support timbers, I'm not sure how well this comes out. 

The daub texture was simply filler, watered down slightly to help coverage and applied with a stiff bristled brush. 

Finally the wood for the doors and the lean-to was added, thin balsa with planks marked in first with a craft knife and then with a pencil. 

A bit of extra texture was added to the woodwork simply by carving off a few corners pto make the building look worn.

Next, my favourite bit (not).  Tiling the roof.

The Great Terrain Build Off - Part 3

Still more progress on my version of building 19 from the Warhammer Townscape. You can see part 1 here, and part 2 here.

I've got the base for the roofs done. This is simply a card cover that I will later tile. The card is another delivery envelope from that well known online delivery company; its just a bit thicker and stronger than cereal box card, and I'm tempted to use it for the tiles as well.
I also drew guide lines at 5mm intervals to help when I stick the tiles on later.

I pinned the card in place while the glue dries, after first making holes in the card.

You can see where I've sketched in the positions of the timbers, though I've still not finalised this.

I mentioned previously that I suspected the scanned Warhammer Townscape might not be to scale. A quick bit of comparative measurement proves it, the Townscape is about 115% the size of the originals, at least with the buildings from Terror of the Lichemaster. It doesn't matter of course. In any case I suspect minis themselves have grown more than that in the thirty odd years since original publication.

Next will be timbering and texturing.

The Great Terrain Build Off - Part 2

I've made a bit progress on the Bake House, as I am calling my version of building 19.

I've made a suitably imposing chimney out of an odd piece of XPS foam. I cut a notch so the foam would slot over the wall. The gaps between the stones were lightly penciled in, then I used a scalpel to make cuts along the lines and then textured the foam using crunched up foil. The cuts were deepened with a pencil and I hollowed out the top of the chimney.

The chimney was then glued in place with tacky glue and pinned while the glue dried.

When I built the extensions I added foam board strips along the base to strengthen them. This was a last minute thought, mostly because I had just trimmed the lean-to down and so had a piece already the right size. 

I decided to do the same for the top of each extension to give the roof bases extra stability. These were cut to size, chamfered to match the slope of the roof, then glued in place. The main roof got a double thickness piece along the ridge. 

These would, of course, have been better fitted as each extension was built, though the bake house bit has had a section cut out to fit around the chimney.

Next up will be fitting the roof base.

Gunthor Son of Gurn of the Stone Crows

You might have noticed this chap in the background in the last post.

He is my take on Gunthor, described as a thin man in a horned helmet armed with a long knife.

The body and arms are from North Star's Oathmark goblins and the head is from the Frostgrave barbarians set.

I had to make a hole for the head to sit in as the two makes don't always play together nicely. The long knife is a cut down sword, I may have trimmed it a bit much actually, but it will do for now. 

I need to greenstuff the cloth round his neck to cover the top of his shoulders, and a little bit in a hole in his neck as well. 

I had originally planned to use the nice new Dark Age Irish from Wargames Atlantic, but when I re-read the description the clans are equipped in boiled leather, oddments of armour and barred halfhelms. I thought the goblin bodies fitted this description nicely, I can find the heads on some of the many plastic sprues I have collected over the years.

I plan to eventually build more of these clansmen; this was simply an experiment to see how well I could match the description.  I'm pretty pleased with how he has turned out.

Why? well, I have a new project in mind, but I have plenty to do first, so you'll have to wait a while to find out more, but a no prize if anyone can identify where he is from. 

The Great Terrain Build-Off

As both Merlin and myself look at the games we play and assess what we have, he decided he needed more terrain, especially buildings. I suggested looking at the Warhammer Townscape set, as many of the buildings are suitable for fantasy and medieval games.

He decided to start with Building 19 in the set, it being a fairly straightforward build. Rather than just encourage him I decided to challenge him to a build-off, both of us producing our own take on the building and blogging our results (see his build here).

Now I have built this building before. Twice. Many years ago I made it for Orc's Drift, it's building number 2 in those games, you can see it top left in the following picture.

Bloodbath at Orc's Drift

My first build was made from really thick card that we used to get supplies in at work, (think 'chipboard', in the Wylock sense rather than the UK sense, but about 5mm thick). 

I made it again much more recently at 60% the size for 15mm gaming. You can see this version here.

My second version used thick card from packaging from a well known online retailer and major South American River. The small size of the model meant I could get away with thinner materials. 

For this challenge build I'm going for foam board. 

I was tempted to alter the look of the building considerably. I want some crude drystone buildings for a future project and this seemed a good opportunity to experiment. However, on reflection that doesn't seem to fit the spirit of the challenge, so I'll make it as close to the original as possible. 

Well, I say I'll be sticking close to the original, but I'm changing a couple of features. As I mentioned in the 15mm build, the chimney could be shifted to a wall. I'm thinking that the extension might be a bake house, so a chimney shared by the main building and the bake house sounds sensible.  Thinking about the purpose of the build will help me when it comes to painting and adding little details.  A bake house will need lots of fuel for the ovens, and perhaps sacks of flour.

I also noticed that the Townscape includes an optional lean-to. I have no recollection of this on the Orc's Drift model, and I must have missed it in the Townscape when I built the 15mm version (it is on a different page, my excuse and I'm sticking to it). Lean-tos were a common extra on these card models, it's pretty much up to the builder where they go. One of the side walls is blank, and I was originally planning to put it there. I cut the wall height down so it fit. But once I'd built up the foam board shell I decided it looked better on the end wall opposite the bake house. 

Construction is pretty straightforward. Rather than print off the relevant pages I set the pdf to 100% and measured on the screen. I did fudge some of the measurements as they were odd, leading me to suspect that the pdf is slightly out of scale. Ah well. 

My foam board is a tatty bit of old advertising, donated by T'Other One (thanks!), I think they were throwing them out at his work.  Any slight areas of damage will be hidden in the texturing. The board is 5mm thick, so the side walls were reduced in length by 10mm and the front wall of the bake house and the lean-to were likewise shortened.

The pieces cut out and ready for assembly 

Joints were glued with tacky glue and temporally pinned. I built up the main building, the bake house and the lean-to as separate sub-assemblies. The main building got triangular off-cuts to strengthen and true the joints, and the two additions got a length of foam board across the back. 

Sub assemblies

These were then glued in place, after testing different positions for the lean-to. 

Trialling the lean-to on the side wall.

The lean-to on the back wall.

Currently the glue is drying. The next step will be the chimney, probably made out of an offcut of XPS, and card for the base of the roof, then texturing and adding the timbers before my favourite stage, tiling. 

I found the following blog with a very good build of this cottage about half-way down this post.  Not only has he produced an excellent result, he has done the same for ALL the Warhammer Townscape buildings.  I have found a couple of interesting techniques I plan to try on this build, but I won't say what yet, don't want to give all my secrets away to Merlin quite yet. 

Games of Times Past

While sorting through my 30 years plus of 'stuff' I came across some old photos of minis and games.

This is a scene from a Flintloque game I made up based on the TV version of Sharpe's Gold.  It was an easy switch to make the rogue band of guerillas into ghouls (in the show they are bloodthirsty Aztec cultists, not what Cornwall wrote at all).  If you don't know Flintloque, it is still published by Alternative Armies, and is essentially a fantasy version of Napoleonics, with orcs as the British, elves as the French etc.  The game initially focused on the exploits of a certain officer named Sharke and his rifle-orcs.  It's also a great source of truly awful puns.

I can't remember much about the game, except that I played the orcs and Merlin played the elves.  I do recall that I prepared three games for Merlin's visit, all using the cliff terrain you can see in the picture above. The other games were a fantasy game involving dwarves attacking goblins, which I think used the old Fantasy Warlord rules, and a SciFi skirmish using the recently released Havok rules. I remember we played the fantasy game, but not the Havok game.    

I made the cliffs in spare moments at work (lots of great crafting materials to hand) and they came in useful, though not perhaps as useful as I thought they would, as they afterwards lay abandoned in the loft of shame for two decades.  I've had to throw them out as they were falling apart, and it will be easier to build them anew rather than repair them.  I've access to better materials now, such as XPS, and I may well produce something similar in the near future. There will certainly be more areas for individual minis to stand, ideal for skirmish games.

You can also see in the distance some buildings I made based on the card buildings in Terror of the Lichemaster and The Tragedy of McDeath.  The ruin the cowardly elves are hiding in is the one from Bloodbath at Orc's Drift.

Speaking of which...

These pictures show our mass game of Orc's Drift.  I mentioned this a while back, but briefly we played through the campaign as a send of for Merlin as he was moving up north of  The Wall back in 1999. You can see the full set of Orc's Drift buildings, I still have some of them, but they haven't stood the test of time very well.  They should be repairable though.  I'm sure the roads are Merlin's, and the elves probably are too, though the high elf with bow (standing in for Brommedir - near dead centre on the top photo) was mine. The orcs and dwarves from the old plastic regiment were mine too, but most of the players chipped in with minis to make up the armies. The strange green thing between the buildings in the bottom photo is an old wyvern (Hincliffe Models?), the mount of King F'yar.

I'm afraid I can't remember the outcome, but I do know we all had a lot of fun.