Rumble in the rubble

Two rat gangs confronted each other in the rubble of a once great city.

The black rats, led by their rat ogre mother, slumbered after a long hard party in one of the ruins. Spread about (randomly) in the ruins were caches of food. A rival gang, the browns, had decided to attack the black’s territory, sneaking in and pinching the barrels, or if confronted, to kill the queen and take the whole territory.

On the first few turns the blacks snored on, the guys on watch were not doing a particularly good job and failed to notice the scurrying below. However, another fellow woke to pee off the side of the building and decided to go up for air. Once there he saw the encroaching browns and raised the alarm.

The black rats swarmed out of their lair led by the ogre and engaged in a brisk hand to hand fight. It swayed back and forward, with the browns losing one chap and being pushed back and knocked down. But they were tenacious, and ganged up, bringing down the blacks’ gigantic mother. As a last desperate act, the gang’s Dad called out for his sons to flee, leaving this city block to the victorious browns.

We used absolutely vanilla Song of Blades and Heroes including all the pre-generated character statistics (rats on page 29 and ogre warrior on page 24). To resolve some of the non-miniatures aspects such as walking up from drunken sleeps and where an individual might go because we could see the enemy but he could not we used our Enquiry table, based on Mythic. The figures were GW (thanks again, Paul). All terrain scratch built. And on that note, I think this is the most attractive layout I have set up for a home game to date.

Adding life to the main baseboard

Satisfied with my small scale experiments I graduated to the real thing today in livening up my war-game baseboard.

The goal was to break up the lurid GW green and camouflage the 6″ square vertices that are useful for playing such things as Poor Bloody Infantry. I wanted something that had some variability, hinted at natural colours, but did not overtake the entire board.

The first picture shows the tools: spray glue, spray fixative to hold the flock down, an earth tone flock and a dark green flock. Finally: an ordinary dust brush.

First squirt random patches of glue and pat down generous amounts of brown flock. Then shake off the excess. Then repeat with dark green flack. At this stage I gave the board a gentle dust off.

Then I sprayed the whole thing with fixative and let it dry in the sun. The final step is to firmly brush the board. This removes an awful lot of the flock the fades out the edges, giving it a gradual organic transition between colours.

More baseboard tweaking

While browsing the net looking at terrain I found that there are some great new base mats available. The days of the simple lurid GW (or Heki) mat, or the felt monstrosities of yesteryear from Monday Knight Productions (was that their name? Anyway, once up on a time they were the only game in town and I felt my self pretty swish to own one) are gone. Now you can get textured rubber (that you have to paint yourself: rip-off!), and you can get colour impregnated materials. These last ones have blends that really look natural. Or at least they convey a feeling of naturalness that is much better for practical wargaming purposes.

Inspired, I took a can of spray adhesive and put some smears on a spare piece of mat and a hill. Then I pressed in two different colours of flock: an earth and a darker shade of green. After shaking off the excess I sprayed art fixative to hold it down. Finally, after it was well dry, I took a brush to it and really gave it a good brushing. What was left is pretty subtle.

Here is a scene on this sheet and hill, using the scatter technique with boulders, gravel and clump flock in a much darker shade. Again: is it ‘realistic’? No it’s not. But I quite like it, and it’s certainly playable while conveying the illusion of the great outdoors.

The Japanese Garden theory of war-game table layout

My friend Alan is a fantastic modeller. His terrain setups are inspirational. His Schloss for the Jurassic Reich game was awe inspiring. But I’m not that good. I don’t have the patience. He once commented to me that he wished had my ability to not put so much effort into the terrain and just have a make-do set up so he could play… which is about as close as being damned with faint praise as I can imagine. But I forgive him, because he lets me play with his beautiful models.

In Wargames Illustrated 284 – The Thirty Years War special (joy!) – there was a set up for Poles versus Swedes. The table had some magnificent buildings up at one end. I’m guessing they were Miniature Building Authority. But that’s not what caught my eye. Instead it was the semi-random placement of gravel and flock bush. They did nothing, really, well: nothing game-rule significant. They just added a beautiful touch of ‘rightness’. The rocks scattered around the edge of a large natural feature, in the magazine it was a river, just seemed to tie the pieces together. The flock bushes conveyed the illusion of an uneven heath.

I fell in love with the idea. I call it the Japanese garden method. It’s not about creating a 1/56 scale replica of reality. It’s about creating the minimal elements that evoke the atmosphere of a believable scene.

This is my attempt at the idea.

Strange Seas – jungle trees complete

Bugle Call 2011 in  Adelaide is coming soon. I will be there helping to run Strange Seas with Alan. It’s a pirate theme, of course, but brings some off-beat fantasy whackiness to the genre without trying to slavishly follow the ‘Pirates’ francise.

Alan has made the lion’s share of the terrain and painted the figures. I have a good 30 pirates to bring along, and these jungle trees. There were made from plastic bonsai plants picked up from a local Reject Shop. I ripped them out of their potery pots, stripped them of leaves, repainted and rebased them.