Saturday 6 November 2010

Adeptus Titanicus

Although Blood Bowl was my first foray into Games Workshop's games and Rogue Trader appeared somewhere along the line it was Adeptus Titanicus that was my first choice of game I wanted to persue. My friend had shown me Blood Bowl and RT but when Adeptus Titanicus came out I was the only one to get it and although we went on to play Epic and Space Marine extensively no one ever got Adeptus Titanicus except me.

So I have quite a large Titan force. I also got hold of the Titan expansion box, a further 6 warlords not to mention my Reavers and Warhounds. Hopefully I'll get to showcase my entire Howling Griffons, Ultramarine, Dark Angel Epic battleforce. Meanwhile here's the White Dwarf teaser advert...

Thursday 4 November 2010

Dark Angels genesis vol 1.

For some reason I've chosen Dark Angels as my Space Marine chapter. I think it goes back to that first Epic boxed game - 'Space Marine' they were on the front of the box all dark and moody. Funnily enough I did most of my epic figures as Ultramarines but with a contingent of Dark Angels as allies.

Anyway I started these guys around 1990/91. I may even have been using enamel paints in some parts. I was never 100% happy with the finish, I mean the colour is awesome but the quality just isn't there. If I could get such a deep green/black finish now I'd be happy but at the time I wasn't which is why there is another volume to this saga...



Milliput bases, what was I thinking?

Wednesday 3 November 2010

Cheap terrain materials

Cheap alternatives to some of your usual terrain building materials are available at your local hardware store – B&Q, Homebase, Focus etc.

For instance sand you could purchase GW’s own basing sand £5 for 100g or you could get one of the many sacks of sand from B&Q for £2 odd. The difference being GW’s is probably graded  and cleaned, the sharp sand is probably damp contains many grades, which can be frustrating but I used a selection of sieves to get exactly the grade I wanted and left it outside in the sun to dry. I managed to grade some very fine sand, some medium grade, some chunky granular sand and even some pebbles for rough terrain – particularly useful when basing Hormagaunts. They mostly advance through cover/difficult terrain anyway, why not base them with a lot of gravel to offset that annoying tendency to fall flat on their gnashing teeth!

Here's an example of how the sand is graded. Clearly the basing helps pick out the variety but it's there in spades!



You can build plenty of hills with this sort of polystyrene for only £2! Not quite as good as the denser pink, peach or blue insulation foam but it'll do in a pinch. I got some peach foam from B&Q [honestly I don't get commission]. It's not on their website but it is available from the larger 'trade centres'.

Tuesday 2 November 2010

Space Hulk freebie


Rooting around in one of my many treasure troves of 40k stuff I found White Dwarf issue 120 December 1989. Aside from the fact this magazine is 21 years old there was a complete article on rules for using Space Marines in Space Hulk. Complete with mission, extra board pieces and army lists.


As far as I'm aware the recent reissue of Space Hulk was exactly the same and included the Deathwing supplements [if I'm wrong let me know and I'll see what I can do about that]. So I've scanned the rules so anyone wishing to try out their favourite marines against genestealers give it a shot and let me know what you think. 



Monday 1 November 2010

Terrain is everything - modular hill overview part 2.

In much the same way that GW’s battle terrain can split and rotate I wanted a hill that did the same. A hill big enough to support my largest building but offer a split so it can be positioned as corner pieces or board side ridges.

I sourced some pink insulation foam from B&Q. It was about £7 and 50mm thick, twice what I wanted but the 25mm foam was out of stock. I think the sheet was about 5’ long and possibly 3’ wide, big enough for a table on it’s own and after producing all my hills I have half of it left.

Firstly I had to split the foam in two to get it down to 25mm. I used a normal wood saw to do this. It made a really rough surface but I figured that would be the base so wouldn’t matter. One down side to this is that the foam did start to warp a little so if you can get 25mm thick foam, get it! I then traced my hill, with split and a number of other hills, a roughly circular hill, oval and a long ridge. I think all of them can fit on the modular hill in some way to get that double height cover.

The hills were all cut out at an angle. I used a thin bread knife for this as the serrated edges were finer leaving a smoother finish on the slopes. This is really difficult to do and takes a lot of care so you don’t lose a limb. Cutting the hill on the edge/corner of a table allows the knife to cut through without destroying the furniture. I did mine vertically on the wall outside so I didn’t make a mess from the polystyrene.

The hills had bases made out of mounting card, less durable than MDF but I had loads to hand and it’s easier to cut/bevel edges. Obviously the downside is that the PVA used to mount the hills and board together warped them but eventually you can bend them back straight. Around the edges builder’s sharp sand from B&Q was stuck on with PVA.

The hills were painted with a black interior house paint, bulked out with Early Learning Centre art paint, some Polycel ready mix plaster, some fine sand and a good dollop of PVA glue. I wanted a nice impervious coating, like you get with surfboards, a foam core with a hard outer fibreglass shell.

Once this was dry I sprayed a red oxide primer paint [another advantage to red planet battlefields] onto the hill. I’d also managed to pick up some Vermillion artists acrylic paint from Quality Save for 99p. Amazingly this colour matches the base map perfectly. A series of successive drybrushes really picked up the sand and texture.

Below are all the hills I made in one go, as you can see there’s plenty of variety to their deployment which means we won’t get too bored with our terrain. Later on as I present more examples of my red planet terrain, once I've prepped all the .pdf templates to go with them I'll show how the terrain all fits together.


Sunday 31 October 2010

Terrain is everything - modular hill overview part 1.

From day one my primary interest in getting back into gaming has been the fun I had making scenery. Admittedly I’m not talking some of the hyper-realistic sort that some terrain artists can do but functional, eye-catching, game-worthy scenery. Added to this, given our limited gaming table I wanted the scenery to be versatile. Terrain created in such a way that, where possible, it can be used in a variety of ways for maximum effect.

So I started with a list of typical terrain:

  • Hills
  • Trees
  • Walls
  • Fences
  • Buildings
  • Ruins
  • Scattered objects
  • Rock formations
  • Bunkers/defences
  • Containers
As you see first on the list was hills, you’re defacto standard terrain. If you’re using a felt sheet for a battle mat these can be as simple as books under the sheet! In this case I drew up a quick sketch for my modular hill.

So, for part two of this overview tomorrow, I’ll go into detail how I went about making the hills.

Friday 29 October 2010

A freebie - Battlefield Mars

Way back when I went to a Games Day or Golden Demon and I fell in love with a Chaos battlefield. This thing was bright red and the were lots of little mounds of 'difficult terrain' that were made out of massed piles of pure white skeleton warriors piled up on these red ash hillocks [that's hillocks]. Of course you could do that then because skeleton box sets were THE go to army if you wanted to game on the cheap, are there any cheap starter options anymore?

Anyway, I always wanted a red battlefield, if and when I did my own terrain but back when we were gaming as a group of mates our table was made of plywood and we had a big sheet of green felt. Cut to today and considering the large interest in Adeptus Mechanicus armies I found very few Mars/Red Planet terrain tutorials.

So my first option was to look at red felt which I was going to 'distress' a bit. This would have cost somewhere in the region of £15-£20 and although I've since looked at a couple of alternatives GW's own Realm of Battle Gameboard [too expensive], Zuzzy Miniatures awesome looking Terra-Flex System battle mats [a third the price of a gameboard, easy stowage but not as versatile], a big sheet of B&Q insulation foam carved up and ready to game [V.cheap but hard work to make and a pain to store without damage], I opted for the cheapest option available to me - a big laminated print out of aerial photography!

Of course you need access to a large scale printer and laminator for this sort of thing and if you even look at high street printers who offer such a service you're better off with the felt route, or even the B&Q foam route if you have the skills to model such a board and store it. However if you can access such things here's a copy of my red planet battlefield to print out. It'll easily cover 4'x2' at 144dpi so you could blow it up to do a 6'x3' with only a little loss in quality. It's just over 2MB if you're worried about filesizes.


You can download the full hi-res version here [using Shift+D] https://photos.app.goo.gl/wVvX3TIZ3veLDuS53