Terrain is everything - mo' fences

Here's an update on the fences - as you can see below my two test subjects are all growed up, the glue has dried with no warping of the cardboard base [yay!]. I think perhaps the grating provided some sort of tensioning effect that prefented this, that's my pseudo-science explanation there. The grating is a bit too chunky for my taste but I'll live with it seeing as it's esay to work with and I've a ready supply. I'm sure it'lll look better painted.

One minor concern is that I rushed a little too much and they don't meet neatly at the corner. Hopefully with a dozen or more of these there'll be some that fit others better but for gaming purposes we can live with this.

The last shot was after I undercoated the fences black. I thought this would stick to the granny grating a little better but I think it uses far to much spray to fully cover the sand and the rockcrete posts still come out as plastic so I'll be adding a coating of black art paint, PVA for adhesion and some plaster [my usual base]. This will probably be thinned on the fencing because it's chunky enough as it is. 

Before I do any more painting I'll be prepping a fair few more fences and some broken ones. I'm confident this test has served it's purpose so there's no stopping me from doing the rest.

Joining a blogging movement - Old Stuff Day

On Valentines Day Rob™ at Warhammer 39,999 suggested we all start a blogging movement to show a little love (♥) for some of our old posts.

So here's one of my posts that I think deserves a little more love via the filthy art of 'thread-o-mancy' my free wound markers [with an update]...

If you've got plenty of high wound characters, or if like my son you are running Tyranids then sooner or later you're going to have to deal with recording wounds. There's a number of options, put a dice down [preferrably a small one], buy wound markes or note it down on a piece of paper. The first two cost money, or are annoying if you're using all your lucky dice just to keep track and the last one's also a pain in the hive mind.

Alternatively you can make your own, so I did. All you need to do is print them out, attach to mounting card, cover in sellotape for pseudo one sided lamination and then cut them out, voila!

You can use the blue markers for your Doom of Malantai, thanks to his Spirit Leech having a maximum of 10 wounds! There's also a few 3-5 wound markers for you Tervigon, enjoy.

Of course you can also use these for your Dark Eldar pain tokes [that's the update].

On top of that I thought I'd resurrect some of these other blogs 'old' articles that deserve a dusting off and a little bit of love  (♥)

http://40kmaunderings.blogspot.com/2008/02/b2b-flamers-part-1.html

http://yearoffrugalgaming.blogspot.com/2009/03/blood-bowl-pitch.html

http://www.battlebarge.com/guides/terrain-guides/

WFB - Empire Flagellants (sort of)

I don't use LOL or OMG but in this case OMG! I love Flagellants. When we ponied up as a group for Warhammer Fantasy Battle, the first big box edition with the mighty heros  printed on card(!) not even as plastic, it was Flagellants that caught my eye in the Empire Army list. However, Marauder miniatures were theonly real option of sourcing them at the time. Marauder was a GW offshoot by Ally and Trish Morrison who modelled their own figures and sold them through GW. They we're all quite cute and cartoony, the Empire Dwarves in particular were darling little things. The Marauder Flagellants were 3 for £4 and even then that wasn't a price I was prepare to pay.

So in walked [shambled] these fellas. Some form of militia figures and I wanted them all flame like so went to the most extreme highlighting from red through orange, yellow and white! All wood and stuff was pure white and the odd item was picked out in a random, appropriate, colour. Here's the ten lined up, each a character.

The gormless halberdier, the piper, the thug, the childcatcher and a crossbow dude with a peg-leg!

A knife fighter, a drunkard, two butt-ugly clubber twins and the fattest halberdier in the Empire.

A view of the back of the guys.

The pure white sachels and the odd green glass bottle really look striking, moreso if I hadn't have added the highlights to the red clothing, still nothing a wash wouldn't fix, right?

Another view of all their gear from the back.

Now if I start looking at completing the Empire Army I first started 18 year ago I'd totally go with plastic Flagellants. They actually look like one of the best value sets out there. Quite a few figures and loads of bits for conversion purposes and bits that'd fit right at home with the Dark Angels.

I have one question though, in the current Empire rule book Flagellants are Rare [I think] but if you take a Priest they become Special [or core] is that in addition to the Rare unit or instead of? Let me know if you can answer.

Terrain is everything - fences

Here's a 'Birthday treat' from me to you, which is why this post has come a day early. The terrain and tutorials are some of my most viewed articles so I thought I'd bring one of my oft-pondered terrain ideas into the blog.

Back when I was gaming in 6th form my mate Liam, he of the scratch built Warhound and Warlord, used to make a fair bit of terrain too. One of his best ideas were chain link fences. Using aluminium car-body repair mesh and some wooden pegs [which his dad, a pub landlord, used to have loads of from tapping the kegs]. I'm not sure if the wooden pegs even had two grooves in or Liam ran a hack-saw down them but these fences were awesome, cheap and quick to make. I loved them so much when I got to uni and our local purveyor of all things cheap and cool, Trago Mills, had 5 packs of the mesh 'cheap-cheap' I bought some. Now I know that pack is still around somewhere but do I know where? Do-I-eckers-like! And I'll be damned if I buy anymore only to find them, bearing in mind this stuff isn't so 'cheap-cheap' anymore.

Anyway, in it's stead I've loads of Granny Grating. One of my work colleagues had some vouchers for Fred Aldous and I got around five A3 sheets, more than I could possibly find a use for. I thought I'd knock up some fences but I was going to turn the grating 45° so I got me some diagonal chain link fence. However, just the other day I was leaning on the fence at my local train station only to realise that stuff was square, not only that but it was blue, exactly the pale blue Anita's craft acrylic I have. It must be some anti-corrosion coating, although there's plenty of Devlan Mud washed into all the creases. So I got the urge to finally make these beauties, from real life no less, purely as a test.

You'll really only need three things,

1. a base, here I've daringly chosen some mounting card, I'm playing 'warp roulette' yet again!
2. Some Granny Grating
3. Some Rawplugs, wall-plugs, whatever you call them

As you can see below I've cut some 6" strips of grating [handy for movement guessing] some 6" bases, angled at the edges so we can rotate the fences around each other for maximum fence deployment. I've cut a chunk out of the grating as this slides down the centre split of the plug.

These are all PVA'd together and I'll be hot melt gluing them to the base when I next pick this up. They're super quick to do, which is as well because I'd rather be doing 20 of these than the 2 but I just want to ensure the cardboard doesn't warp too much. I have a stock sufficient for this task and I'd rather use it up than cut hardboard for more durability but also more heartache.

Really looking forward to the painting though as the red 'rockcrete' with blued, corroded steel mesh should look quite striking!

Dark Angel Terminators, but not Deathwing!

Here's some original Terminators and these were painted just before the Deathwing supplement came out so were Dark Angel green. There's something about the pure white armour reinforcement that I love. The blending on the green is really nice too. The Captain was going to be THSS armed but clearly I sold them in my ebay frenzy!

This standard marine is also missing a weapon. Maybe the Dark Angel upgrade sprue would achieve that... Fundamental concern is the paint, I like the paint I've done but it's not Deathwing and that'd require stripping. 'Course, I have the pictures but it's not the same. Now that Dark Angels have been brought [slightly] into the 41st Millenium having a Deathwing force may be the easiest option for me. Easy meaning a cop-out over the whole Dark Angel Green issue! "Chicken!" I hear that little voice shout in my ear.

eBay sales I may regret

Here we have one of my eBay sales that with hindsight I may regret. These are some of the Close Combat Terminators. As you can see they're a little more bulky than your average Termie because they got into the rough stuff, also a Cyclone Terminator and some figures from the original box set though I note the Assault Cannon isn't present. Back row you have a TH+SS in Deathwing colours. A Cyclone Terminator which I got from a friend, he also has a chainfist at his feet. Next is another TH+SS in Deathwing colours, I think I used a yellow base with a thinned chaos black for these. All these bonwhite colours where mixed on the fly, no ready mix paint and highlights back then for me! Then we have a captain with the original power fist/combi-grenade launcher and lastly the Lightning Claw Terminator [the other pair of lightning claws I got went on the Librarian Terminator I'll be using as Belial and realise now I've never included a shot of him here...]

On the front row is a standard Terminator but with TH+SS armament. This guy was undercoated in a satin Racing Green Car spray that had really good coverage and was spot on for Dark Angels green but I don't think I ever got passed that undercoat on any of the figures I primed with it, which is a shame. Then we have a standard Terminator with Storm Bolter and no left hand and lastly a set of TH+SS with what looks like one of those tiny Heraldry shields you used to stick on and still come molded to the Black Reach Terminators.

Some of these I do regret, the CC Terminators are really tough looking and would stand with the slightly bigger plastic variety now, in particular the lightning claw one looks awesome. I'm certainly short of a few bits of armament for my remaining lead [pb] Terminators. The painting on the Captain also looks really good [considering I had no bonewhite colour] and I'm sure I'd have been able to bring him into my existing line up. The Cyclone is also something I may play around with in my list.

What can you do though? I'm sure I got a good few quid for them and at the time I got a digital camera with the proceeds so I can't complain, despite it having broken since then. So I debate getting rid of anything 'surplus' at the moment which is tough because I have some figures I'm just not sure I need anymore...

Terrain is everything - Standard Template Constructs - FREE Terrain Templates

Standard Template Construct (STC) systems were advanced computers created during the Dark Age of Technology, which are said to have contained the sum total of human technological knowledge. An STC system was possessed by every group of human colonists before the Age of Strife, allowing them to build all of the equipment necessary for survival on an untamed colony planet. It enabled the colonists to build efficient shelters, generators and transports without any technical knowledge and using almost any locally available materials. The user simply asked how to build a house or a tractor and the computer supplied all the necessary plans.

One of the primary goals in this blog was to formalise any tutorials and templates that I had, to help other hobbyists. The 'STCs' I've created so far for my buildings have received a lot of hits on the articles, although I'm not sure how many new structures have been built but I'm appreciative of all the good vibes coming my way, thanks. In the 10 years since I first posted this article some of the links have been misplaced. I'm working through editing it to be up-to-date so people can access both the original page and the .pdf of the STC.

 

Here's the STCs for what I've created so far, if it's BOLD then it should be up-to-date [Oct 2021]. But, if you have any issues or the link doesn't work please comment below, I will always respond even if it takes a while to do so:

• 40k Tower Page | STC
• 40k Outpost pg1 | pg2 | STC
• 40k Container pg1 | Scatter container search | STC
• 40k Hex Tower 1 | STC
• 40k Ruins | STC
• 40k Vulcan Plateau | STC
• 40k Hex Tower 2 [now reclassified as the Spyrle Forward Observation Platform] | STC
• 40k Single Storey Ruin [Caffeine Plaza] | STC
• 40k Mercury Plateau | STC
• 40k Standard Manifold Coupling, aka the Modular Plug Socket | STC
• 40k Cetacean 'Vent' Tower and Baleen Roof Extension | STC

'Adeptus Mechanicus unapproved plans' - STC's liberated by the Free Radical Collective that don't contain quite as much detail, instructions or corrections but it's better they're available to you so you can tinker with them. Then one day I may get around to fixing them:

• 40k Dawn of War Plasma Generator | STC
  Build tutorial: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
• 40k Targus Assault Blockade | STC
• 40k Cathedral Tower | STC

Print and Play STC building templates - a variety of pre-textured simple buildings to quickly populate your battlefield. Just print and stick to foamboard, cut out and stick together [be fair warned these templates are all considerably large filesizes - 40-90MB due to the many textures added to the templates. Please do not download if you are unhappy with this. I prefer to spend my time making FREE templates, not working out why one file is bigger than it should be]:

• 40k Administratum Tower 1 [2 storey] | STC
• 40k Administratum Tower 1 [3 storey tall] | STC
• 40k Administratum Tower 1 [2 storey wide] | STC
• 40k Administratum Tower 1 [3 thin and tall towers] | STC

• 40k Black Tower 1 [2 storey] | STC
• 40k Black Tower 1 [3 storey tall] | STC
• 40k Black Tower 1 [2 storey wide] | STC

• 40k Green Marble Tower 1 [2 storey] | STC
• 40k Green Marble Tower 1 [3 storey tall] | STC
• 40k Green Marble Tower 1 [2 storey wide] | STC

• 40k Generatorium [2 storey] | STC
• 40k Generatorium [3 storey tall] | STC
• 40k Generatorium [2 storey wide] | STC