A great Case

The large Carrying case from TableWar has proven to be handy for a number of things.  I thought that the larger size would let me carry the bigger Creature Caster demons more safely at conventions...

The front door is transparent as usual, which means it is better at airports (the contents can be seen by looking at them as opposed to rummaging through them!).  It also has the side benefit of knowing who it belongs to by looking at the minis inside!

I didn't even notice the large try on the bottom when I first looked at it, but once I did, I put a bunch of different supplies in there to see how much it would hold.

I also thought that the Song of Ice and Fire movement trays might fit perfectly on the shelves, and that was correct.  Fitting three units on each level would be more than enough to get an army somewhere for a game... perhaps even some terrain included!

You can blue tack the trays to the shelves, or have the metal inserts and magnetize them.

Looks like the Free Folk are heading somewhere!

The bottom tray was more than large enough to howl all the terrain pieces, cards, dice, etc. that I would need for SoIaF.

It was even handy for a batch of Black Heart Models busts!  As I mentioned before, it would be no problem to blue tac these to the shelves, and get them where they needed to be safely.  Here's a link to the TableWar site: http://www.tablewar.com/towercase/

It's in the Bag!

For quite a while, I wanted to have a decent dice bag for our games of Bolt Action.  While there are plenty of options on the Warlord site, I was also hoping for something which could be utilized for other games or purposes.

This hand made custom leather bag from Armored Wolf did just the trick!

You can get an idea of the scale comparing it to the dice and surrounding figures.  Without a doubt, you can get plenty of order dice inside!

Since I tend to play larger games with a fair mount of order dice, having a bigger bag is handy.  Also very handy is the leather string which can close off the bag, just in case I don't have my usual dice carrying boxes.  I was able to fit 30+ order dice and 32 large regular dice into the bag with no problem at all!

The dice bags are a custom order, which means you can have just about any color combo you need.  Other elements can be added such as leather tooling for unit/army/national insignia, etc.  Here's the Etsy location where you can contact them:  https://www.etsy.com/shop/ArmouredWolf

Eventually I will have a bag made for my French forces, and probably another for my Winter Soviets.  As I mentioned before, this is the most generic bag that is available, at $55.

The dice in the image are from Dice of War, of course, who make dozens of amazing dice for anything you could possibly want!  I loved my Fallschirmjager sets that I used for Operation Sting last November.  You have seen me using them in my Battle reports all the time... here's an example from my YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/njN4D64zH1k 

I will be bringing this along with me to Adepticon so that I can use it for my Song of Ice and Fire tournament action!  The leather is just soft enough to close easily, but stiff enough to hold its shape even with a bunch of dice inside.  The bottom is flat and fully stitched by hand.

This high quality bag is really amazing in person, and I have seen super customized designs that blow your mind.  You want some shell casings stitched in... some tooled insignia or even shoulder badges?  Let your imagination run wild.  I certainly plan on it!

Building Nouvion: Part 2

More images of the Nouvion terrain board which I have been working on to continue my France 1940 series of battle reports.

In case you have not already seen the articles on how the buildings were created, I have a number of previous episodes:

https://wappellious.blogspot.com/2016/06/a-town-in-ruins.html

In the last episode, I talked about the 1/48 scale furniture and what that added to the scenery, as well as the scatter bricks made from the Das modeling clay.

I also made these sandbag emplacements out of that clay, and they have proven to be even sturdier than expected!

The idea was to make sandbag emplacements that could cover any of my weapon teams, and even a squad of 10 infantry!

Here come the reinforcements for the next battle!

I will have to find ways to make mailboxes and other small street items.

The 75mm gun also fit behind the sandbags, as did the heavier 105mm.

As I look at the images of the streets, I definitely want to make some destroyed tanks... along the lines of these scratch sculpted objective marker/terrain pieces:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2GrlbpDT0o

The Citroen car in this image was part of a 1/48 scale airplane kit... perhaps I will get lucky and find some more!

All of my previous video reports have taken place in forests and hills, so this urban environment will be quite different!  Here's a link to one of those earlier reports: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78AWDqiSgH4

The higher sight lines of these buildings will offer some interesting sighting angles, and there will be a LOT of blind alleys.

I also look forward to seeing what difference the roads will make, and the use of barricades to cut them off!  At this point, I am still trying to compile the equipment needed to make tutorial videos on my terrain.

As I have mentioned in other articles, some of the equipment has been acquired.  However, the more costly items remain, which is one of the reasons I have the Patreon Page.  A much larger filming area is required, as these terrain pieces are pretty big!

There are already a lot of painting tutorials available on the page, including the Army Painting series on the winter Soviets!  You can check that out here:  www.patreon.com/JamesWappel

Building Nouvion: Part 1

I have been continuing to work on the latest terrain board for my Bolt Action battle reports... attempting to create the town of Nouvion!

Here's a link to the original post on the construction of the town: https://wappellious.blogspot.com/2017/10/heading-into-town.html

As I mentioned in the link, this table is built around the TableWar cobblestone town mat.  In the article, I talk about how I have been trying to build to the design of the mat itself, as opposed to simply plopping a bunch of scatter terrain around.

I am trying to create some interesting viewpoints, multiple levels of combat, line of sight blocking, hard cover, blind alleys and so on.  This goes as far as attempting to match the cobblestone around the edges of the buildings!

Over the last few years, I have been studying all kinds of terrain that has an urban feel to it.  This can be a little more tricky than the natural forest style boards, as it needs even more scatter terrain.

Also, having those ruins look a little more realistic has been an obsession.  One aspect of working on my Monte Cassino display board involved a large amount of rubble.

I wanted to be able to "extend" the broken brick rubble piles beyond the buildings and the initial "base" as you see in this image.

However, I knew that having a lot of loose bricks all over the place would mean extra work cleaning things up, not to mention the labor in making them all!  Fortunately I learned about Das Modeling clay, which is a very sturdy, inexpensive air drying clay which turned out to be very handy for making a LOT of bricks in a hurry.

I will try to do more of a step by step article on that for you later.

It was a little frustrating to learn about my misspelling on the Butcher's shop sign, but I was still happy about the building, the posters, etc!

Here we see the scatter bricks, extending out beyond the buildings.  This provides a little more rational appearance to the broken walls, and something which will play off the city fight rules in Bolt Action.

I know there is a table for rubble, and I definitely wanted to include them.  When I start to work on the more urban tables like Stalingrad, Budapest and Berlin, I will have immense piles of masonry around.  Not just individual scatter bricks, but actual pieces of terrain which look like troops have dug out some of the bricks to create a gun emplacement, etc.

An overview of the buildings, which was very satisfying!  Things are starting to come together!

I have a lot of signage to do on the buildings in the central square, as well as other weathering effects, windows, and more posters!

I think it might be fun to have a new more of these cars, and perhaps some trucks as well.  Might have to scratch build those.

At least I won't have to scratch build any furniture!  I discovered some very inexpensive 1/48 scale furniture on Amazon.  I eagerly awaited to see how they might look in my buildings...

I have some of the interiors finished on my intact buildings, complete with wallpaper!

This was a very cool result... and it made me really happy I had gone through the effort of creating the wallpaper.  I will also try to create a step by step blog post around my process for making the interiors.

The furniture certainly adds a lot.  It was very cheap, very sturdy, and it can simply be removed if I feel like it is in the way of a weapon team or squad that takes shelter in that building

If you want to check out the last episode of my battle report series that will lead up to the engagements on this table, here's a link to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LgWEoymVQw

Photo Booth in a Hurry!

Sometimes you just have to take some pictures of your stuff in a hurry, or on the go, or both!

Using one of the TableWar photo mats and a few of my portable LED lights, I was able to set something up to snap images before I had to pack up a number of large critters.

You just saw the Wereshark in a recent post, using the Reaper Pearl White for the first time.  He looked pretty interesting on this backdrop!  I just pointed my phone at the setup and snapped a few images.

These mats are made from the same material as the game mats, which means they are very durable and much more immune to the potential damage from rough handling.

Here's my original post that shows the other mats and the rest of the setup that comes with the kit:

http://wappellious.blogspot.com/2017/09/big-time-backdrops.html

You might recognize these beasties from Cathy's live Twitch streams of late!

They really looked different on this backdrop... more of an undersea setting.

The mat was actually big enough to get all four of these rather large critters in one frame!

Here's a link to the store entry:

http://www.tablewar.com/macromats-full-backdrop-set/