Scenery Project 1 - Sci-Fi Farmstead?

   I've fallen behind on a lot of things I planned to do this year with the idea of completing scenery projects just being one of many things on the list*. One thing I did want was to effectively make my desert scenery work for 3 different board styles; I wanted a more built up urban area, a more rural deserty area and a rural farmstead to be something in between.

*2025 has not gone to plan at all

   As we are still very much aiming for smaller games when we meet up, I thought it made sense to focus on getting that farmstead style building done. I decided to keep life simple and use the Renedra Mud Brick House and bolt on some sci-fi bits to prove my point - very much thinking of Tatooine as my muse. As I couldn't find the one I owned, I figured the best plan was to cut my losses, buy a new one and then have two of the same model I could substitute depending what I was playing.

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Scenery Project 1 - Dibbler's Meat Pie Shop

   I've been looking online for some interesting buildings to supplement my collection, those models that just have a bit of character to draw the eye. I follow Fogou Models on Bluesky and this building came up as someone had shared it, which instantly made me realise I needed one for my Madina.

   Its made of an almost plaster of Paris feeling resin, so is a very different beast from the other plastic kits I've been playing with* and with it only taking an afternoon to paint, it was a lovely little project. The model is called the Bakehouse and I've added a roll shutter door** and junction box from the same company just to give it something, along with cardboard signs. 

*this will not play well if stored in the same box as a foam built adobe

**I meant to order their shop opening but didn't realise I'd ordered incorrectly until I made this post

   All of my other scenery for this project has been made with multiple periods in mind, so I'm trying not to put anything futuristic on that can't be removed for WW2 or Medieval games. This model I just decided would be sci-fi all the time and I think it just suits it.

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Scenery Project 1 - Back to the desert

   Back in 2016 my regular gaming mate was massively into modern warfare, so as we gave each others interests a chance and tried to play a mix of games, this meant I got into wargaming the war in Afghanistan.

   He was a massive army nut who always meant to join up, so it was obvious which side he was going to play, when left me to take the Afghans/Taliban and also the scenery (as scenery is the bit of the hobby that is probably my favourite aspect). We played Sangim Skirmish, which due to this period in my gaming life, is still one of my most played rulesets, despite it being a set that I think relies too much on multiple tables to be really enjoyable. One of my biggest regrets was when he moved clubs and we saw each other less and less, was selling all my stuff for that game to him*.

*wasn't worried about the figures but I was pleased with the board.

   The bulk of the scenery that I sold was from Tinned-Fruit and I was incredibly pleased with it, but the rest was home made in some form or another, mostly with a MDF structure at the core.

   With last year's aim that we would be playing games in the desert** I had it in the back of my mind that I would need to work on rebuilding that board, but other stuff kept getting in the way. Saying that, I do have a Crusades collection, WW2 desert war army and our next 40k campaign will be on a desert world, so there is a lot of usage that will come from sorting this out.

**that went well

   I already had some desert scenery from 2020 when the enforced lack of gaming meant my heresy group started planning a big come back campaign based on the desert world of Prospero. I plan to use this post to go over the bits already done, so that the next two months, I can post stuff as it is finished.

   The Dyeing Mill was from a German company called More-Terrain.de and was just so different I had to pick it up. I'm really tempted to give this a repaint to match my other buildings but I'm worried I'll ruin it in the process.

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Scenery Project 1 - Fields Of White Gold

   One thing I plan to lean into heavily next year is sorting my scenery collections out. I suspect I won't be playing many games in 2025, so I'd like to get each of them to be as good as I can. The first project I'm going to focus on is my desert scenery as I have a few gaming projects that need that to be up and running.

   I'll be calling Project 1 "Desert Scenery" but that covers a lot of sins, this could be the full on deserts to arid grassland and fields, some of this scenery can work for the Mediterranean as well as Palestine and North Africa, so I want choices of items that I can place on a table to suit the area the game is supposed to be taking place.

   One thing I wanted to add was fields for those areas that aren't just sandy desert and on my list to do last time I made "desert scenery" was cotton fields. I've been trying to work out how to do this for a few years now, but recently I had an idea I wanted to test out.

This is what the internet says fields of cotton in Afghanistan look like, so I had something to work from.

   My test piece of scenery before I try to mass produce them in the new year. Material wise its just a place mat, door mat cut up and some white foliage flock but I'm pretty pleased with the outcome. I didn't want to make multiples of this so I could cover a bit area of table and then decide the idea looked terrible.

   The gap between rows is eyeballed to about right to put 25mm bases flat on the ground with some slight deviations from this. Blocks of infantry can just be sat on top.

All in all, I'm pleased with my test piece, I just need a new source of place mats as I always bought mine from Wilko . . .

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Expanding Rainforests

   Much as I am still whacking posts up, I'm still just catching up on units I painted in my recent splurge of painting time. This post is another of these - doing another chunk of jungle scenery in the hope of getting some games of 10th edition 40k over the summer.

   On the last post of the jungle scenery where I did 5 bases of trees and undergrowth, I mentioned that I had gone the whole hog and prepped all the big bases I had so that I only needed to hot glue the plant life onto them once I bought more trees. I picked up 5 more plastic bonsai trees from China in two different designs and sprayed the leaves a darker green, repainted the trucks where I'd gotten paint on them and spend an hour or so with a hot glue gun to do another 7 bases.

   I've played a couple of games with the full 11 finished bases of trees and while it is a pretty good start I think I need another batch to really finish it off* and make a dense board like I used to gawp over in the 3rd edition Catachan codex. I've now run out of the big trees again, so I'm tempted to order one or two more, but I do have more palm trees to use to bulk out a few more smaller bases.

*Although I have now filled up the box assigned to jungle scenery

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90's Warhammer Cacti

   This is one of those posts where I have tried to keep to what I do best and that's not trying to be too clever. There is quite a lot of noise online at the moment of 30 odd year old hobbyists feeling nostalgic for a time when gaming was simpler, with at least a couple of guys in my local area painting 40k armies made of older models in an older paint style* - at least one is using a box of paints he bought online dating from 2rnd edition.

*Goblin Green bases and bright colours

   While I am nowhere near that nostalgic, the jungle scenery project I have found myself restarting has given me thoughts, one of which was to do a single base of the iconic foam ball cacti - but in a way they should fit into the rest of the collection.

   I appreciate that cacti famously don't grow in rainforests but in the deathworlds of the 41st millennium, who can prove me wrong? I kept to the now famous method of building them except they are covered in two layer of Modge Podge for added strength and final colours I went for aren't perfect matches - warboss green and flesh tearers red contrast. I also added a jungle base rather than a desert base so I could just do one test batch that I could add straight into a collection, rather than starting something big*.

*I am now very tempted to do a whole set in the future for my desert scenery

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Rainforests - Not As Easy As I thought It Would Be

   It's been a bit longer* than planned between my rainforest scenery posts but I have been making progress in a number of fronts. Firstly, I decided to take remove all the plants from the bases I had already done to make the repainting process easier and so I could do the whole lot in one batch with a big brush - this step was soul destroying.
    For the second attempt I took the advice given and changed my recipe, with the biggest changes being a much darker pot of brown paint with a layer of mixed dried herbs over the top, plus (I think) a better mix of trees.

*What an understatement

   This is only my first few test bases finished to test the theory, I think I have another 11 bases flocked up and ready for trees and more free time. I also need to work out what the big trees were again as I'm really pleased with how they came out.

I'd better get working on some more bases now.

Thanks for reading

Prepping For Normandy

   With less than a week and a bit before our proposed first games of Bolt Action in the desert, my brother sent me a text to say his armies wouldn't be finished in time, could we play something set in Normandy this month and come back to the desert for our next games. This gave me time to tidy some bits up I'd been putting off. . .

   The more games of Bolt Action my brother and me played in 2022, the more pleased I became with the boards we were putting out. The various door mats and teddy bear fur (that my club mercilessly mock me for) break up the continuous green mat and the hedges really help add cover, but the board is still lacking in a few key areas.

   The French buildings in my collection are not quite good enough anymore - there are a few key things I need to do to upgrade them (roofs mostly) are on my list of jobs and will get sorted once I have a bit more inspiration after a holiday to Normandy later this year. It would be really good to plonk a village that feels right onto the board.

   The other thing is a lack of walls. While hedges are a big way of making fields borders in north western Europe and feature in a lot of my games, stone walls are a prominent feature f the countryside and I wanted to add another type of cover to the board. With this in mind I picked up a box of Warlord's Stone Walls and got to work.

   While the photo doesn't show them properly and the one below is dark and terrible looking, I've built a single 2 sided field of about a foot by 2 foot (so hedges will do the rest of the field boundaries), plus a stone wall for a house which used the whole contents of a box. I've kept the painting as simple as possible, sprayed a beige, picked our bricks in a few other shades then washed.

   While doing the walls, we were also talking about the new gaming club my brother has joined and how it's exposing him to other games. So being the good older brother (?) I've promised to teach him one new game after every session of Bolt Action (time allowing) so that he had more of an idea of what he likes and what he doesn't so he can join in more easily. Having planned to pack a board of Normandy themed terrain, I had a thought about what to play using the same scenery and 100 years war made the most sense.

   The last game played with these collections showed the French were too light on foot sergeants, so I focussed on getting a unit painted ready for the game.

   All I have left to paint in my 100 years war project is a Joan of Arc figure that is lost somewhere in my backlog and a pair of early 100 years war French knights that I bought as an experiment. I am tempted to buy one more pack of metal French men at arms/knights on foot to add a few more banners and allow myself to field another unit of foot sgts but we'll see how this year goes.

Now if only I could find Joan . . .

   Annoyingly this delay in getting the desert games onto the board will end up affecting my targets for the year but as long as I can do a block of it in the springtime we should be alright.

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Macabre Cows?

   I was reading the memoirs of Trevor Greenwood - D-Day to Victory: The Diaries of a British Tank Commander - and one of the things he mention is how many fields they advanced past had whole herds of dead cows in. Most seemingly dying from sheer fear or the shockwaves from bombs rather than direct hits.

   I mentioned to one of my brothers that I was half planning on buying some dead cows to put in a field on a WW2 board and then to my surprise a blister pack of Warlord Games Dead Cows turned up on my birthday. While its a bit ghoulish (especially from a vegetarian), I think the war should be portrayed as accurately as possible and with a game lined up, it seemed the right time to get them painted.

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Small Romans

    One of my main targets this year was to play some 15mm games to test my theories to do with the scale, which meant I needed to organise said games and paint some more models. With time to organise games being difficult so far this year - nearly a 6th of the way through the year and I'm a game and a half into my targets - so I got an opponent in place, booked a table and with the deadline looming, I got painting.

   With the last bits that I needed for the game being two units of auxiliaries (regulars and archers to balance sides), a general for each side and some scenery was a nice to have. Ultimately, as I started getting the last few units that I needed for the game moving, I got a bit carried away and started on what it may be said* was too many other figures, ending up with every flat surface within arms reach with a 15mm model in some stage of being painted**, so this post is what I actually managed to finish. . .

*by those with too much sense

**Most of which weren't strictly important

   The first units are the last Middle Imperial Roman Auxiliary and Auxiliary Archers units as these would allow a fairly even game with about 6 units a side and now mean all my Roman Infantry is painted**. Like the rest of the project these should cover me for the early 200's, but with a few allied units I don't see why they can't get me as far as the late 200's as well, so that I can play all the battles in the crisis of the 3rd century. As I think I have mentioned before, this might be one of the best periods for a wargamer to build armies around****, not only do you have constant Roman on Roman fighting, you've got the Palmyrenes, Goths and later the Huns all to add as allies or enemies depending on the period or game.

***Until I buy more?

****Plus it's historically one of the times the empire probably should have fallen which makes it interesting

   Next up and not hugely exciting but really useful are the Roman Generals. The figures are from Essex Miniatures and are all the same sculpt (although I added Forged in Battle figures to the big general's bases). These are not only to give each side a leader for Lion Rampant games, but also to future proof the collection for games like Sword And Spear (for later this year?) where you need a lead general and smaller Captains to relay orders. Again, I'll be adding 'captains' or generals for my allied/enemy armies so I doubt all 6 will be in the same game very often, but I figured it was better to be covered than missing a single figure later on.

   Weirdly, these 8 figures have been sitting on my painting table for about a year and have been in the category of where do I even start painting these, but, as it turns out, they've been a really nice mini project.

   The next thing I started painting, and I suspect it was because they were easy and I wanted quick stuff to put at the edge of the battle, was a flock of sheep with shepherd and some wagons, pack mules and associated workers. The small wagons and sheep are from Forged in Battle along with the shepherd, while the workers, big wagon and mules are from Essex Miniatures.

   Last for the actual romans is the start of my 15mm Roman scenery collection. I've still got another 5 or so buildings to do, but this was the point where the deadline really started to loom, so I've got together what I felt was a minimum villa complex to put on the edge of the board and more buildings will be done in the future.

   Lastly I have two units of Gothic cavalry. I could gush for hours about how interesting I find the Goths as a race, but that can wait until I start on that army properly. Suffice to say for the moment that in this period they are both the biggest external threat to the Roman empire (if you treat the competing empires as a single unit) and, arguably. the biggest source of man power with whole tribes fighting as mercenary armies and Goths being inducted into the legions themselves. So I wanted to get a couple of units of their cavalry painted for this game, partly to get their presence in early and partly to bulk out my cavalry and make the game a bit more interesting, with 7 units a side instead of 6.

Now all I need to do is play a game . . .

Thanks for reading

The Underhive - Other Companies Edition

    While the last scenery post was about kits I'd bought from Warbases, this one is a bit more of a mixed bag. 

   First up is a structure I built from a sprue of Industrial Gubbinz that I picked up from TT Combat. The sprues of MDF and thick card have been used on pretty much everything I've built, including on the Warbases stuff from last time. I'm not really sure what it is supposed to be, but its useful for building height and putting ramps on.

   Next is a couple of foam made concrete blocks and some ramps. One of the ramps is built from thick card in the same one that the small one of my first bit of Warbases scenery was, while the other two are from War Cradle (Wayland Games other name) and covered in Industrial Gubbinz and corrugated card.

The foam blocks were a test to see how they would look. I wanted some bits that I could just put ramps on without needing big bits of terrain and I'm not too upset by them.

   Lastly are a pair of towers from War Cradle. I bought these as the deadline for the game was coming up fast and I wanted some quick, cheap height to just fill a board while I carried on with the smaller bits around the edges. I was pretty stumped with how to make them look like they were built for a reason, and I don't really think I have succeeded in giving them that look, but they worked well in our game and really dominated the board so they did what I initially bought them for.

   The bigger one of the two, I made a couple of quick changes too. I put the ladders inside as I thought they looked better and it might store a bit more easily, then I cut a square out of the MDF to fit a grate from the Industrial Gubbinz kit. The rest of the gubbinz was added to try and make the structure look used.

   Then the smaller of the two structures (same height but substantially thinner) I went really simple with. I added a barrel on some off cuts and some bits to try and keep the industrial theme, but by this point I was really short of time.

   I've got a few other half built or unbuilt kits left to do, but as the initial game has now past and I'm not sure when I have time to fit another in, I'm happy to leave them for when inspiration next hits and get on with more important projects.

Thanks for reading

The Underhive - Warbases Edition

    In my spare time, one of the things I'm absolutely fascinated by is scenery scratch builders on YouTube, with Eric's Hobby Workshop (https://www.youtube.com/c/EricsHobbyWorkshop/featured) being the one major channel that I can rewatch over and over again. Whilst I'm not brave enough to really scratch build I have dabbled with using MDF kits as scratch aids.

   Last summer before I really had any plans to pick Necromunda up again, I ordered a couple of kits from Warbases as a bit of a test bed for some ideas I had in my head. The first kits I ordered were a pair of Sci-favela Lift Shafts**. Something about the shape really appealed to me and with a little boxing in of the frame at the top, I thought I could make a big difference really quickly.

*And a Lego channel but lets not go there

**Annoyingly at different times and at the point where the local sorting office was overwhelmed and we didn't get any post for two weeks

   Most of the additional bits are made from a thick cardboard recommended by pretty much every Youtuber and I now have a pack that I am working through. While the photo doesn't show it very well, I was really pleased by my little bridge, which I supported with a pipe half because it looked cool and half because it meant it was strong enough not to need a base.

   Next  up was a kit that I have looked at on Warbases so many times but not really known what to do with. The idea of having habs felt right, but I didn't want one or two as I thought it might look odd. Then I had the idea of adding the Sci-Favela Tower to the Twin Shacks set and an idea was born.

   I have based this one but only because I couldn't work out how to make anything strong enough to work without one, but I don't think it distracts. I've added candles in a shrine at the back and broken bottles to make it look lived in. A liberal application of corrugated card hopefully stops it looking too mdf-y.

   The last one for this batch was a Sci-Favela Chemical Tank. This one I really wasn't sure on. I added it to an actual order of bases as it was cheap and it sat unopened for quite some time as I couldn't really get my head around how to make it look like more than a MDF kit with a can stuck in it, but actually once built it looked really good. I don't think it hides the can element as well as the lifts set, so I gave the can a bold colour to make a show of it instead.

   I've added decals and lots of bits to the base to really make it feel like people are using the area. Then tried for a concrete look to break up all the rusty metal I've used elsewhere.

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KGL 2rnd Light Battalion

    Everything came together a bit quicker than planned with this post, so it's going to be a similar job to the last one, with scenery and Napoleonics.

   So first up are the figures, in this case it's a whole project - the King's German Legion 2rnd Light Battalion. There is a risk I might need to buy some more to defend the whole of La Haye Sainte, but 8 units worth of skirmishers felt like more than enough to start with as I need to add a couple of units of light company from a KGL line company, which will bring the defending force to 72 points, which when a normal size game of Rebels and Patriots is 24 points, means the game is already pretty big.

   The figures are from Essex Miniatures, breaking Old Glory's monopoly on my 15mm Napoleonics. I have to admit, I wasn't hugely impressed with the figures when I saw them online, but they were cheap and would arrive quickly, so I figured they would do the job, in person, however, I'm much more impressed with them. I assume the squat nature of the images online is due to compressed photos rather than compressed sculpts, so I'll be visiting Essex Miniatures when lockdown is over.

   Lastly are the extra tree clumps I said I had ordered on the last post. Once I knew N Gauge trees would work for what I was doing and I could get them cheaply enough to build a decent collection of clumps, I decided the next step was to add in the one type of tree I will always pay extra money for to put on a railway layout, the willow. There is something about a model willow tree that breaks the tree mould of any model as we all know model trees are either clumpy deciduous or are cone shaped pines, add a willow and your eyes are drawn to it every time. I also bought a much wider tree than the ones that come in the box sets, again, to break up the silhouettes and make sure the trees had enough variety to look believable. These 3 new clumps get me to 13 in total which fills out a decent sized lump of a board.

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Skirmish Line in the Trees

    As ever, while I should be focussing on getting a single project ready for the table, I'm instead bouncing around like a crazed grasshopper, but I scrounged a few hours of hobby time and wanted something fairly simple I could enjoy painting in that time, so the two units of 15mm French Voltigeurs, ready sprayed, fitted the bill.

   The figures are from from Blue Moon via Old Glory (I think?) and are, in my opinion, the nicest 15mm Napoleonic sculpts out there. It's just a pity the range isn't a bit bigger. I also had a spare flank company figure from my grenadiers, so I decided to use one of the officers from the command pack and create an extra base - as in a few cases coming up, I'm not sure how this will be used, but it solves the problem I'm starting to have with 15mm of the spare figure.

   As ever, I apologise for my photography, 15mm isn't my friend for close up shots.

   Sadly, I'm now waiting on a back order for the rest of my French troops - I gather Old Glory UK ships over figures in bulk, so I'm waiting on the next shipment - which means I'll spend a bit of time painting the other side while I wait for the rest of my order to arrive.

   However, this gave me an opportunity to look at another recent purchase. One of the things halving my scale has done, is it has meant most of my scenery now looks a bit daft next to these new figures, so I'd been on the hunt for ways to bulk up my scenery collection fairly cheaply.

   The roads in the top photo are part of a big set I bought from eBay and are better than I imagined they could be, so I'd tempted to buy a few more just to make sure I always have enough matching roads. Then I got an email from Warlord games saying they had partnered with The Model Tree Shop and were offering their N Gauge tree collections as scenery for the Epic ACW range. Now, I've bought loads of trees from them in the past for my model railways, so I knew they would be good and I put a basket or two together but didn't know how many trees I would realistically need, then it dawned on me, I had loads of Warlord medals to use up. . . Two heavily discounted boxes later and I was on my way.

   24 trees has made me 10 bases of various densities and I've painted an over sized base without any trees on that I can put the clumps on during a game to represent wooded areas and move trees off as figures move through. I plan to paint another couple of big bases so I can have 3 big woods, and I have since placed a little order with the model tree shop for 2 or 3 small bases worth of trees just to keep the numbers up.

Thanks for reading and sorry for the terrible photography

A Walled Village

    My mate Neil always says that ideas are dangerous and should be stamped down, but I had an idea that I left to grow - sorry Neil. A few years back when I was playing a lot of Lord Of The Rings the guy I played against and me starting chatting about creating some scenery for the scenarios that needed something to work a bit better. For example there is a scenario that I am sure was called King of the Hill, where you measured out a 2 foot circle, which was the hill, and you got victory points for having the most models within the circle at the end of the game. So I asked my dad to cut me a circle of mdf about 2 foot wide and I got as far as drawing on it what I was going to build before I put it down to carry on working on another day.

   Fast forward to November and I had an idea for a walled village for my Ancient Britons - a defensive wall rather than defendable wall, which was an important difference in my head. This isn't a fort, its a walled village. I decided it would be a nice project I could get on with once my son was born, but in the end I got carried away with it before that could happen, but as I needed to clear some space to get a photo of the model, it didn't make it onto this blog.

   The basic structure is pink foam on an MDF circle, covered in plaster and painted. The walls are made from wooden cuticle sticks snipped to slightly different lengths. The fences are Renedra and the buildings are Hovels.

    While the end result is historically suspect at best, I wanted something big to put on the board as the project it goes with was getting out of hand. I just need to get some games in with it now.

   Lastly, and very much tacked onto the end is a quick stone circle. Not a huge amount to say about this, other than the stones are from an Arcane Miniatures order I made a few years back, on an MDF base.

Thanks for reading