Good afternoon everyone, this is the right place, isn’t it?

I hope everyone is good/great/better.

Pledge…well, I have been painting some scatter terrain for Infinity. Crates and boxes from MA Studio, but I have been experimenting with weathering over the last few weeks. It started when I bought a hot-air gun for £3. Brilliant for drying paint, but as it is superhot you have to make sure you have the right distance from the model. You couldn’t dry plastic/resin minis as they would just shrink. However, solid stuff, like MDF terrain or think resin items, it is awesome. An early discovery (throw the switch, Igor!) was that if you are careful you can cause the paint to warp, curl, and blister. “Knackers,” I thought. When I looked at the final finish I thought, “I can go with this.”

So far I have only used it on crates, but I want to give it a try when I paint a building. As it ‘appens, I have almost finished a garage for Infinity. You can see where this is going…that will be my pledge.

Question time. C- for effort, but plenty of room for improvement.

1. Storing terrain is a pain in the rear – not the good type either! I could never do a pile. Everything has to be neat and ordered. It also needs to be dusted if it is not used. Then again, it does look good on my middle-eastern stuff and you can’t really tell. All of my stuff is either shelved, in a cuboard, or packed into modular storage boxes.

I get the boxes from B&M Bargains 2-3 for £5-6. Very tasty indeed. If you get your shopping online then ASDA/Tesco also have some great, cheap storage. The bottom box is from Tesco.

A caravan is great storage too.

2. Modular terrain always looks so nice, but in my experience it is a bit of a nightmare – unless it joins together with something. Someone bumps or kicks the table and it looks like a scene from the movie 2012. Yes spend the next twenty minutes putting everything back together or rescuing minis from an opening vista.

Hex stuff is a waste of money too.

3. Generic terrain? For my games it has to be crates, dumpsters, or general ‘street’ things. You might have guessed that I play Infinity and you need plenty of things to use as cover in a fire-fight. I also play Force-on-Force (ultra modern if you don’t know what it is) so I make clumps of grass/rocks onto small bases as scatter terrain. In FoF it is considered that everywhere can provide ‘cover’. You will find that when you get shot at you can hide behind the kerb of a pavement. In FoF if you are more than 2″ from a bit of terrain you are in “open ground” and that usually spells trouble. Lots of it too. So, to save any squabbles I made little markers so that you know what is, and what isn’t, “open ground”.

Scatter terrain is great. I love it, but it has to fit in. Too many people just seem to chuck anything on the table. Why would there be a pile of storage crates just in the middle of the road?

It is just a bit of luck that I am ‘home’ today, due to train dealys, and thought I would see what was happening.