A City worth fighting for?

Pleased with the result of the first mat, I wanted to make another. I also wanted to experiment a little by adding some built in detail that I hoped would still allow the mat to roll up nicely.

On writing the previous post, I realise that I’d actually forgotten the Knarb video until I went back to check my sources and inspiration. Reviewing it again now, while his mat has some great detail in it, it doesn’t roll nearly as tightly as Mel’s version. More compact storage is definitely my preferred outcome.

I’ve had some 1mm thick A4 size cork sheets in my stash for a while, I thought I’d give this a try on the new mat. It’s quite flexible and easy to cut, I figured it should be ok.

I cut the sheet into 30mm squares to represent tiles. This gave me plenty. Given the width of the sheet I also ended up with some half-wide pieces as well. All good for variation.

I set to work on the first layer of the mat. Caulk, paint, no sand. I was running out of paint too, so the first two batches were pale. the 3rd… well, you’ll see.

I worked from what is the bottom left corner of the picture, anti-clockwise around to the top left corner.
I put the caulk down (I use a wide paint scraper to spread it around) then while it was still wet, pressed the cork squares into it. The first 3×3 square was rather plain, just to test if it would stick and hold. I also started to tear the cork to create cracks in the pavers.
The second set on the bottom right, I was crushing multiple squares in hand. Then realised that I had to reassemble them puzzle-like. I wasn’t interested in doing that while the caulk was setting.
The third set on the top right I was more careful in distressing the cork, doing only one square at a time. I also used some of the rectangular pieces to add variety.
The fourth set top left, I was confident this was working, and just wanted to get it done.

Yeah, I got caught up in the build and forgot that I was going to paint the cork then put the second layer on top. The plan being that it would weather the pavers into the ground.
Second layer: Caulk, paint, sand.

The second layer is on, and I’ve worked it into the gaps between the pavers. The caulk reacts well to water, so I could use that to smooth it off the pavers, work it into place. The next test would be the Roll test: would it roll up ok? Would the cork stay in place or would it peel off?

It rolled up well, it unrolled well. The cork stayed. All is good!
Since I’d forgotten to do it earlier, I painted the pavers using dollar store acrylic paint. They stood out too much now, and the ground wasn’t as dark as I would have liked.

8 Sep 22: I hit the whole mat with some slightly watered-down acrylic paint, mixed with a little PVA just to be sure it would stick. Applied all over with a paint roller. Again, using water to blend where I went over the pavers.

Sometime in late 2020 or early 2021 wargaming mats were on my mind. At some point I came around to these two videos:

A great video from Mel, and there are associated experiment videos delving into materials, layers etc.

An amazing looking board from Knarb. But to be honest, I can not be arsed doing all that with the flock.

In any case, I did a trial version. It has been seen previously in this project:

Following Mels’ guidance, it was crafted from a plastic-backed canvas paint drop sheet. Cut to about a 4′ square.

A single layer of caulk, mixed with sand and some paint went down. It took about three tubes of caulk to cover the whole surface. It sat like this for a fair while, but I’d always intended to put a second layer down.

hahaha.
Anyway. I thought I’d put the second layer on now. Over this time I’ve rolled it, unrolled it, stored it. Used it as a tablecloth (for game nights…). No cracks, or other dramas. It unrolls well, with a little counter-rolling it lays flat.

I put a second layer of caulk over. It also included sand and paint. Looking at it afterwards, I didn’t need the sand in the first layer. But so far it hasn’t caused any issues other than being heavier. I went with a grey colour on this layer, having “ruined city” in mind.

An excellent experiment. At the end of this I really decided that another was in order. There were a few other ideas that I wanted to try out as well.

The project ground to a halt when I ran out of spray…
I “knew” that neither of my two local suppliers carried the AP range regularly. Then discovered the closest had recently changed ownership & management. Happily, they were able to order and supply within a couple of days! Back on.

Really there’s only a couple of pieces to finish in this batch. I just needed more spray to do the job.

Raised walkways with ramps and stairs. Being modular than can easily be reconfigured or combined with other terrain pieces.
Most have arched tunnels running under, so it’ll allow minis to move through without necessarily having to climb over.

Apparently I haven’t printed the top of some of these. Better get onto that!

A four way walkway intersection and a ramp. The ramp’s supporting wall was just crying out for something, so I fished out a poster left over from the paper buildings. A quick bit of super glue, and done!

The next piece is a multi-layer building. I’ve only printed the brick components so far. There are rickety wooden levels to go above.

Well… that happened.
You know, the event. No people coming over, no Frostgrave. No impetus to prep terrain.

But I was doing a clean up and re-organisation of my hobby workspace. I’ve been feeling the itch to scratch build terrain. I realised as I was tidying and reorganising that I already had a backlog of terrain waiting to be done. This tower has been lurking over my painting desk since I put it up there to gather dust. I figure, time to get it done. A whole heap of it.

I got stuck in to paint. Seems like the painting guide I was referring to is gone… Oh well.

I went in with the dollar store craft acrylics.

The walls:

• Drybrushed Grey
• Mix Grey + some white and pick out random bricks
• Lighter drybrush all over with Tan

Timber components:

• Light drybrush with grey
• Lighter drybrush with tan

Roof Tiles:

• Drybrush red ochre
• Light drybrush with tan

Smaller details:

• Ropes were picked out with tan.
• Bars in the window hit with red ochre for rusty iron bars
• black drybushed under the chimney top for soot

A few tufts placed around to show grass growing up through the cracks.
Some dried mixed herbs to indicate old dried out leaves gathered in piles.
Green flock for… moss? Not sure to be honest. It could look better if there was a mix of greens.

Also, a splash of red… I noticed that I’d got red ochre in places where I’d not intended. *facepalm* It stands out in the photos. Rather than try and repaint and match, I dabbed some of the Citadel Blood for the Blood God technical over it.
Not mistakes, happy accidents! Turn an error into an interesting detail.

Looking at what else I could do…
Pick out all the nails in a rusty colour or technical…
Add more greenery…
Do a little more to cover some of the print errors I can still see…

Though I’ve got more pieces to get though, and have spent most of today getting the bulk work done.

Taking a tip from Mel the Terrain Tutor, I thought I’d try house paint as an alternative for painting terrain. A little bit of an experiment for me I suppose…

I’m using Dulux Klavier for the next colour. A small sample pot only set me back about AU$5 and that much paint will probably do a good chunk of scenery. After a coat, applied as an overbrush, it looks like this:

The next phase of the city build is 3D printed buildings. I backed Printable Scenery’s most recent kickstarter, which was thick with ruined buildings. Perfect for Frostgrave 😉

My first building is printed, primed and base coated. But I felt that it needed a base. I’ve been reading through Mel Bose’s book, and wanted to take this opportunity to apply some of the knowledge.

Some notes on my process for the prepping the 3d print for painting:

After cleaning up any string/ errant filament etc. I’ve been hitting the piece with a car body filler/primer. This seems to adhere to the PLA+ that I’m using very well. It’s self-levelling so it goes to a nice smooth finish.
What I’ve been doing is hitting the model with a thicker coat than I’d ever use on another miniature or plastic model. It fills the print lines well enough that they are hard to see, especially at gaming distance, but not enough to obscure the detail I want to see. The Printable Scenery details are nice and chunky, so they take the extra primer/filler well.
Then I can go over with a colour primer, as I have done here.

Using dollar store craft acrylics, I’ve put the colour on the pavers. Just using overbrush/drybrush for the pavers. Using brown acrylic thinned with water to paint the spaces between.

The first batch is almost done at this point. I got so focused on just getting it done, I forgot to take progress photos… Mostly.

The tops of the walls have been painted as terracotta tiles. I mostly used old Citadel paints… I don’t what I’m go into to do when they eventually run out?

Then I went in and picked out the little details quickly. There are little weeds and bushes. As there are 3 sets of these walls, each set fort a different colour: a green, a brown and a beige.

1. It’s been a while but we finally got another game organised. This time Nick wanted to host as his place, as his girl wanted him to be close by (at this time she’s heavily pregnant, an any day kind of situation).

So I packed up the town and we set up at player game on his table. We played approx 3′ X 3′ each warband taking a corner. The scenario was the Haunted Houses.

A tester piece for the stone walls that came with the Terrain Crate set. Again, keeping to a quickish scheme: Over-brush base, dry brush highlight, wash.

I’ll come in later and colour in the little shrub and bits of greenery that are molded on.

An hour of work.

28 pieces painted with AP Quickshade Dip. Some were finished from the last batch, some will need finishing in the next batch.

5 pieces of stone fence have had their tops coloured in. Where the walls are broken, I picked out some pieces in the red.

Over the last little while I spent some time painting up some scatter to put around the town to give the lived in feel. This all came from the Mantic Terrain Crate range. I backed the KS when it was live and have four boxes to work through. My goal is to work through it quickly, using batch painting techniques.

In order to keep myself sane and focused, I’ve started setting a timer for 1 hour while I paint. The reasons:

• Focus.
• Commitment
• Mindfulness

Focus: setting an hour timer means that I know I need to stay focused on the task at hand… As opposed to getting distracted, say, trying to pick a YouTube video to play while I paint.

Commitment: after the 3rd or 4th barrel, it was kind of easy to think about other stuff I’d much rather be painting… By setting myself a time limit I know I’m only with these less exciting pieces for a set amount of time.

Mindfulness: I find it easy to feel guilty about wanting to sit and hobby. I should be “doing something more productive” (study/cleaning/finding a better job). But then I feel crap when I don’t get to hobby, because that’s how I recharge the batteries. By setting myself an hour, I know I can turn down the volume on that little voice that Says, and just enjoy my time ?

In order to get this pile of stuff done quick (really… I’ve got so much more of this stuff ?) I wanted a quick shading option. Results below!

Army Painter Quickshade Dip Strong Tone:

Army Painter Quickshade Wash – Dark Tone:

Artists Ink – Sepia:

Mixed with a little water and something to soften the flow, as the first application just tended to sit.

The ink really didn’t work for me. It didn’t want to flow over the spray painted surface, an issue I’ve had before when I’ve used ink to quickly colour hordes of Skaven.  Perhaps some proper flow-aid my help. But that’s a future question to ponder.

The Dark Tone wash went on just fine, and the pieces that I tried it on look good in hand. But I’m churning through the little dropper bottle quickly.

The Quickshade Dip is the way I’m going forward. The first few pieces were dipped, later I thinned it a little and brushed it on. I’ve got much better control this way and it doesn’t take long to slap some on more than a few pieces.

Another step in getting stuff on the table for Frostgrave. This, too, was a resurrection of an old project. This was an older version of the modular dungeon tiles inspired an old game.
The tiles were left in various states of completion as seen above: Done; done with foam risers attached (which was the original plan, later ditched); crafted but raw; crafted and primed.
The very first version of these I had made were recycled from an old corkboard. Later they were cut from foamboard: easier to draw cracks/ designs/ magic circles in.

I decided I could bring these back as roads/ courtyards/ squares for Frostgrave. But looking at them again, the finished tiles seemed now to want more work done, more texture. I wasn’t satisfied with the raw edges where I could still see cardboard showing, and where it jutted out.

I mixed a batch of sand, PVA and water. No set mix, just until it felt right and slathered it on. I used paddle-pop sticks and brushes to get it in and around. When dry, I repainted using craft paint.

The First official game in our campaign. We again played a 3 player game and picked a scenario at random from Frostgrave 2nd Ed.  Not knowing any better we ended up on the  Treasure Phantasmal scenario.
In short: During setup place Wraith adjacent to the center treasure, it won’t move until a mini moves within 6″. Every treasure picked up has a 50/50 chance to spawn another Wraith within 8″.  On top of that, any figure carrying a treasure has to pass a Will check or full move toward the center of the board.

The picture above is taken part way through…

Every treasure picked up did spawn a Wraith within 8″… somehow most of them ended up in my side of the board (Lower half of the photo above).

Meanwhile Steve and Nick started fighting over treasure.

Nick and Steve spent a fair bit of time trying to grab treasure and fight each other. Steve’s Wizard sniped Nick’s Apprentice from across the board with a Bone Dart. I summoned a Demon and rolled a 20 for the summoning roll… Greater Demon, baby!

At the center of the board my orc manages to push away the central Wraith in an attempt to grab the treasure, while my Wizard cheers from behind the safety of a shrubbery!

In the end I only secured one treasure, as the multitude of Wraiths floating around my side of the table was too spooky for me to handle.

After a couple hours play we called it. Looking back, had we known that this was more an advanced scenario, we probably would have picked something different to start with!

My mate Steve expressed an interest in trying out Frostgrave, and talked another friend into trying it. Nick is essentially a Normie, he enjoys board and card games, but hasn’t been into Miniatures or RPG style game’s. The three of us have played a good chunk of Gloomhaven, so Steve sold the idea to Nick based on that experience.

We started with a “Session 0” learning how to assemble a party, build a wizard etc and put minis on the table to learn the rules. This wouldn’t go on to be a part of our campaign, just a practice session to see how we liked it.

Steve has minis of his own. He used a mix of Pathfinder/D&D, old Citadel Elves and Dark Souls board game minis. For Nick I delved into my painted minis and let him choose what he liked. He mostly opted for Wrath of Kings Shael Han minis.
I decided to go for something different and used Orcs. An old metal Wild Orc Shaman for my Wizard, a plastic Citadel Night Goblin for the apprentice and my Mantic Dungeon Saga Orcs and goblins for the rest of the warband.

While working on the tiles I’d also started working on another papercraft project: buildings.

Using the laser printer at work, I printed these pages and glued them to card with spray adhesive.
The aim, again, was to get some quick terrain to put down which could later be replaced with better quality stuff.

The desire to get this complete was reinforced when my mate Steve expressed an interest in giving Frostgrave a try!

January ’20 I moved into a new place, with a good amount of space for gaming.

Something I wanted to get organised as a priority was a table-full of terrain. Working from the ground up, I thought I’d resurrect an old project from a few years ago: a modular dungeon tile set. I could use this for dungeon crawling or as a basis for a fantasy town.
Above you can see: papercraft floors to be used for this project; the original plans I drew up years ago, and the first version of the tiles I had done then.

They were crafted tiles, put together using two-layer box cardboard, hot glue and dollar store acrylic paint.

March ’20 I’d got the first tile made. This time built around foamcore, using spray adhesive to apply the printed floor tiles.

It worked ok. I went with a 30mm grid, as you can see it works for GW miniatures. There’s room enough for larger Space Marine bases, even a Dreadnought.

Ultimately I scrapped this idea. Too time consuming, too fussy to assemble. Plus, the pieces I had built weren’t staying together well, and they’re only months old.