Terrainfest 2024: A True Roman Bakery for True Romans

I’m off to a very late start for Terrainfest this year, so my project isn’t going to be very ambitious. This Roman Bakery MDF kit should round out my collection of Gangs of Rome scenery nicely, giving me enough pieces so that I don’t have to use all the same buildings every time I set up the table.

Having tried it both ways, I have found that it’s a lot easier to do at least the majority of the painting before doing any building. Naturally, the one time I would prefer for all the parts to stay on the sprue, they fall out without any prompting, but I’ve been able to get most of the flats painted. I’m using cheap craft paints for this first pass, but honestly they are more trouble than they’re worth — I have to do two or three coats to get any coverage, so what I’m making up for in price I’m losing in the time it’s taking. Once I get the basics done I’ll switch to proper model paints.

I’m using an off-white as the main base coat for the walls. The image on Sarissa’s website has a blue stripe around the outer base of the building. I think that looks fine so I don’t see any reason not to do it that way. I’ve just about exhausted my (very old) bottle of Reaper Turquoise Blue though, so hopefully I won’t need to do to much retouching.

The red I’m using for the bricks is a little too bright — when viewed with the blue and off-white these walls look a little too patriotic for my liking. I’ll dull down the red and blue with a little drybrushing after I’m done with all the base coating. Next I’ll need to start dry-fitting the pieces so I can see which walls will need to be painted on both sides.

I enjoy building MDF kits, but I really don’t like painting them. When painting miniatures I rely on the models’ texture to do a lot of the work for me, so when it comes to painting flat pieces of wood I’m at a bit of a loss. I got the base colors down and managed to dull down the too-bright red with a strong tone wash. But when I tried using the wash to add some weathering, the results were…not great.

I spent the next day painting over the wash with the base off-white mixed with just a drop of black and brown to darken it a bit. I started with a heavy drybrush — too heavy as it turned out, I broke my brush — but then just brushed the darker color on, attempting a bit of blending with the original off-white color. I often need to remind myself about table distance, and that the paint jobs really don’t need to be all that detailed, especially with terrain.

I added some detail to the smaller bits which I’m reasonably happy with. The final step before assembly is one I’ve been dreading: the bundles of wheat painted on the front and side of the building. I studied drawing and painting in college, but that was a long time ago and I’m woefully out of practice with doing anything freehand. I dread doing flags and banners and will go far out of my way to avoid it if at all possible.

In this case, since I’m working with a flat piece of wood that’s been painted white, I decided to try it using Prismacolor markers rather than a brush and paint — they’re a lot easier to control and the end result was more or less what I was hoping for.

Next comes the part I actually enjoy, putting the thing together. After that I’ll touch up the paint where needed and call it done!

I’ve completed assembly and touched up the paint where needed. Everything went together without a hitch, and I’m pretty happy with the results.

I think this is going to be a great addition to my Gangs of Rome table setup. It’s got a full interior, and a lot of interesting access points so there is actually a reason to move your gang fighters inside (unlike some of the other buildings). The upper level loading area will be good for ranged attackers, and Gangs of Rome encourages making daring leaps between scaffoldings.

Looking at it in context, I think the paint job fits in with my other Roman buildings nicely.

I’m ready to call this one done…almost.

One of the selling points of Gangs of Rome is its use of non-player characters to keep things interesting. Eurysaces the Baker gives out bread tokens that gang fighters can use to their advantage. Naturally I want some little bread loaves to use for these. I’m not confident in my ability to sculpt such a thing myself, so instead I’ve done my part to encourage international trade by ordering some hand-sculpted tiny bread loaf tokens from an Etsy seller…in Latvia. Hopefully they’ll turn up before the Terrainfest deadline…

And here’s the final touch. The bread loaves are a little large to be in scale with 28mm models, but that’s not really the point. They’ll work great as bread tokens for the game while still being thematic and not looking out of place on the table.

I’m going to call this project finished. Hopefully I’ll be able to get a game of Gangs of Rome in soon…