Bowling Green? #NotAtMyTable

With apologies to the Ohioans out there - it might be a fine university, but a bowling green makes for a bland wargaming table.  With very little room left in my One Fantasy Box to Bind Them All And In the Dark Closet Rule Them, grand topographic chances are off the table (heh).  That doesn't mean we can't spruce things up with some nice terrain blocking templates that also help to funnel figures around and even make for some interesting defensive challenges. 

These three small hillocks were carved out of one plain round piece of Styrofoam picked up for a couple bucks at the craft store.  The slopes are just low enough to allow figures to stand almost anywhere on the terrain piece, and they were painted to match the hill on which the Nameless Tower stands - a small touch that helps unify the table theme.

As you can see, the overall elevation difference is less than 15mm including the terrain base, so they can be treated as a linear obstacle for climbing purposes, or the players can agree that they are not to scale, and that these little cliffs actually block all movement.  In that way you can even have a couple of short canyons to funnel troops through. 

 

Oh man, I'm working on something big right now, but I can't show you what it is.  A huge project compared to my usual, but I don't want to ruin the surprise for my players, so posting might be lighter than usual here despite increased output.  Maybe I'll be able to share the photos with you as a Christmas Surprise.  If you don't already follow this blog, now's a good time to subscribe so you don't miss it.

Deepest, Darkest Elfrica

Who doesn't love a good fight against the dark elves?  Especially when Splintered Light makes such distinct and characterful figures!  The first four figures are the Personality Pack, and give you four unique NPC style bosses.  Rather than the usual purple dress, I went with a fall-time red and orange coloring.

 

I also bought one pack of blade dancers.  These guys come in a pack of twelve with three different sculpts.  You wouldn't know it from looking at these eight figures.  Simple arm bends give each of these eight figures a different look - if you look closely you can see which ones are twins, but they'll still look great on the table.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving!  A better blog host would have had a nice Solomon Kane figure painted up.  Perhaps a cornucopia of fields and gardens can make up for it?

It's late autumn, just after the crops are in and the table fully dressed.  The crops are just MDF covered in sand.  Took two or three applications to get those furrows looking right, but it paid off.  They demarcate rough ground, but don't hamper figure movement in the least.

 

The rock wall is just fish tank gravel carefully stacked one at a time until it was high enough to represent a decent sized wall.  The giant leafy greens are small plastic flowers painted in bright green.  They transform that slab of terrain from a merely empty field to a corner garden. 

 

Here's another sneak peek at the completed dark elves, too.  Full shots up on Monday.

Bringing Out More Dead

My tombs were heavy on the physical dread and light on the spiritual dread, so I fixed that with a little help from Splintered Light.  Their ghostly packs sell packaged in numbers suitable for big battle games rather than skirmishes.  So I added a chunk of lead to my never-to-be painted mountain.

 

 

Being a rather clever fellow, I also turned a few of these single sculpts into different monsters through the expedient of different paint schemes.  In addition to standard black, I painted a handful up in a LotR ghastly greenish glow.

 

Here's a slightly better side by side comparison.  The contrast is even more stark in person.  So the black robes can serve as more skeletons or wraiths, and the green guys can be ghosts or shadows or something equally impervious to less than silver or magic weapons.

I also found this towering skeleton giant in a bag of twelve plastic toys for sixty cents the day after Halloween.  I picked the best looking figure and simply mounted and painted him - didn't even need to trim any flash - and look how he towers over that dark elf (spoilers for my next post!).

A Giant Update

Light on the texts, but heavy on the heavies, here's how Splintered Light's hill giants stack up against a typical (Ral Partha Europe) figure.

I like this size.  Big enough to be a threat, but not comically so.  And the animal skin and skull necklace, and the weird proportionality of their limbs, make these two a much better representation of the fantastic than just using a 28mm figure.  (Which I've done, but never really liked the look of.)

No idea the size difference between these and the other giant-kin on offer, though.  I never really liked the breakdown in giants in traditional D&D.  It always felt a little artificial to me.