Welcome to Haitabu! (some town terrain for 15mm fantasy and medieval)

 Welcome to Haitabu. Haitabu is the central marketplace in Utavoll. It was once a small nomad encampment but its central location has made it a meeting place for all who travel across Utavoll. Merchants come here for the big markets and the chance to hear of lucrative opportunities across the land, and many have made Haitabu their base. Unfortunately, this has also made it popular with the Thrappled Lemmings too, but they are out of town, so let us take a look around while the chaos they bring is at a minimum.

I needed buildings for my games and bought the Usborne cut-out models Make this Viking Settlement set because it was cheap, readily available from the local museum, and would only require the effort of building the houses. I do like a set where I don't have to paint anything! The set is closer to HO/OO or 20mm than 15mm, but that is a compromise I am willing to make in favour of the price and the ease of getting it to the table.

The Viking settlement is a card-model set that I have reinforced with foamboard inside. The roofs are removable, as is evident in the pictures below, because some have been knocked and sit slightly out of place. All I did for them is to add a triangle of foamboard to keep each roof in the right shape. Because the roofs are removable, the interiors are playable spaces, even if they are not pretty and decorated at all. The buildings are all stuck to mdf bases and some texturing added. I hope that this makes them prettier and more durable, even if my terrain making efforts are never going to win an award.

The base for the town is the Dave Graffam Cobblestone Streets mat that I printed out and put into a cheap picture frame. I play Five Leagues from the Borderlands at 60% scale in 15mm, so this 70cm x 50cm picture frame offers a playing area equivalent to approximately 45" x 33", which makes it ideal for Rangers of Shadow Deep and Frostgrave too (and, no doubt, many other skirmish games).

The trees are from a local model railway shop and I really need to get more of them. The figures in the images below are a mix of Essex Miniatures, Alternative Armies and Two Dragons.

So, let us start our tour of the town.

Haitabu overview shot

Another overview shot

Young Ketil is throwing stones at a rabbit, while Gunnar is planting turnips in the back yard. Jarl Atli has sacrificed a pig on the platform over his door recently and stands there taking in the view, while one of his serfs, Marit and her child Moldi, watches over his sheep. Jarl Atli hopes that the pig will bring him favourable attention from the gods.

It is turnip planting season all over. Helgi the Leatherworker and Thorbjorn Hammerbreath are also planting turnips on their plots

Meanwhile, a thirsty traveller takes a drink from the town's freshwater spring. (This is a rock pool from the Warlock Tiles Mushrooms and Pools set. It's nominally 28mm but it works for me)

Lady Greta chases sheep and goats from her plot. Her serfs must soon plant turnips too, but she sent them on an errand to collect mushrooms earlier, so her turnip crop will be planted a day later than everyone else's

Lars the Apprentice and Guthorm the Boatbuilder are discussing the best ways to split logs. Lars has lots of ideas and thinks that Guthorm does not think big enough, but he is wrong as usual. Old Forsi, Guthorm's father has just got up and is off to see what the market has to offer. Meanwhile Young Forsi Guthormson is planting turnips just like so many others.

Svarti the Swineherd is tending the pigs in the woods near Haitabu. He knows that the winter sacrifices will be along soon and he is planning on making a lot of bacon out of them. It is traditional to sacrifice a pig at midwinter for luck and good fortune in the new year.

A merchant caravan passes through the streets of Haitabu watched by Jarl Atli and Lady Greta's husband Jarl Tovi. Jarl Atli dislikes Jarl Tovi because Tovi's house is bigger than Atli's. The merchant notices them watching and orders his slaves to stand straighter and put on a show. He hopes that Atli or Tovi will buy the slaves and the other goods he has brought to market. His assistants hope that they will buy the other goods first, because they are sick of carrying them. A goat and a sheep look on incuriously. They know from experience that merchants are not a good source of food for them.

Gladtown: 15mm sci-fi terrain pics

In this post:
Buildings and billboards: Mad Mecha Guy
Street furniture: Brigade Models
Mushrooms: unknown (they were a gift)
Battle mat: Dave Graffam

Crikey, I found the enthusiasm to do some painting this last week and a bit! After all my talk of ennui and an 18 month dry spell with no painting, I finally got it together to do some. Two things have grabbed my attention recently. One is my 15mm sci-fi terrain. I still can't bring myself to paint actual 15mm figures, but I did slop some paint on some of my Mad Mecha Guy buildings and print out posters for the MMG billboards. There's a lot more I could and want to do to enhance these buildings, but I'm just happy to have more of them coloured in right now. Once the rest are done, I shall go back and add graffiti, signs and other bits and pieces to improve the look.

Ages ago, I bought the pdf of Dave Graffam's Cobblestone Streets battle mat. It comes as a pdf including a file breaking the map up into A4 sheets for printing. I started printing it out and mounting each sheet separately on mountboard. They are not geomorphic so I am stuck with the standard layout, but that is fine. The advantage of printing this way is that I can easily stack the tiles, stick them in a box file and store them away. I can also lay out only those tiles I need.

My sci-fi faction is the Bwendi, a former African republic that models itself on a caricature of the British Empire. It's mortal enemy is the nation of Albion, descendants of the English whose warped perception of what it means to be English means that there can never be peace between Bwendi (the righteous guardians of fair play and cricket) and (perfidious) Albion. As part of that, I started wondering of Bwendi might not seek to make their towns more Olde Englishe. What better way to do that than to have cobbled streets? So, the Dave Graffam battle mat may well be used as the base for a Bwendi town. The cobbles are unlikely to have much effect on game play with all the grav vehicles kicking around, and they look nice, according to President for life Colonel Throckmorton P. Gladiolus XLVI. I hear that Gladcorp is planning to introduce fog generators in some city centres for a more authentic experience too.

The battle mat is sized for 28mm figures but I have printed it out at 100% and it seems ok for my 15mm figures. The roads are no wider than 100mm which is pretty much what I want, but they lack pavements. I'm undecided about this. Many places I have visited have limited or no pavements, so perhaps this works ok, especially with the perspective that Bwendi is a (darkly humorous) banana republic on a distant colony world, but maybe I need to make some pavements to put around the buildings. I must think on this.

Musings aside, I am really quite happy with the visual effect of the buildings on the Dave Graffam mat. I've been dithering for ages about what sort of base mat to use with the Bwendi stuff, and have printed up a bunch of roads from WWG's Streets of Mayhem set that I have used previously to form towns, but I think the olde worlde aesthetic may well work better for my vision of the Bwendi. We can leave the future, urban dystopia for Albion. After all, they do it so much better.

The other thing that has grabbed my attention recently is my ongoing 6mm WW2 Western Desert project. This project has been ongoing since Miniature Wargames published an orbat and campaign for Operation Brevity in the 90s. I painted up that orbat but became obsessed with checking it against the sources, and quickly realised that it was only a very rough approximation of what was actually present on the field of battle. That led to analysis paralysis and the project stalled. Since getting the Benghazi Handicap sourcebook for Command Decision: Test of Battle, I have been more enthused, but not enough to pick up a brush until this weekend. Once I have some of it completed, I shall start posting photos of that too.