15mm Doors from Ral Partha Europe

 Not the most exciting post, perhaps, but my early activities this year are all about accessorising my games in free moments, because life is otherwise very busy. One thing I have wanted for a while is some doors for use while exploring dungeons. Ral Partha Europe has some as part of their Terraincards series that the furniture I posted about a couple of weeks ago came from. These come in two flavours.

The rustic doors are standard wooden doors that would not look out of place in a dungeon or as part of a typical medieval house. They are wooden doors with a bolt, a wooden lintel and a wooden frame.

The stone arch doors are for fancier dwellings or dungeons. They are arched doors set in a stone surround.

Both types of door come on a small lasercut, 3mm thick plywood card that you need to press or cut them out from. Each card has eight doors. They are set up so that four have the hinges on the left side and four have the hinges on the right side, so that you can glue them together to make a single door with each side having hinges on the same side or just glue them to a structure for making houses.

I bought two of each card and made eight freestanding doors of each type by gluing them together and sticking them to 15mm square mdf bases so that I can place them where needed on a 2D or 2.5D dungeon floorplan. This will let me keep track of open and closed doors more easily. The paint job is nothing special, but coloured in is better than not. I feel sure that they will look fine on the table. Time to start planning a dungeon bash.

Bonus pic for those that could be bothered to read this far:

Paper and plywood terrain in action

The bold adventurers tied their pack horses to the ominously fresh gravestones that stood near the door of the creepy castle ruled by Prince Killemall. They opened the double doors into a large pillared hallway. Ahead stood double doors ajar as if the servants were too slapdash to close them again after passing through. To either side were closed doors. Who knew what horrors lay beyond? Or what treasures?

Furniture for 15mm fantasy games

This week I have mostly been making flat-pack furniture. Fortunately, not a single allen key was required, and there were no unfortunate incidents with pieces attached the wrong way round.

Plywood terrain card 'TC005 Tables and Benches' from Ral Partha Europe

I bought several Ral Partha Europe terraincards 'TC005 Tables and Benches' just before Christmas so I spent an enjoyable evening cutting them out and gluing them together. There is something really satisfying about this sort of task!

The set comprises a long table with 2 benches plus a round table with 4 stools. They are laser cut from 3mm plywood which feels quite soft and many of the pieces are small, so I was a bit worried about pressing them out of the frame. However, all went well. I cut the tab that held them in the frame with a craft knife and pressed them out with the end of a paint brush. Very soon my table was covered in tiny pieces of plywood.

The contents of one card built.

With all the pieces out, I sanded down the nub of the tab and glued them together. Then I painted them with Vallejo 70.828 Woodgrain. This is a thin paint that is designed to be used over the top of other paints, if I have understood correctly. In this case, I did not paint the furniture first, but just applied the Woodgrain paint directly to the furniture, giving it that proper well-varnished look that should be proof against most spills of ale, food and blood.

The finished articles with two Demonworld Elves from Ral Partha Europe for scale.

"I've told you before about blowing your own trumpet in here! Now get out!" commanded the landlord.

For only a little work, the Thrappled Lemmings can now sit down and have an ale or three in comfort. I, on the other hand, must find more tavern furniture (a bar and shelves of alcohol) that I can use to set up a proper bar-room brawl. Having tables to stand on and stools to throw is a good start though.

The Wilderness of Utavoll (wilderness terrain for 15mm fantasy games)

 I'm slowly collecting terrain for my Five Leagues from the Borderlands games, and have been on a bit of a spurt working on that instead of playing games. I shall get back to playing at some point soon, but I wanted nicer terrain to play on. Here we see a selection of terrain I have been working on or have bought for wilderness games.

The tent is from the same Viking Settlement set as in the previous blog post about the town of Haitabu.

The camp site and the stone circle are from CP Models. I based the standing stones on mdf bases to make a full circle.

The house is a Vietnam house from Peter Pig that I have had for donkey's years. I finally got around to painting it, am still not happy with it, but at least it is coloured in. I am thinking of getting a few more of these to use as Lizardman huts when I add The Oldest Ones faction to my game.

The mushrooms, rock pools and crystals are all from the Warlock Tiles: Accessory - Mushrooms and Pools set, and were bought at my local comics shop. They are nominally 28mm but work fine for 15mm as far as I am concerned. They will come in handy for both dungeon and wilderness dressing.

I've also put in a bit of effort making EPS hills for my wilderness games. I think I have enough small and medium hills now. Perhaps it is time to make some larger ones. The slopes on the sides of them are not going to be useful to stand figures on, but there are ways round that, and it is better to have any hills than none at all.

The stone circle still pulses with eldritch energies, even thousands of years after it was built. No one knows who built these stone circles or why. Some scholars theorise that the Oldest Ones' earliest ancestors built them because they always occur in areas where the Lizardmen live, but the Lizardmen are not telling, if indeed they know

Unfortunate travellers became lost in the wilderness and camped near the stone circle. Perhaps they were in trouble and hoped for aid from the Oldest Ones living in the hut, but the area seems deserted and there is no sign of where the travellers went. Even their possessions remain undisturbed.

The wilderness near the stone circle seems deformed by its power. Mushrooms have grown to the size of small trees and glowing crystals have sprouted from nearby hills. There is power here for the mage who can tap it and use it without dying.

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.

Snowing in March!

Steve and I had a productive day yesterday (Saturday) working on the terrain. We covered the frames for the final two boards in plaster-soaked t-shirts, added green scatter material to the three boards that had only been painted and added snow to the first four boards that we had worked on. It looks like we might actually have a game to put on at Salute after all!

Towton terrain

I have been slowly plugging away at the last of the figures I need for Towton, while Steve and I have been spending our gaming night progressing the terrain. We have a big day tomorrow as we have the whole day to crack on with it. We are planning to get the majority of the terrain finished or at least into an acceptable state for Salute by the end of tomorrow. Here's part of the terrain before the snow gets added with a view looking towards the Cock Beck and where Castle Woods will be.