Salute 53: the shoppening

As you may know, yesterday was Salute, and we made our annual pilgrimage (although in a reduced party of 2 this year).

As always seems to be the case, I took far fewer pics than I thought I had, mostly due to spending the time walking and talking as we encouraged each other to support a variety of small businesses, as all good citizens must.

As is now tradition, as soon as we got into the hall we rushed over to the Osprey stand to sign up for a demo game, this year being Warriors of Athena. While we waited to see if anyone else was going to sign up, we got to have a look in the cabinet at a preview of the upcoming sprues:

Here’s the board of the demo game, which is basically the second scenario from the first Quest:

I selected Penelope as my Hero, who unlike the other Heroes had no companions, but did have a bow, which I figured might be tactically optimal to reduce the chance of getting my face smashed in by a Cyclops:

The game was fun, and our luck with dice seemed to be very thematic. We were there to reclaim some honey that was due to the gods, and so bundled in to wreak mighty violence on the naughty Cyclopes that were withholding it. Things started well, with us generally avoiding getting blatted with flung rocks and even taking out one of the Cyclops brothers with a combination of bonfire and carefully applied axe, but then things took a turn. My hero, finding herself with nothing unengaged to shoot at, explored a hut, discovering it to be a slaughterhouse full of meat (some of it human). My usual terrible dice rolling skills returned in this moment when I rolled a 3 and failed to hold my nerve, and threw up at this sight. The next turn, I dashed forwards to grab the honey… which again required a roll to resist eating it (which the Gods were very clear about the importance of not doing). And I again rolled a 3(hey, she was probably hungry after losing her lunch earlier). The next turn, everything that could go wrong did, as 3 of the 4 companions were killed, and a harpy appeared just as we came to the end of our time slot, so we all surmised that I had managed to curse us:

Once we’d finished the game, we then ambled around peering at lots of lovely minis. A small selection of things I took pictures of:

Scratched paintwork, a music themed mech game that caught our fancy. No minis for it, but probably worth an investigate…

A Robin Hood game - not something on my immediate projects list, but it’s probably only a matter of time…

Butt Fish!

Dreadfjord had a cool diorama that caught our eye

Barsoom! I’m surprised I haven’t had a Barsoom project at any point, as I enjoyed the novels I’d read, and have a stack of the comics too. I even liked the movie!

Which leads us to the crux of every Salute post, the loot:

• A few packs from Foundry - assorted Satyrs and ancient townsfolk for Warriors of Athena, and some Mexican Irregulars to use as Tejanos in the Alamo project 
• A box of Perry Spanish Guerrillas, because they work for Silver Bayonet Bandits, and between these and last years purchases I could probably do a reasonable Spanish Napoleonic army… 
• A freebie of a little lizard from Twilight 
• A mixed pack of tufts, as I build up my basing options
• The event freebie of Saladin. Fun fact: I read the entire Osprey about the third crusade on planes trains and automobiles coaches the day before Salute in preparation 
• The Barons War Outremer expansion - I asked whether the rumours of this book being updated in the near future were true, which they couldn’t tell me, but I bought it as I figured it was still going to be full of cool Crusade stuff, and also they said they’d give me a free sprue of Ancient civilians (that they were giving away if you bought Gangs of Rome) if I bought it, which I was eyeing for potential Warriors of Athena use 
• Crooked Dice - some Greek themed treasure tokens, the 13th Doctor, a companion for the 3rd Doctor, and the Terminator to go with my batch of them from last year 
• Super Tiny Giant Battles and two gacha from the Mammoth Minis gumball machine 
• Some GSW basing bits - crabs, that I’m hoping look good enough based up to be enemies in Warriors of Athena, and Pigeons, because my daughter is currently pigeon obsessed and next time we play D&D will probably want her Druid to turn into a pigeon
•  Silver Bayonet Spanish Unit, because… it was in front of me and I really like the sculpts! Plus, with the various Perry Plastics I have I could definitely make a unit. He says, still needing to finish his first unit… 
• Bad Squiddo vampire hunters, in case this is the purchase that gets me to actuslly finish my original Silver Bayonet Unit 
• Warlord gave me a couple of Konflikt 47 preview sprues when I bought a pot of Strong Tone at their stand 
• A sprue of Mantic Abyssal Dwarf infantry was another goodie bag freebie 
• Sci-fi barricades (for Firefly) and Amphora (for Warriors of Athena) from Debris of War
• 2 pots of Troll Trader superglue, as a pot of that lasts a year as opposed to going through a hundred tubes of terrible Poundland glue
• A Vae Victus buttfish, and a Dwarf Slayer from a company selling orange brushes 
• 3 shapeshifting aliens from Tangent, because I try to support Wayne every year 
• The Wargames Illustrated Templar and Assassin heroes, that I had previously resisted, but were in fact right in front of me which is much harder to resist 
• A Bushido giant crab for use in Warriors of Athena - expensive, but the nicest crab sculpt I’d seen all day and a good size too 
• Warriors of Athena Mythic Bees and Athena herself - after months of telling myself that I was going to find some alternative miniatures to use as giant bees, after playing the demo game I decided that maybe the official minis were actually the way to go! 
• My Gringo 40s preorder, which had a spread of minis for Silver Bayonet and the Alamo, and even included a freebie mini of an 1860 Egyptian chap 
• The final goodie bag freebies was the annual Salute die, a sample of Warmag base magnets, and then a smorgasbord of stickers, fliers and catalogues.

Before we add all of that to the Tally, a confession:

With the best of intentions, I’d hoped to wrestle the Tally down to zero before Salute, but that didn’t quite pan out. I even took minis 250 miles to Germany to try and hit that target:

Only to discover that rather than Foundry 34B, a nice dark charcoal paint that I was planning to use next, I’d packed 34A, black. 

I was able to get some other base colours done though, although I only managed to actually sit down and paint once the whole week between one thing and another.

And in full transparency, I had also picked up another issue of the new Warhammer partwork magazine since my last post, which had added 3 more minis to the Tally:

So, running all the numbers, the Tally now stands at:

20 vs 160 = -140

Not the biggest haul I’ve ever brought home, but still unlikely that I’ll get it back into the black by the end of the year!

Hair of the dog

Hey, I’m on a deadline, not every punny post title is going to be a winner.

Seeing as how I keep rolling wild dogs in Frostgrave, keep poking speculatively into my Song of Ice and Fire project box, and they are mostly fur so could be drybrushed quickly, this pack of dogs and their hirsute handler got launched up the painting queue to get my finished numbers up before the end of year Tally reset:

Apologies for the terrible pictures again, I was basing them this morning when I noticed a couple of spots that needed touching up, and I didn’t then get a chance to do that until after my children were abed, at which point there wasn’t any natural light available to take nicer pictures.

Fun fact - while adding the greenery to the dogs bases I zoned out and accidentally applied the same pattern of flock and grass to all of them (flock on the right in the centre, grass to their left), which I only noticed about three quarters of the way through and had to quickly try and jazz it up a little so that they would look less uniform.

Finishing these brings the Tally to:

52 vs 309 = -257

So, I’m unlikely to get it back in the black by the end of the year, but I have at least dragged my average back up to at least one mini a week!

Zomtober 2025 week 2: roamin’ remains

 Roaming, like Roman, right?

Another themed offering for Zomtober, this time some zombified romans:

I know, technically they’re meant to be skeletal Romans, but this is what I’ve got.

Like last week’s Vikings, they’re a mashup between some Warlord veteran sprues (handily, they come with campaign worn and battered equipment) and a mix of bits from the Wargames Atlantic zombie sprue and the Frostgrave Cultists. Some parts are straight swaps, while others got spliced to attach zombie arms to Roman shoulder pads. Yes, I know, the Centurion’s sword isn’t historical, but I figured that it would help him stand out a bit more on the table. 

I’d planned to do a few more figures with shields, but didn’t get round to it, which is probably for the best as putting the aged transfer onto the one I had was a nightmare last night. I’m not sure if it was an old transfer, a bad transfer, or just the fact that I only know where my Micro Set is (the Sol is probably somewhere in a bad in the garage), but it wasn’t plain sailing. There were white edges, clear bits that weren’t looking very clear, and one side that kept lifting, but with some cunning repainting, judicious application of varnish to try and stick it together, and them some hefty (perhaps too hefty) weathering, it looks just about palatable, which is the low bar that I shoot for. Speaking of a low bar, don’t look too closely at their glowing eyes, they’re a lot better looking at arms length I promise.

Here’s the back too! Just about visible is the one Roman where I cut off a leg and twisted it to give that classic dragging leg zombie look (which I think was a tip in a Peachy Tips video), but for ease and speed I skipped it on the rest, and I think they look just fine.

Painting these brings the Tally to:

25 vs 247 = -222

Now, if I was a smart guy, I’d have rationed these out and posted one a week to hit the Zomtober target of weekly posts, but that’s not how I roll - and to be frank, I’m also quite enjoying that I’m well on the way to doubling my total painted for the year so far in just one month… Next: more zombies, I hope!

Dem bones dem bones

 Dem ratty bones:

A kind chap called Andrew over on the Oldhammer Community Facebook Group offered some free nonhuman skeleton minis, as long as people promised to paint them, so here we are!

It might seem weird, but in its own way this is a big step for me - this is the first non GW mini in one of my Warhammer armies. When you think about it logically, I’m never going to play in an official tournament or even in a Warhammer store (doubly so now that I’m only really enthused about out of print editions of their games), so why shouldn’t I just use whatever miniatures I think are cool? It’s a conscious step that I’ve had to take though, as the official messaging has always been you can only use ‘proper’ Warhammer in your Warhammer, and I guess I had been conditioned by that thinking since the age of… nine, maybe?

Whatever, cast off the (mental) shackles of the capitalist overlords, here he is hanging out with some other bony boys:

In order to paint him, I also had to receive him, and the Tally shall be adjusted thusly.

I also treated myself to a copy of Wargames Illustrated, because it came with a sprue of greatcoat wearing French napoleonic types, which would be ideal conversion fodder for my Alamo project:

Yes, the Alamo project that I’ve only actually fully finished a single miniature of and here I am buying more miniatures for it, yes that one.

All things factored in, the Tally now stands at:

48 vs 205 = -157

What’s next? My painting tile has a broad variety of half painted minis currently, where my attention has wandered somewhat. Then again, it’s Zomtober soon, which usually helps to narrow that focus!

Alamo Test Model

I know I usually have a dumb pun or obscure reference for my blog post titles, but that’s really all I could think of for this - I’ve finished my test model for my Alamo Mexicans:

He’s actually been finished for a week or two now, but I kept looking at him thinking maybe I should do something else, and then got distracted building him some chums, but in the end I think he’s as done as he’s going to be.

He’s a lightly converted Warlord Napoleonic French chap that came free with a magazine at the end of last year (and I unfortunately missed out on getting a bunch more of for crazy cheap in the Warlord Sprue Sale as I emailed asking if something not in the sale would likely come back into stock soon, and in the single day it took for them to get back to me half of the things in my online basket had gone out of stock). Paint scheme involved having to nip out and buy anew pot of paint too, as I didn’t have a blue quite bright enough for what I wanted.

He’s a little scruffy, but I think I can relocate this scheme across multiple chaps, and they’ll look grand en Masse I think. Also, I gave him a Mexican colours plume, because I think it looks cool, when strictly I think he should have had a fully green Pom Pom. 

The conversion was pretty straightforward - as the Mexican troops dumped their gear before the attack on the Alamo, I carefully cut the cartridge pouch off of the models backpack, filled with green stuff the hole that the backpack would usually clip into, and then inspired by Chris Peach used masking tape hardened with superglue to make his back straps. Chris Peach approved:

So, where has my obsession with the Alamo come from when I’ve historically (pun intended) been a fantasy and zombie gamer? I’m… not sure, to be honest. Usually I can track the train of thought that ends up with me starting a new project, but this one is a bit of a mystery to me. The best I can think is that with the Silver Bayonet reminding me how much I liked Sharpe as a child and showing me how snazzy Napoleonic uniforms are, and my other random new obsession with cowboys (roll on the second part of the latest season of Yellowstone), the Alamo is basically the best of both worlds…

Or maybe I’m just approaching middle age. I’ve bought 3 Ospreys, and have been thoroughly enjoying them. My main inspirational image so far has been this one:

So if anyone knows anyone that makes heads with scarves and straw hats that scale nicely with Perry plastics, let me know! That, or if anyone knows of a UK stockist of Boot Hill Miniatures, since postage from Brigade in the States is a bit of a turnoff…

The Tally has also taken a hit in the other direction, as nipping into our local games store I noticed that they’d had a restock of D&D monsters, so I grabbed a couple of packs of mimics to potentially harangue my family with:

Side note - why is it that on the rare occasions that I find a store that stocks these minis, the always have tons of player characters, but very few monsters? Surely monsters is where the money is at, since a layer will buy one pack, but a DM needs to buy plenty… 

All in, the Tally now stands at:

24 vs 152

We’re pretty much halfway through the year, so I’m not actually that far off of keeping to my ‘average one mini a week’ Challenge. Unlikely to get it back into the black though, especially when you consider that a friend and I have gone halves on a mystery box of 40 minis, with the plan being to draft them…

Last Days Seasons campaign: December

As we’re (hopefully!) moving very soon (or maybe have already moved by the time this gets published?) I played my December game of Last Days at the start of the month so that I could then pack everything up. As it’s the last game of the originally planned year long campaign, I decided to play the final special Season scenario, Whiteout. To make it extra festive, we also had thematically appropriate zombies:

I set up an abandoned refuge deep in the woods, with a number of crumbling perimeter walls.

To make the board look snowy, I threw down a fleece that was previously doing double duty as a draft excluder. While it makes the table look more festive, it also means that all of the pics this month look very dark!

Most of the group are bedridden, so Dionne, Kev & Cece find themselves trudging through knee deep snow to investigate an abandoned refuge in the hope of securing some supplies.

“It’s snowing, nobody trusts each other, we’re all very tired”, says Kev suddenly.

“That’s not the quote, he doesn’t say anything about snow does he?” replies Dionne, shooting Kev a questioning look.

Cece looks at them both blankly - “what are you two talking about?”

“The Thing! You’ve never seen The Thing? Kurt Russell?” asks Kev. Cece pulls a face as if to suggest that this is a ridiculous question, of course not.

“Ugh, another thing I miss about civilisation, before the biters we’d have been able to go home and fix this” says Dionne, seemingly in shock. “Wait, quiet, there’s something up ahead” she says, peering though the blizzard…

As the group enter the area heading for the abandoned refuge, Santa zombie and his elves start to trudge towards them.

Kev Dionne and Cece begin their advance on the abandoned refuge, aiming to enter through a hole in the tumbledown surrounding wall. Kev was particularly perturbed by the weather, as his skill set largely revolves around running in and rapidly grabbing things, which he was unable to do due to the deep snow! Until I re-read the Free Runner skill, and realised that Kev can actually parkour over the top of the snow like he’s Legolas toting a magnum and a cricket bat - go, Kevolas, tell us what your elf eyes see!

He barrels off towards the closest supply token, while Cece and Dionne struggle through the snow behind him. Unfortunately, due to the blinding snow and high winds, they’re not able to clearly see the monies heading towards them, and so there isn’t any shooting. Kev is close enough, but has been told that he is only to fire his magnum as an absolute last resort, for fear of causing an avalanche (whether of snow or the walking dead, we’ll likely find out eventually).

Kev swings the backpack onto his back before moving across to the right to try and lure the nearby zombies away from the opening so that Cece and Dionne would have a clear path into the compound.

Dionne loosed a crossbow bolt at Santa zombie, but was horrified to see that the zombie’s flesh was frozen, and so the bolt failed to pierce and bounced off! Seeing this, Cece raised her sniper rifle, but Dionne waved her back, whispering “not yet, let me just try again” wanting to reassure Cece, but her nerves showed in her rapidly darting eyes.

More and more zombies seemed to jerk into activity now that the survivors had started to break the tree line, and stumbled forward in even greater numbers.

Kev skirted the wall, and trudged into the compound proper, scooping up a fuel canister as he did so (I decided for this scenario to say that survivors could pick up a fuel or food token in addition to a supply token, and that fuel and food tokens would count as Heavy 1 - otherwise it would have been a short and boring scenario if the survivors just popped in, grabbed the 3 nearest tokens, and then immediately left!)

Cece advanced toward the lone elf zombie, knife in hand, while Dionne loaded a fresh bolt in her crossbow and followed behind:

(Look at how much my trees are still shedding!)

Dionne loosed another bolt, and was again surprised to be unable to take out a zombie (don’t worry, it’s not that her injuries and the weather are affecting her abilities, I just rolled a 1 both times…)

Kev suddenly realised that he’d ranged too far ahead when the zombies that he was previously luring away turn around and close in on Dionne and Cece, rejoining the lone elf zombie that has managed to get within arms reach of Cece.

Dionne reloads and sidesteps to block Cece from being attacked by a second zombie, while Kev starts to head back to try and give them a hand. Unfortunately, he’s so laden down with supplies that he isn’t able to quite make it, ending up tantalisingly close to the action.

At that moment I realise that in hindsight it would have been a better idea to send Kev off to grab some further away loot tokens, leaving the easier ones for the girls to grab on their much slower advance up the field. Ah well, maybe next year is the year we start using tactics I guess…

Just as the zombie shed moved to intercept was about to lunge at her, Dionne whipped up her crossbow and shot it at almost point blank range, scoring the first kill of the game! Cece was similarly successful, plunging her shiv through the eye socket of other zombie elf.

Seeing that Cece and Dionne now only had a single zombie to contend with, Kev shucked the backpack off of his back and onto the ground for them to later collect, and turned back to try and gather some more supplies. He decided against the ones to his right, as although he’d be able to reach them easily, there were four zombies bearing down on them, so instead he decided to take cover on the other side of the shack and see what he could find there.

Cece looked at the backpack in the snow ahead of her for a second, but figured it would keep a while longer and instead moved to help Dionne take out the zombie in the Santa outfit that she was fighting, and although both were able to land some blows on it, neither were able to land a fatal one.

With Kev now out of sight, the zombies in the compound started to shamble towards the combat between Dionne Cece and Santa zombie:

Kev nipped around the corner, grabbed an unattended cardboard box, then headed back towards the rest of the group to hand it off. 

Seeing him heading towards her, Dionne wasted no time in decapitating Santa zombie with her samurai sword, then moves forward to receive the supplies from Kev. As she does so, Cece moves up alongside her, and grabs the previously discarded backpack. Kev tosses Dionne the box and fuel canister he’d been carrying, before turning round to make another dash through the snow on the left hand side of the shack.

Dionne snaps off a shot at the zombie that’s getting dangerously close to them, but overencumbered as she is it’s unfortunately not a lethal one.

Both Dionne and Cece back away from the encroaching zombies, Dionne pausing to slot another bolt into her crossbow as she does so. Kev, however, heads off towards the abandoned lookout tower, scooping up a crate of canned goods as he does so. 

Dionne shoots again, but still can’t make a kill (the zombie in question’s reindeer outfit starting to look more like a porcupine at this point), and so decides that discretion is the better part of valour and eschews reloading in favour of putting more distance between herself and the oncoming zombies. However, laden down with supplies as she is, it’s only a matter of time before they are able to catch up to her. Seeing this, Cece lets off a deafeningly loud shot with her sniper rifle, atomising the head of the closest zombie, even as it sent flocks of birds flying from the trees, and every dead head in the area turned to face the source of the noise…

Kev, meanwhile, had managed to make his way to a clearing in the woods where he spotted a discarded briefcase sticking out of the snow.

“Things are looking up!” He said to himself, until he heard the unmistakeable crack of a gunshot ringing out, and saw zombies starting to crash through the trees ahead of him.

With four zombies bearing down on her, Dionne suddenly remembered that she had the Quick Reload skill, and so was able to easily reload her crossbow while back-pedalling, which would have come in pretty hand in the last couple of turns!

Cece, figuring that the cat was out of the bag at this point and it was a fight for survival fired off another shot, and while she wasn’t able to land a killing blow did cause the zombie to stumble, meaning that it would be unlikely to catch up to Dionne quite so easily. 

Dionne fared similarly, although her crossbow lacked the stopping power of a military sniper rifle, and so was significantly less effective.

While Dionne and Cece continue to reload while walking backwards through snow, Kev has managed to make his way to the edge of the table, and will be home free next turn.

Dionne misses her next shot entirely, while Cece once more manages to land a staggering hit on a zombie heading towards Dionne. 

Things continue mostly like this - Kev makes his way off the board with a supply token and a crate of food, having tried (and failed) to garner a single zombie kill along the way. Meanwhile as Cece turns to make her escape, she is ambushed by a new zombie that had been attracted by the sound of gunfire:

but after a few turns of struggling manages to kill her and make her escape.

Dionne, however, continues retreating and firing, but has no luck whatsoever in taking out any of her pursuers, and they eventually catch up to her, and start to surround her:

At first she tries to take them out with her samurai sword, but finds equally little success with that method of despatching them to try and this their numbers as she did with her crossbow…

This continues turn in, turn out, with Dionne breaking away to take an ineffectual shot with her crossbow, being caught and mobbed by her pursuers, breaking free, then repeating the cycle until she is able to get off the board.

Post-game:

Dionne is the only one to gain a level, and at this point reading her sheet I remember that she has the Sniper skill, so probably would have made a couple more headshots in that game had I remembered earlier. Ah well, on the other hand I rolled so many 1s that a +1 probably wasn’t going to do enough to make a real difference… and then I remembered that she has the master skill Never Misses, so could have re-rolled every single miss! Ah well again, it’s all about self belief, she just needs to remember that she’s the deadliest thing on two legs! With her advance, she gains another point of Damage Capacity - evidently lugging all of those heavy supplies was a good workout!

Between them, the survivors managed to make off with three supply tokens, one food and one fuel, and found a smattering of food fuel and scavenge, but also a set of cold weather clothes. These were given to Devon as soon as they got back to the refuge, as they knew that being so selfless if there was ever a situation where someone had to be left out in the cold he’d choose himself so that someone else in the group could be warm, and this would then keep him toasty warm. 

Speaking of leaders, it’s lucky everyone in the group gets along (and shares the same keyword, or is neutral) otherwise we’d have had a lot of infighting and leadership challenges with how often people in the group have been suffering from sickness!

When it came to assigning jobs, once again it was the case that the majority of the group were sick and needed to get bed rest - unusually though, every single member of the group felt better this month,  waning that no one at all was bedridden for the first time in a few months! That’s the power of turning the heating on I guess… Dionne and Cece set about rustling up enough food for everybody (which they managed, with one additional meal going to waste) while Kev patrolled the perimeter to protect everyone from zombies.

Managing conditions, everyone had enough to eat, and thanks to the stockpile of fuel built up in the preceding months (as well as building a wood-burning stove) the farmhouse is toasty warm. I was tempted to be a bit ‘gamey’ and only spend 3 fuel on heating the farmhouse, leaving one room cold as Devon’s cold weather clothing would mean that he could sit there and suffer no ill effects to save me 1 fuel, but that felt a little bit too detached from the narrative for my tastes. In a shocking turn of events, nobody recovering from sickness relapsed, and everyone is out of bed - it’s a Christmas miracle! 

And with that, my full year Last Days Seasons campaign is done! I had fun playing it every month, even though the common cold seemed to be a bigger threat than the zombies most of the time. I’ll probably play some more games next year, but I’m not going to commit to a monthly schedule again given everything we’ve got going on. I could do with finishing building the group’s shelter and playing a game there at the very least though…

As well as playing a game, the Tally has also taken a few hits this month.

Firstly, this year my wife and I decided to do custom advent calendars for each other (something we used to do before the children came along, but hasn’t really happened the last couple of years). As well as an assortment of small chocolates and dice, I’ve also been getting a sprue in instalments that was apparently included in the order with one of my Christmas presents. Being a big nerd, I recognised the font on the sprue and knew what company it was from straightaway… having looked up the finished sprue, it will be 4 additional miniatures by the end of the month.

I also spotted a Warhammer box poking out of a crate on a market stall that was packing up while on my way to pick up my youngest from Squirrels, and after a couple of weeks of missing them managed to catch them and bought the following on my lunch break:

And then went back again at the end of the day and also bought these:

Looks like there’s a 500 point Empire army in my future doesn’t it? All in, that’s 64 miniatures and one resin terrain piece hitting the Tally.

As we’re moving house, grandma took the kids for the night the other weekend, but also bought me sweets and a magazine because everyone else was getting one:

Adding 4 French miniatures to the Tally for future Silver Bayonet shenanigans, and leaving the Tally at:

33 vs 222 = -189

And leaving it unlikely that I’ll get back into the positives or hit my ‘average one painted miniature a week’ target by the end of the year, seeing as how my painting stuff is all packed away and any free time that I have being spent putting things in boxes…

Finally, the ground!

So, I finished drybrushing those tiles that are the last piece on my checklist to be able to play the first Rangers of Shadow Deep scenario! 

• Mystery additional structure
• Trees
• Cart
• Well
• Woodpile
• Crates and barrels
• a playing surface!
• Treasure tokens

Here’s one in situ with some of the other finished pieces:

So, how I made them! Plans started earlier in the year, during one of our many lockdowns, when I asked my wife to grab me a sample of some wallpaper that looked like scale cobblestones. And she furnished me with this:

Flicking through the rulebook, I saw that I’d need to be able to make a variety of different sized playing areas. I’d grabbed a dust sheet with the intention to dye it grey to use as a playing area, but it turned out to be plasticky rather than material like I’d imagined so I needed to come up with another plan. At which point my eye alighted on a pack of floor tiles in Poundland…

I left some of the foot square tiles whole, but cut some in half and quarters (until I had 9 12” square tiles, 6 6 x 12”, and 4 6” square, which would allow me to make a variety of different sized boards, including the three 18” square boards needed for Tor Varden). The adhesive tiles were paper backed, so I started peeling them off:

Thinking that it would be better grip having a rubber bottom rather than paper. Experiments with removing the adhesive with WD40, sanding, and prayer largely just made a mess…

So I decided to stick each tile to some newspaper and then trim the edges off, before applying some masking tape to each edge to try and give it a bit more ‘tooth’ to stop it sliding around on the table. In hindsight, I probably could have achieved much the same effect just slapping some tape onto the original backing paper, but at least this way there’s less chance of it peeling off and sticking my terrain tile to the dining room table and having to explain that to my wife…

Then, it was a case of decorating and texturing the tiles! I ripped, tore and cut suitably ruinous looking shapes out of my textured wallpaper

And stuck them willy-nilly onto some of the tiles 

Not worrying too much about where they went, as they’d be slightly buried by textured paint, hopefully making them look like partially submerged areas of street in the rubble. I left enough tiles blank to be able to make a sizeable enough playing area for the ‘outside’ scenarios in the initial Rangers of Shadow Deep campaigns (although admittedly a little bit of paving in the middle of the woods surely just adds to the mysterious feel of the area… or could be covered with a tree)

The tiles were then textured up using my usual textured paint recipe (sand, plaster, paint, water) and globes on with a large brush, taking care to try to avoid leaving any obvious brush marks (lots of dabbing rather than brushing)

At this point I also discovered that I had a plastic crate that was the perfect size to store the tiles in a stack, which was very pleasing:

Then, one sunny day (back in March!) I set about giving everything a liberal dousing of grey spray 

Yes, there’s still a grey line in my garden where I overshot somewhat, that’ll wash off when it rains right?

Then in June (because opportunities for big project stuff rather than a sneaky hour here and there painting a miniature are rare when you have two children, work and whatnot) everything got doused in a brown wash:

Some things are a lot browner than others, due to variations in the mix when making up more as it inevitably didn’t go as far as I’d expected. The first batch had too much washing up liquid (which you add to break the surface tension), and so was bubbling up and settling weirdly when I brushed it on; the next batch I added barely any and it just didn’t spread out right. So, I bodied my way through - trial and error, the bread and butter of the wargamer! 

As seems to be a pattern with this, two months pass and now it’s August (although admittedly it’s not that I’d not been doing anything, having knocked the rest of the checklist off in the intervening time), and with two weeks off work and everything else on the checklist completed I was determined to get these tiles over the finishing line! And so, armed with a Poundland makeup brush and three tester pots from Wilkos (a grey, light grey and cream, which are close enough to the colours I use when painting miniatures’ bases) I got to work:

The first two shades of grey admittedly didn’t really look like much had changed when applying them, but when it came to the cream the magic really happens:

I was initially going to skip the cream step, having read something where someone said that they tended to paint their boards darker than their miniature bases in order to make them stand out more, but I’m glad I didn’t in the end as they would have looked a little bland and flat otherwise!

I also drybrushed some Amera craters that have been sat for years waiting to get some love since I picked them up from their stand at Salute many years ago:

I think I might have gone a bit overboard with the final pass, and they’ve come out a little paler and chalkier than I had initially envisioned, but for some cheap and cheerful difficult terrain I’m not fussed enough to go back and repaint it, truth be told. I guarantee that at least one will see use in Frostgrave, with a treasure token at its centre, because it amuses me no end to imagine a wizard seeing a pair of boots in the middle of a crater and sending a Thug off to go fetch it rather than picking it up themselves lest it still be a bit explodey…

And here it all is again in the perfect sized box, but finished this time:

On the non-task-completing side of things, it was my birthday on Monday, which came with a hit to the Tally:

The Reaper Fungal Queen because it’s lovely, and also this Oglaf strip:

And the set of Bandits & Brigands (giant compared to some rangers, but lovely regardless) is to jumpstart my Ronin of Shadow Deep project, as there are some lovely minis that will work perfectly for a roving band of Ronin wandering the land dispatching evil and presumably posing dramatically all the while. 

These bring the Tally to:

19 vs 19 = +0

Still in the black, just!

I also got a paint shaker, having seen a multitude of videos where people espouse the virtues of them for salvaging old paints (of which I have many). My first attempt was on a pot of Liberator Gold which is so separated it’s just orange paint now… the initial shakings just smoothed out the orange with the assistance of the glass bead I’d popped in, so my wife suggested scraping the metallic pigment out of the bottom of the pot where it had seemingly settled and set, and whilst further shakings did make some strides towards unifying the paint it still isn’t what I’d call useable. This might not have been a fair test though, as that pot is probably beyond salvaging…

So, what’s next? Playing a game of Rangers of Shadow Deep! Although I should probably paint some miniatures too, as I treated myself with some birthday money to a copy of the updated Rangers book, and added some miniatures on to the order to get free shipping, so I’ll be back in the red on the Tally sooner rather than later!