A City worth fighting for?

A tester piece for the stone walls that came with the Terrain Crate set. Again, keeping to a quickish scheme: Over-brush base, dry brush highlight, wash.

I’ll come in later and colour in the little shrub and bits of greenery that are molded on.

An hour of work.

28 pieces painted with AP Quickshade Dip. Some were finished from the last batch, some will need finishing in the next batch.

5 pieces of stone fence have had their tops coloured in. Where the walls are broken, I picked out some pieces in the red.

Over the last little while I spent some time painting up some scatter to put around the town to give the lived in feel. This all came from the Mantic Terrain Crate range. I backed the KS when it was live and have four boxes to work through. My goal is to work through it quickly, using batch painting techniques.

In order to keep myself sane and focused, I’ve started setting a timer for 1 hour while I paint. The reasons:

• Focus.
• Commitment
• Mindfulness

Focus: setting an hour timer means that I know I need to stay focused on the task at hand… As opposed to getting distracted, say, trying to pick a YouTube video to play while I paint.

Commitment: after the 3rd or 4th barrel, it was kind of easy to think about other stuff I’d much rather be painting… By setting myself a time limit I know I’m only with these less exciting pieces for a set amount of time.

Mindfulness: I find it easy to feel guilty about wanting to sit and hobby. I should be “doing something more productive” (study/cleaning/finding a better job). But then I feel crap when I don’t get to hobby, because that’s how I recharge the batteries. By setting myself an hour, I know I can turn down the volume on that little voice that Says, and just enjoy my time ?

In order to get this pile of stuff done quick (really… I’ve got so much more of this stuff ?) I wanted a quick shading option. Results below!

Army Painter Quickshade Dip Strong Tone:

Army Painter Quickshade Wash – Dark Tone:

Artists Ink – Sepia:

Mixed with a little water and something to soften the flow, as the first application just tended to sit.

The ink really didn’t work for me. It didn’t want to flow over the spray painted surface, an issue I’ve had before when I’ve used ink to quickly colour hordes of Skaven.  Perhaps some proper flow-aid my help. But that’s a future question to ponder.

The Dark Tone wash went on just fine, and the pieces that I tried it on look good in hand. But I’m churning through the little dropper bottle quickly.

The Quickshade Dip is the way I’m going forward. The first few pieces were dipped, later I thinned it a little and brushed it on. I’ve got much better control this way and it doesn’t take long to slap some on more than a few pieces.

Another step in getting stuff on the table for Frostgrave. This, too, was a resurrection of an old project. This was an older version of the modular dungeon tiles inspired an old game.
The tiles were left in various states of completion as seen above: Done; done with foam risers attached (which was the original plan, later ditched); crafted but raw; crafted and primed.
The very first version of these I had made were recycled from an old corkboard. Later they were cut from foamboard: easier to draw cracks/ designs/ magic circles in.

I decided I could bring these back as roads/ courtyards/ squares for Frostgrave. But looking at them again, the finished tiles seemed now to want more work done, more texture. I wasn’t satisfied with the raw edges where I could still see cardboard showing, and where it jutted out.

I mixed a batch of sand, PVA and water. No set mix, just until it felt right and slathered it on. I used paddle-pop sticks and brushes to get it in and around. When dry, I repainted using craft paint.

The First official game in our campaign. We again played a 3 player game and picked a scenario at random from Frostgrave 2nd Ed.  Not knowing any better we ended up on the  Treasure Phantasmal scenario.
In short: During setup place Wraith adjacent to the center treasure, it won’t move until a mini moves within 6″. Every treasure picked up has a 50/50 chance to spawn another Wraith within 8″.  On top of that, any figure carrying a treasure has to pass a Will check or full move toward the center of the board.

The picture above is taken part way through…

Every treasure picked up did spawn a Wraith within 8″… somehow most of them ended up in my side of the board (Lower half of the photo above).

Meanwhile Steve and Nick started fighting over treasure.

Nick and Steve spent a fair bit of time trying to grab treasure and fight each other. Steve’s Wizard sniped Nick’s Apprentice from across the board with a Bone Dart. I summoned a Demon and rolled a 20 for the summoning roll… Greater Demon, baby!

At the center of the board my orc manages to push away the central Wraith in an attempt to grab the treasure, while my Wizard cheers from behind the safety of a shrubbery!

In the end I only secured one treasure, as the multitude of Wraiths floating around my side of the table was too spooky for me to handle.

After a couple hours play we called it. Looking back, had we known that this was more an advanced scenario, we probably would have picked something different to start with!

My mate Steve expressed an interest in trying out Frostgrave, and talked another friend into trying it. Nick is essentially a Normie, he enjoys board and card games, but hasn’t been into Miniatures or RPG style game’s. The three of us have played a good chunk of Gloomhaven, so Steve sold the idea to Nick based on that experience.

We started with a “Session 0” learning how to assemble a party, build a wizard etc and put minis on the table to learn the rules. This wouldn’t go on to be a part of our campaign, just a practice session to see how we liked it.

Steve has minis of his own. He used a mix of Pathfinder/D&D, old Citadel Elves and Dark Souls board game minis. For Nick I delved into my painted minis and let him choose what he liked. He mostly opted for Wrath of Kings Shael Han minis.
I decided to go for something different and used Orcs. An old metal Wild Orc Shaman for my Wizard, a plastic Citadel Night Goblin for the apprentice and my Mantic Dungeon Saga Orcs and goblins for the rest of the warband.

While working on the tiles I’d also started working on another papercraft project: buildings.

Using the laser printer at work, I printed these pages and glued them to card with spray adhesive.
The aim, again, was to get some quick terrain to put down which could later be replaced with better quality stuff.

The desire to get this complete was reinforced when my mate Steve expressed an interest in giving Frostgrave a try!

January ’20 I moved into a new place, with a good amount of space for gaming.

Something I wanted to get organised as a priority was a table-full of terrain. Working from the ground up, I thought I’d resurrect an old project from a few years ago: a modular dungeon tile set. I could use this for dungeon crawling or as a basis for a fantasy town.
Above you can see: papercraft floors to be used for this project; the original plans I drew up years ago, and the first version of the tiles I had done then.

They were crafted tiles, put together using two-layer box cardboard, hot glue and dollar store acrylic paint.

March ’20 I’d got the first tile made. This time built around foamcore, using spray adhesive to apply the printed floor tiles.

It worked ok. I went with a 30mm grid, as you can see it works for GW miniatures. There’s room enough for larger Space Marine bases, even a Dreadnought.

Ultimately I scrapped this idea. Too time consuming, too fussy to assemble. Plus, the pieces I had built weren’t staying together well, and they’re only months old.