For the Throne – A Wargaming Blog

After being inspired by the table Piers put together for the Bovington convention over in Europe I got to thinking about how I’ve been doing roads and wondering what I can do to “up my game”

Here’s a pic of his table as he was building the project

Biggest thing I think I like is how the road and the cut out blend really well with the mat he’s using (dyed and airbrush bath towels) The downside though is that I like to be able to mix my table around a bit. And while this setup seems really appropriate for a big convention where you want to bring your A game… it’s just impractical for day to day use (unless you have a shitload of space to store all of your boards)

So, the issue I have with my current setup is that I just don’t like the transition between the road and the rest of the landscape. I’ve been using the Flames of War roads but I just don’t really like them. I tried to blend them in, but they just look “off” to me

1. I think they might be better suited for 20mm instead of 15mm.

2. They’re kind of thick so they really pop up against the rest of the landscape) If you look at the picture from my Project Cobra post, you can see how the truck just looks weird setting next to it.

Now, the fact that I’m using a flocked mat makes this whole thing possible since the flock for the roads will blend in with the mat fairly well.

Materials

I used a thin plastic “FOR RENT” sign that I picked up at Lowes/Home Depot (Ie, your friendly neighborhood DIY store) I want to say it was about $5 USD for an 18″x24″ sign.
Sand
Paint (primed it, sprayed it grey, drybrushed it white)
Woodland Scenics “Blended turf” flock.

After doing a couple of “proof of concept” pieces I decided to go all in on the project. Since the materials are pretty cheap I’m not worried about making a lot of different shapes. Also, they will stack fairly nice, I’m not worried about them taking up too much room.

Couple of lessons learned

Road width – I decided to go with 2″ since that was the size of the fat part of my square. Also, it seemed to work fairly well.
Black>Gray>White drybrush – the Gray was the army painter gray spray primer.
I put down two coats of flock (ie, flock it, let it dry, then flock it again…) I think it adds a bit of volume and texture to the pieces. Plus I go heavier on the edges to and thinner by the road.
I need to put more thought into how large/small I make the building’s footprint.

Overall I’m pretty happy and I think this is as good if not better than what I can purchase commercially.

Started work on the Boxer Rebellion Project….

Last month, I went to Historicon in VA and Old Glory had a great sale running on 15mm Boxer Rebellion terrain and I kind of when “all in”

First up – a pair of USMC China Marines c. 1900. The uniform was taken from an illustration in “Leatherneck” from the 50s. I decided to go with white for the cartridge belts to make them “pop” a little more.

So below I’m messing around with table design. I taped some brown paper onto the board and I’ll sketch out how the terrain should fall. I think I’m going to use my road technique to make the “not grass” parts. Here’s a Link to where I did this for my european roads. The funny part is that I have a LOT more terrain to drop onto the table too (like, all of the foreign legations) — I don’t really think I’ll end up doing a downtown scene… the boulevards were really wide from the pics I’ve seen once you get into the back alleys it would be almost unplayable. I think I’m going to do a large village thing instead. This will give me some green space and let me pepper it with trees.