"Terrain," a Plan, and morning progress

Raw materials.

Since my FLGS doesn't do terrain, you have to port it in with you when you go there to game.  While I have a fairly nice setup for Uncharted Seas, a blue base isn't going to work for Warmahordes and the islands are comically undersized for 28mm.  I have plenty of foam and hardboard left over from those islands, but making up new hills and things will take a bit of time.  Since I want to have "terrain" for Thursday I needed a quicker route.  Carrying a minis case and bag of books, dice, etc. as I am, I'm not too keen on adding another box on top of it for terrain, so space saving factored into my plans.  The answer was quick and easy: felt "terrain".  The idea is simple and one you're all no doubt familiar with, cutting out felt shapes to stand in as hills and forests.  There's no 3d element of course, but since Warmahordes runs on standardized shapes and volumes determined by base size it will work well enough.  It's also a quick, cheap, and easy solution that I can roll up and stuff into a bag.  While I intend to get on some real terrain, this will be a good place holder.  As a slight change from the Uncharted Seas setup, I put weights in the bottom cloth to try and hold it in place on the table.  Because fabric comes short of 48" on the bolt, and because the tables at the FLGS are wider than 48", the cloth won't quite be  4' x 4'.  This isn't an entirely bad thing though as there should (hopefully) be less shifting of the cloth due to foot traffic and overhang.  We'll see how it turns out.

A productive morning

Title says it all, I got some good stuff done this morning.  I sculpted two more frigate bases, which I wanted to get done in time for tonight so I could tell frigate squadrons apart.  I worked on the "case" for my humans, cutting actual holes for the frigates instead of just cramming them between layers.  I'm also in the process of printing out the Martyr rules to have on hand, since they'll be coming up in the near future.

I've been skewing towards terrain-heavy tables of late, so I wanted to go back the other way and have some more open tables.  With 9 islands (and one lonely rock), I have enough terrain to put out two sparseish tables worth of islands.  I only have one table cloth though, and that's EV's to boot, so I set out to Joann's to get some material for another cloth.  I'd take a picture of it, but I'll just wait until gaming tonight and get a picture of it then.  It's a light-ish blue/lighter-ish blue/white wavy pattern that I think looks a lot like a rough sea.  Since my frigate bases are very textured, which I'm going to call storm-tossed, so the wavy print is going to work out well I hope.  It's significantly lighter than EV's cloth so there'll be no getting the two mixed up.  Having the option to setup two tables could be useful tonight, and on Game Parlor nights in general, in case we have an excess of players and a deficit of table dressing.

In non-gaming news, I finally finished the latest Wheel of Time book, not quite a year after I got it.  I'll post up another list of things I hope to accomplish before the fall semester starts sometime, but that would have been the top item on the list and I can cross it off before even making the list, which is nice. 

Backlog part 2: Terrain wrap-up

This has taken far too long, considering the terrain has been finished for nearly two weeks now.  My last post about the islands saw them still pink and brown, waiting for some texture and paint.  I wanted to have them finished for the start of gaming at the FLGS on Monday, but my weekend was slammed, so I enlisted EV to help finish them off.  The first step was gathering materials, so we headed out to Walmart for paint and, perhaps, spackle.  It took much longer than I expected to have paint mixed up, with most of the time being Walmart's computer analyzing a paint swatch and coming up with the proper mixture for it.  I could understand if I was bringing in a teddy bear or blade of grass to have color matched, but I just plucked the swatch from the wall of samples there at Walmart, so you'd think they might have already had the formulas for those ready to go.  Such was not the case.  While we waited for the paint, EV and I discussed sealing the islands and how useful spackle would be.  I wanted some sort of reinforcement on the islands, but wasn't sure what kind.  EV had experience with spackle and said it wouldn't be much more durable than the foam itself, so in the end we decided to just go with the glue and paint that would eventually cover the islands.  If things didn't work quite like I expected, I could always make more.

Terrain, part 3

Got the foam work finished up on the islands.  A couple pictures, because they say 1000 words.

I put a clothes pin in there for scale, as much as it helps.  From a different angle:

In trying to get these ready for the upcoming Game Parlor throwdown, I'm farming the finishing of these out to EV.  Sadly reading for class is going to take up most of my limited free time between now and Monday, so EV has graciously agreed to run with the torch from here.  Hopefully I can con him into taking some WIP shots as he goes.  Half-finished though they are, this is still the first terrain I've made, so seeing a table's worth of cover that I've made myself is rather satisfying.  I got a scouring pad from EV a couple days ago the help "sand" the foam.  You can see the difference between the island that wasn't scoured (on the far right) and the rest of them. 

Summer "break" retrospective

I had quite a list of things to do over the 2 weeks I had off between summer classes.  Some things got crossed off that list, most didn't.  A visual representation of what I didn't get done.

Terrain, part 2

After a break for lunch and to let glue dry, I went back at it.  I'm trying to think of a good way to get the corner halves to join up into a single piece.  Dowels seem like a good choice, but I don't want a big hole in the side.  Magnets could work, but that seems like a lot of trouble to go to.  I'll continue to ponder.  In the meantime, I covered the first island in Elmer's to see how it would work out.  Like a lot of these glue pics, the picture doesn't really do a lot to convey what the piece actually looks like, but it's better than nothing I think

First crack at terrain

I scouted out Home Depot with EV yesterday and found they had both reasonably sized pieces of hardboard and pink insulation.  I went back this morning to get some supplies.  I got a 2'x4' piece of hardboard, a 2'x8' piece of pink insulation, some Liquid Nails, and an extendable utility knife.  I had been planning on getting a hot wire foam cutter, but after having watched a couple videos on Youtube I decided to give a knife a shot.  While not going bargain basement on this project, I do want to save money where possible, and a $3 knife instead of a $20 (at least I'd expect) hot wire cutter fits that bill. 

Pre-F1 update

Been a quiet couple hobby days.  Played Monsterpocalypse and (the non-Xbox Live version of) Settlers of Catan for the first time on Friday.  Also got the next wave of reinforcements, or at least proxies for them.  It's a couple days early, but I was at the FLGS.  Finally got a set of Warmachine templates so I can stop relying on my opponent having them.  Went out today to take a look at hardboard and pink foam insulation to get an idea of what I'd be spending and what I'd be getting if I go in for making some islands.  Lowe's had ginormous sheets of hardboard, but I couldn't find the pink foam.  I'll try Home Depot on Monday and compare.  Looks like costs will be reasonable(ish) and I'll be able to scratch the terrain itch.  In worse news, a week and half is all I have before my next class starts.  Haven't made any progress on the Khador, but I've gotten a bit of reading in.  The new ships will get painted soon enough, then we'll see about WM or terrain.