Buildings Of The Emirates

Martin Smith was asking about the model I used as the stronghold in my most recent game, so I thought I'd do a quick post on it since he's not the first person to ask.

Many years ago, before I lived in Australia, I lived in close proximity to Heathrow Airport. So local car-boot sales often had odd bits of airline merchandising in them. And that's where I found these:

As you can see they were produced by Emirates and, intriguingly, are part of a series of at least eleven models. Naturally they are all of 'local' Emirates buildings.

The first one, and one that sees the most use in games is the Sharjah Souk - essentially a large modern shopping mall. It makes a great general-purpose stronghold, and has also featured in my giant monster games.

Each model has a nice felt bottom. The label tells you what scale the model is.

This one also sees use as a stronghold from time to time. It's a 1/100th (so 15mm) model of the Shindagh Watchtower

It's a great model for fans of pareidolia ...

... and Picasso

This one is my favourite, which is odd because I keep forgetting I have it and it never sees much table time - a 1/300th model of the Al Jahili Fort. A bit big for DBA, but an occasional large footprint stronghold. 

It's roughly 4" square. I'm thinking that it might look quite nice as part of a horse and musket game featuring my Nottomans, if I ever finish them.

Blocks

Since we moved I have been trying to get back into my regular painting thing that I started this year. I wouldn't say I have managed to paint something every day, but I've managed something most days and am slowly establishing the necessary daily routines required to get back on track.

Anyway, most of this week has been taken up painting wooden blocks. I assumed this would be easy, but it's taken more time than I thought. One batch were the Jenga pieces that I use to mark out tracks in Gaslands. We're demoing the game at a show later this month, so felt that the terrain we use needed an upgrade. Here they are painted grey and weathered a little with some dry-brushing.

Not perfect, but they'll do.

When we moved I found my 1950s Risk set at the bottom of a cupboard. It had suffered irreparable water damage at some point (along with my Gibson Games edition of 'Brittania', sadly), so I had to chuck it, but I kept the wooden blocks that were used for pieces in those days. I had an idea for something, so glued pairs of them together and painted them grey ...

... so that they make perfect small buildings for 'Godzilla: Tokyo Clash', replacing the counters the game uses for these key terrain pieces.

Next up for painting is some more Gaslands terrain.

Heads

A quick bit of painting on two scenic items which have been cluttering up my to-do pile since I lived in the UK.

Big stone heads for 25mm figures, and colossal ones for smaller figures.

I can't remember the manufacturer.

Random Terrain Placement For 'Palaeo Diet'

Although 'Fireside Tales' includes a system for random placement of terrain, I wanted something even more random for basic hunting setups. Over the past few weeks I have settled on the following. It assumes that you are using a roughly square board. The system will work for most of the scenarios in the book.

Roll a D6 for the terrain density.

1 - Terrain is Very Open
2-3 - Terrain is Open
4-5 - Terrain is Close
6 - Terrain is Very Close

Split the board up into 9 sectors (3x3). Roll a D6 for each sector. On a 5-6 that sector will contain terrain. Note that some scenarios may dictate that certain sectors contain specific terrain, in which case you do not roll for that sector.

Unless the terrain is Very Open, count how many sectors contain terrain.
If the terrain is Open or Close and there are two or fewer sectors which contain terrain, then roll again for each sector that does not currently contain terrain.
If the terrain is Very Close and there are three or fewer sectors which contain terrain, then roll again for each sector that does not currently contain terrain.

Each sector will contain a maximum of one terrain piece, unless it is a river/stream.

For each sector roll a D6 to see what the terrain piece is:

1-2 - Hill
3 - Tricky Ground
4 - Thicket
5 - If the density is Open or Very Open, then Tricky Ground, otherwise a Thicket
6 - Special

'Special' terrain can be a pond, a river, rock-outcrops or tar-pits/quicksand. Choose something interesting from your collection. If you choose a river then it will run through the sector in a randomly determined direction.

Tricky Ground can be anything you like so long as it doesn't block line of sight.

Finally roll for the size of each terrain piece:

1-2 - Small: Must be less than a quarter the size of the sector
3-5 - Medium: Must be at least a quarter the size of the sector but less than half
6 - Large -: Should fill at least half of the sector

Obviously use common sense with regard to your own terrain pieces.

Terrain should be placed mostly within one sector, but if aesthetics dictate some deviation from this then go for it. It's your table.

Place your beasts (I place them in the centre of the board, terrain permitting), determine the approach of your hunters (I use direction dice to randomly select an edge or corner, and use the same for any lurking predators), and away you go. Happy Hunting!

Deep Blue Sea

Regular readers of this blog will know that I play my naval games of a rather boring blue felt cloth.

However, inspired by Peter at Grid-Based Wargaming, I got hold of some cheap oil pastels and had a go at tarting it up a bit. I reasoned that if I cocked it up, the cloth was easily replaced at little real cost.

This was the result. Three different blues and some white for the wave crests. Took about an hour to do the whole 3' x 3' area.

I was impressed with how it turned out. Visually, anyway. It was only after I did it that I realised that oil pastels never dry. If I touched the cloth (stop laughing at the back there) then the colour came off on my hands. Not ideal at all.

Fortunately a good spray with sealant seems to have fixed that issue. But it needed a good spray.

Anyway, I haven't played a game with the new look cloth, but I have taken a picture.

Obviously I need to do something about the bases of the ships now.

Terrain For One Hour Wargames

On the way to work today I was idly pondering what would be the minimum amount of terrain you'd need to fight all thirty of the scenarios in 'One Hour Wargames'. With an idle hour to spare this evening I sat down with the book and worked it out, then with some old cork-tile hills and my collection of felt bits I manufactured it.

Here it is:

Now I'm not saying that is the bare minimum - you could put two hills or area features together in some cases, but I think it's probably the most practical selection. Obviously I haven't included the buildings, trees and other bits used to mark the nature of area features - the scenarios only use towns, woods and marsh if that helps.

Whilst the observant amongst you can probably work out from the picture what's needed, here's the inventory as I see it. I assume a 3' x 3' playing area; scale your collection accordingly.

One 3' x 3' playing area
One 3' stretch of river.
Two fords.
One bridge (optional - I just show one by having the road placed over the river)
Two 3' sections of road. (One scenario uses a 18" road section though, so you may want to have a 3' section and two 18" sections)
One 2' x 1' hill
One 1' x 1' hill
Two 1' x 6" hills
Two 6" x 6" towns
Two 1' x 1' area features
Two 1' x 6" area features
Three 6" x 6" area features

The area features can woods or marsh.

For two scenarios it helps, but is not required, to have breastworks or similar fortifications for up to two 6" x 6" areas.

I'm not sure how much use this information really is, but it whiled away an hour before bedtime. Plus the half hour I spent going through all thirty scenarios just to check that I really could set each of them up. I could.

Teaser

The provisional terrain setup for a game I hope to get chance to try out tomorrow - both the rules and period are new to me, so it should be an interesting exercise:

Building Houses

My previous post here highlighted my sad lack of buildings for certain types of games. To be fair 25mm games have never really interested me (aside from gladiatorial games), but I actually don't have much in the way of buildings for 15mm games either. I have plenty of strongholds for HOTT, of course, but the problem has always been that my selection of HOTT armies is so eclectic that finding buildings that would look right with many of them would be a full-time job.

However this afternoon I decided to expand my terrain collection just a little. I'd ventured onto The Junior General looking for some top-down figures for a project I'm mulling over at the moment, and ended up in their terrain and accessories section. Before I knew it I'd downloaded a rather nice medieval house and set about resizing it for different figure scales.

Printed straight off it is pretty much true 15mm. But buildings that are the same scale as the figure often don't look right, unless you're doing skirmish games, so I reduced the size of the image and printed it off again, creating a smaller house that looks better with 15mm HOTT elements.

Here you can see some Peter Pig Orcs marching past a village made up of both sizes of medieval house, plus a small stone house which also plopped onto my hard-drive:

Amazingly they didn't stop and burn the place to the ground.

Some more work on scaling and I did a version which I'd be happy to use with 25mm figures for 'Song of Blades and Heroes'. It's still slightly under true 25mm scale but will do the job. Here we can see some of the skeletons from last night's game wondering where the Lego's gone:

Quite fun to make, and quick as well. I think it's safe to say my next 15mm HOTT game will be featuring a built-up area.