The New Table

 Finally completed and played a game on the new table, a generic crossroads with a dirt road, I designed it for Bolt Action, but changing the terrain easily makes it usable for lots of other games.
Aaron Germans roasted me last night in the Demolition scenario, I should have guessed thing were not off to a good start when both my phone and camera batteries died within 5 minutes of each other.
There were of course no pictures from my end and snap these this afternoon just before I took the whole thing down a boxed it up to take to the Tournament in  wee hours of the morning.
I'll spare you details other then on of my vehicles failed it reserve entry roll of a "9" four turns in a row to finally show up turn 6, I'll botched my artillery strike calling in on myself and my Flamer Crew defending my Command Post ran out of fuel on the first shot, Yeah ,one of those games

As for the table here, I feel like I have working on it forever, the bridge section was constructed back in January and the original plan was to have it in this shape for Adepticon which didnt happen , so here it finally is -in October! I still have the liquid resin to do on the resin and I am going to get some more appropriate buildings- but this about it, I wasnt to move on to some other projects.

 I tell myself if I build three more sections I will have options for a ton of different layouts we will see how that goes, right now I am contest with it as is..we will see how people like playing on it this weekend.

Shipwreck- WIP

Ive been pretty remiss in posting "work in progress" shots and since most of my hobby time these days involves things like this, I should probably step it up or be in fear that people think I dont actually do these myself. Here my skirmish board, called "Shipwreck" its a 3 x 3 Skirmish board that if comes according to plan will be the center piece of my Adepticon Legend of the High Seas event next year and will surely see use for a variety of games as fits.



The idea of the board is a rocky beach at low tide, where a wreck has been pushed to shore and broken on the rocks. The surface of this board will be 80% or so water or in this case clear resin. Thin layer of resin will tinted and poured over a painted sandy bottom. There's also a nice section of beach rolling up to a cliff that ends with crumbling lighthouse with water cresting up on the rocks below.



The cliff here is a combination of Foam, plaster rock from molds from Woodland Scenics and of course the lighthouse is from Hirst. Although I already built the majority of the ruin its getting scrapped in favor of a round one. I ordered the 4" round tower mold because I looked at it, it just seemed more and more appropriate. So expect a round crumbling tower in the end instead of square one. The Coral rocks are aquarium pieces that where on closeout from the local Pet Smart and I eyed them while there getting some Cat food and snag them both for $6 each.




I put some figures out here for the sense of scale..as you can see while not a full 4 x 4 the board is quite large with plenty of room for 40-50 model skirmish if need be. The predominate feature here is of course the two piece Shipwreck from Ziterdes in Germany. I have been eyeing this for awhile but buying from the EU was cost prohibitive. Luckily I found someone here in the US on ebay selling alot of Ziterdes stuff at a significant discount...with the product already being here the shipping cost was nominal, So I essentially got both parts for the price of the large section shipped from the EU. Good Deal..that's what made this board happen.




Envirotex Lite is the clear resin of choice..several notable modelers I know used this for their displays at Adepticon this year..and after my last disaster with pourable water, I needed a product that dried rock hard and would not get damaged from play. This seems to fit the bill perfectly but since everything on this board is going to be permanently fixed and painted BEFORE I pour the resin numerous test pouring must be done to ensure it doesnt get screwed up because if not the whole board would be ruined after all the work was essentially done, which would be disastrous. If you notice the water is only going to be 1/8 to 1/4" deep the trim pieces when fixed and chalked on the inside seam will be what holds the resin in place as it dries.

Expect to this get painted this month as the board and its accompanying scenario will be making and appearance in our Legends of the High Seas Campaign that is ongoing with its next meet coming up June 24th , its extremely doubtful that water will be done by then as I going to do as many mock up pours on smaller pieces as I need to make sure its right...so until then expect a few followup updates and even some games played on it before the final reveal of the finished product.

Last Stand!

Here's a combination of a bunch of pieces finally seeing play..This piece I call "Last Stand" Ruin which I put together for our campaign and its part of my Osgiliath table. Its about 90% complete.. I just need trim out the edges with some paint, flock and some accent bricks...its all Hirst bricks..with some of the old plastic 40K ruins on the corners...I filled a bunch of the bulletholes..but plenty still remain, well just call em "crossbow bolt" damage on this fantasy piece.




I also experimented with some Woodland Scenic pigment here...I used "Raw Umber" which is much thicker than your normal wash but dries opaque. It created the nice dirty look to piece which is a nice contrast to all the drybrushing. Of course it sitting on my Realm of Battle table, which I've put into one of the hill configurations and I finished the full frame out of the table. It all comes together pretty well and since I don't have an actual game to to talk about you can just imagine what it would have been like from the photo's it's the Last Stand of "Square Basers versus the Round Basers." as 9 Empire Swordsmen, take on Shagrat, 3 Uruk-hai, a Troll, a Nazgul and and handful of Orcs..if you play both games...you're laughing at the slaughter that would ensue.

Citadel Realm of Battle- Finished!

Here's some shots of my finished Citadel Realm of Battle, modular table. If you recall the announcement of this late last summer created quite a bit of controversy as it's news went from excitement to disdain to outrage over the inept marketing and pricing of this item by GW.
All of various forum monkeys out there throwing crap at the walls over this thing is what inspired my first blog rant , you'll also might note along the way I claimed I could finish this thing in 6 hours...well I was smoking something on that one. (which I will explain in a moment)

Now that I have done one, I could probably do another in 6 hours IF I stuck to the GW example and just flocked the whole thing. That's not my style, So I felt compelled to stay up into the wee hours of the night painting and then painstakingly drybrushing the thing. Start to finish time on this all the way thru is about 20 hours...that doesn't include the carpentry to build the table base its sitting on..I will add some nice side rails to keep the pieces tight and keep dice from rolling off but I've had some warping issues with my lumber delaying that, but it will get done soon.

Hobbywise- I washed it down with soap and water, primed it black, sprayed with an airbrush the brown paint that comes with the scenery kit, then went to work on two layers of drybrushing (ochre, then graveyard earth)...then painted all the little details (skulls and skull pits drybrushed the rocks (codex grey, fortress grey) , Finally I flocked it using GW scorched grass mixed with two different woodland scenics flocks (burnt grass and havest gold). the married flocks created two nice different tones of Scorched Grass that compliment the badlands theme I was going for. As you can imagine it took some time...I only worked on it 2 hours or so at time so about 10 days in January start to finish. (oh I also sprayed it down with a full can of matte, this is necessary to protect it during play) I still probably put even more detail time into to come, but that's a luxury..its playable now.


I assume the big question is after owning it couple months and spending alot of time on it -what do I think about it? Initially I was a big supporter of the product but was of course put off by the price like everyone else (which didn't keep me from buying it). In the end- my enthusiasum has dimmed a bit while I surely will enjoy this table. It wont be my main table, (that'd be my plain 4x8 that I can set up my horde of individual terrain on.) but the RoB is certainly great for a change of scenery or numerous unique scenarios..it will also be great for the variety of different games I play, covering up the skull pits with other pieces of terrain is easy to and with its modularity a huge combination of looks can be had easily. For me it's great..I even got a huge price break because I got $125.00 worth of free product the day I bought it at my local shop so my net cost on the thing with the scenery kit and tax was "only" (cough cough)
$265.00

I do have several issues with this thou and while the pros are pretty obvious...well made, rock solid, modular..(I'm told they are releasing at least 1 expansion tile for it ( a River). Its definitely got some cons. One...the clip together system for this, is a joke. it doesn't stay clipped, you need two people to clip it together, and even clipped together its nowhere near as tight as its needs to be to minimize the unholy freaking ugly SEAMS. The seams really irk me and while I am going to do some more painting myself to try to minimize them myself and they are less noticeable if you model it the "GW Way". If you want to use it painted or partially flocked you are looking at some serious seemage distracting you from the overall look. While the seams are definitely visible in some of the ads. If you notice in many of GW shots released in White Dwarf they either photoshopped the seams out or glued the table together as a set piece and covered up the seams. You can minimize them by fitting them tight with an outside frame, (like I plan to do.) but unfortunately as a "stock" product its never going to look as good as it could the way the current clip system works.

The next problem I have is once you get it all built and looking pretty its really not that Portable. If I was packing this thing up and taking somewhere in the carry-bag they provide..it would be scratched to hell and destroyed in no time. not to mention you be surpised how much weight the paint and flock add to it...the thing is heavy. While I have no problem with it, (I'm 6'5" 280lbs) what about the normal sized person or worse the kids dragging it along behind them in the bag as the flock they put on it the day before grinds itself off as its stuffed in the bag.?

I guess that's my biggest problem with it, Its that the RoB is not what really what its claims to be Its not "really" the portable game solution for the average gamer with out alot of space..can it be that? sure, but its a royal pain in ass...you're not going to want to take it apart and set it up on your kitchen table trying to clip it together to play your game then pack it all up and stick it back in the closet. I'm sure some uber motivated folks will, but I just don't see it happening for the average person. - its way easier to just go down to the store and wait for a table, or just play on the kitchen table using the GW grass matt (now that was a smart product)

Marketing pushed this as "now every gamer has the option to get their own table", "no more waiting for table space..just buy this set it at home and go!" well the reality is it more complicated than it. It's unwieldly, expensive and takes considerable hobby experience to get to look good enough to justify the price. It's really geared toward people like me, who are hardcore hobbyists who want it as a set piece and have multiple tables, and there aren't enough people like me to keep an expensive product like this around for that long.

I also have to mention that at the Chicago GT last year they previewed the RoB in a new product slide show at the of the day, claiming that eventually everytable at the GT's would be one of these!..In retrospect that claim is so warped I have to mention it, one, while it's cross configurable the huge hills are way too limiting terrain wise for anything resembling a tournament with all its uber anal meta-game terrain parsing. secondly, what GT's???. while there are now two this year..Baltimore and Vegas...when they announced the 2009 circuit there where ZERO. big change from just a few months earlier.

In conclusion, I love my Realm of Battle and will get lots of use out of it but its product for diehards only, you know the kind of people that buy two Baneblades, even thou they rarely if ever play Apocalypse and yet go into the store and a red shirt asks them if they want to "smell" the next one they're still thinking of buying. Or if you've got 13 unfinished armies that your working up to 3K and are still wandering around the shop pondering what army to start up next? If that's you and you got the dough,want to put the time into making it look good and have a place to put it where you can leave it set up..then this is the product for you.!!
I still think you'll want another table as committing to this as your only table will leave you lacking if you are a serious 40K or WFB player. If you're looking for a portable easy gaming solution, buy the GW grass mat, throw it on the kitchen table with a couple modular hills and a bag of the wire trees and you'll be good to go for a fraction of the price.


(14 more photo's in the Realm of Battle Gallery)

January Project Updates

Sunday night here at Plastic Legions usually mean updates and I didn't want to disappoint.If you haven't heard from me in awhile rest assured I am working. Either at my regular Job or at my second job, heh. I mean hobby. For the remainder of this month I am working on 3 things. Thankfully their use of overlaps a bit so progress is being made quickly. First is getting my 2000pt Daemons of Chaos WFB army ready for my gaming groups upcoming campaign. The 3rd round results of our painting challenge was kind of soft so while I am at a modest 3 color standard I am trying to finish my models to a personal standard that I can enjoy before we begin. This is the 5th time we've run our "house rules" version of Mighty Empires and by this point there is very little remaining of the core rules other than using the map and strategic events , everything else is different. I am building alot of specific terrain for the campaign and thankfully my Osgiliath pieces can double for several locations on the map. So as I continue to work on my Osgiliath table, I am also filling out terrain for the campaign. I also continue to slowly work on my Realm of Battle table..while I am refraining from posting shots until its done You can see pieces in the shots posted here. I spent a good 3 hours today working on making an an actual table for (it was sitting on a sheet of plywood and some sawhorses), I completely finished detail painting and started to add some flock. So there you have it.
1. Daemons of Chaos
2. Terrain for our new Mighty Empires, map tiles, objective markers, etc.
3. Osgiliath and Realm of Battle Tables.

Come February everything else gets put on hold as I get my Empire army up to snuff for Adepticon, That project list includes a new mounted battle standard bearer, painting my Flagellants, working on tuning up my display base and then going thru every unit and touching up the paint, there are couple units that are pretty lacking compared to the rest of the army.
That ought to take me right up to Adepticon, as our Campaign is going on from January 20 thru
mid March, I am sure I will have various things to do for that.

Here are some pictures from today, tomorrow I will update the galleries with the painting challenge photos and numerous pics from today.


My Bloodcrusher musician, I only used the legs from the original rider, the rest of the parts are the standard box, I'm liking the way this guy came out..standing up blowing the horn. In play these guys are rock solid and have the durability of Hero Characters with 2 wounds, 3+ armor save and a 5+ ward save. I my latest game against the Skaven, two of tore up the left side of table...( I really could used them on the other side thou...damn plague monks!)


Osgiliath finished pieces..These plastic kits from Pegasus Hobbies are the perfect alternative for Fantasy players to GW's City Fight sets. While the side pieces are the stock City Ruins kit. The tower is built from the administration building box and it doesn't go together like this stock..I had to do alot of cutting with a razor saw and x-acto knife to get it to work. Pegasus has a cool new kit out as well I picked up which is where those column toppers are from. the skirt on the roof is left over piece of GW movement tray. As I plan on playing Lord of the Rings with these building I put the skirt up top so models could choose to give up cover and shoot straight down at attackers if they wanted. This stuff can double for a couple of locations in our Warhammer campaign..cool terrain always makes the game more fun, IMO.




I want my Osgiliath table to have lots of statues, so I threw this together from some of Hirst casting experiments. The model is an old Grenadier Titan from probably the late 1970's..I went thru my old boxes of Grenadier stuff from when I was a kid and found all kinds of great models, including stuff I painted when I was 10 or so.when testors gloss paints where all the rage! LoL..one these days I will post them up for laughs. While this piece is going to double as the "Monument of Glory" for Warhammer, I found another cool old model I am using for the "Ancient Idol".



I didn't paint this, I just wanted to show it in case anyone was interested. This is a stock piece I bought from Pegasus Hobbies..it was around $20 and is cast from heavy plaster..its not plastic..I didn't realize it was pre painted when I bought it...which is ok, one less thing to paint. For our Warhammer Campaign, you guessed it the Chaos Shrine.

Exploring Warhammer Legendary Battles

Given my terrain work lately I thought it would be a good time to explore the Warhammer Legendary Battles rules which came in out in White Dwarf 339. The rules look pretty good but really seemed designed for games even bigger that we are going to attempt. We'll be following the basic rules for Army selection, allies and deployment. It will also be an objective based game rather than one based on standard victory points. We won't be using massed batteries or desperation tokens, as we are all capable of doing 3000 point per team member so it will be 6K per side so those things wont be neccessary. Each players army will follow the 3K Army Organization Chart and there are some special rules for allied armies including you still only get 2 magic dice for the combined army so you need to budget your magic slightly better and one player's lord must be nominated as the "Army General" and his leadership will effect everyone on the allied team and will count as the Army General for objective scoring

The table layout is 4x8 and 4x4 connected by a bridge. (which isn't in the photo's I am currently working on it) we will seperate the tables into three sections. The Village, The Forests, and The Wastes., each section is a 4x4 section of play space. The Forces of Good, in our case it will be the Empire and The Wood Elves. Will deploy in the Village section, While the Forces of Evil will deploy in the Wastes and not within 8 inches of the bridge. So far it looks the Evil forces will be the Vampire Counts and either Chaos Mortals or Orcs and Goblins.


( The 4 X 8 Section of table, the Forest area is in the foreground, the Village in the rear, the Wastes are to the left, the bridge will be dead center connecting the two tables the gap between tables will be about 6 inches.)

The bridge only allows 20mm sized figures to be in a unit 4 wide as they cross it, meaning most infantry units are going to have reform, cross and reform again. While crossing the bridge will slow down units moving into the forest area coming from the wastes. It will also be easier to defend the bridge as units fighting on the bridge will not get their rank bonus and thus single characters will be capable of defending or holding the bridge alone. I feel the bridge as set up is balanced obstacle for both sides.

The Forest Area is neutral territory the Watchtower is capturable and one of the games minor objectives. Each player will be allowed to keep 250 points of units in reserve and reserve units are deployed anywhere in your home quarter per standard rules of a unit coming in from "off the table" Capturing the watchtower is also crucial to using your reserves as once you capture the Watchtower, you can deploy your reserves from anywhere from inside or within 6 inches of the Watchtower.


( The Wastes section of the table and where the forces of Evil will deploy, the craters will be difficult terrain and the crater interiors are treated exactly like forests for line of sight and cover purposes)

Scouts can deploy anywhere in the enemy's or your own deployment zone, and must follow standard deployment rules for scouts. Line of sight for shooting and magic is limited to seeing thru all three sections of the table, so you cannot shoot over the table edge into either the village or wastes without going thru a forest edge. Flyers on the other hand can go direct edge to edge from the Village or Wastes fly off the table into the opposing quarter as long as they have the move.

The games objectives will be as follows, rules for controlling a feature as per the rulebook

Major Objectives-
(you have controlled this feature for 2 consective turns or at the end of the game)

Capture the Village Center, Destroy the Tavern - 4 points (Evil objective)

Capture and Destroy the Obelisk- 4 points (Good objective)

Minor Objectives

Control the Watchtower at the end of the game- 2 points

Control the Bridge at the end of the game- 2 points

Captured enemy table quarters in either the Village or the Wastes 1 point each (4 per side)


Battle Objectives-

Enemy General Slain- 3 points
most expensive enemy unit is destroyed or fleeing at the end of the game- 2 points
Captured Enemy Banners- 1 point each


The are a good amount of objective points available so it should be a fun and flexible game, The games length will be either the first team to score at least 10 objective points within 6 fulls turns or go to 8 turns and call the game with whatever points are scored. Given the numerous objectives and the need to both attack your enemies and defend your own deployments zones, this looks game looks to be very tactically challenging. I am really looking forward to this and we are tentatively scheduled for either May 24th or 31st. Everyone playing is fielding mostly painted armies, so look forward to a massive battle reports with tons of great pics when this is done.

New Terrain- WIP

Post-Adepticon, I needed a break from painting Empire models, (thou that didn't stop me from building a bunch more I was short) and I really wanted to dig in and finish up a bunch of terrain I've had in various stages of completion for awhile. First up is a new 4X4 table, that I finally found some time to finish by laying on some texture (sand) and getting going on the painting. It is probably 50% done at this point I need to add some brown to the front portion so its similar to back half and then start detailing the craters ..the small crater in the middle rear is my experiment on how I want to finish it up..not quite sure how I want to proceed and I am torn to whether I want to add some patches of Scorched grass around various areas...probably.

The photos make it look like there is some green in the there but it's really three shades of brown over a black base then a grey dusting. Those Arcane Ruins of mine have been done since last summer and I never use them on my big table so it's great they'll have a home. Basic idea is a ruined temple that took a pounding from a meteor shower so we end up with dead -cratered landscape.


Hopefully in the next month or so we are going to our WFB mega battle going on where this table here will connect via an 18" footbridge I am building to my 4x 8 table where I have my town set up. where going to run a 4-5K per side game, with various objectives, should be pretty great and look for a big battle report on that one. With all the tables done and 8 -10K of painted armies it should look pretty spectacular.

Second thing I've been working on is this Tavern from CNC minature Scenery. I've been eyeing there stuff for awhile and I picked a couple of there paint racks awhile back.This is going to be the center piece of my town as its by far the biggest building, bigger than the GW watchtower, I should note this things is definitely 28-30mm scale on the bigger side, it's almost borderline out of scale with all my other Armorcast buildings, but works fine, just keep it in mind if you are mixing up other terrain with this company's products.


Here it is in an early stage of building, it took me 6 hours to build the model from the kit
it's pretty complicated with probably 100 parts, tons of dry fitting and sanding, because of the punch out tab/wooden sprue method they come unassembled in, I couldn't imagine building this without a dremel with a sanding wheel to take off sprue stubs and sand a few pieces, quickly.



Below you can see I've started painting away, I used glue an very fine sand to create the stucco look that matches all my other buildings, note I also scored the door and made it look presentable with some green stuff additions. The roof is all cardboard shingles and I've already made one decided the shingles where too big, ripped it off and started over. I don't know how many hours are going to be into this thing when its finally finished, but it will be too many, as I probably have 20 hours into now, and there is alot of painting, touch ups and the roof to do.


Once this is complete, my town will have 10 finished buildings which looks really nice on the big table with all the hills and trees, I'll be sending a bunch of finished shots of this terrain over to my pal scott at his blog Citizen Nick Hobby Center, for his weekly terrain features..shouldn't be too long until I get this stuff done, until then I slave away and drool over that upcoming mega-battle!

4 X 8 Gaming Table

I really wanted to build a nice table after seeing all the great ones out at Adepticon earlier this year and the few peoples homes I've been to. My 1st 4x4 I did late last year does the job, and matches the terrain I built for it but since I actually layed the texture right on the plywood, its not changing without a major overhaul, and my carpentry was pretty half assed as I did it out of miscellaneous scrap lumber on the fly. For this one I made plans to do it right.

This is 4 x 8 sheet of 3/4" plywood framed on top of 2x4's and 1 x4 's, its rock solid and using an old picnic table I have for legs I can make it perfectly level without the hassle of leveling prebuilt legs. The reason it looks like a pool table is that I used a bunch of 6" floor base left over from my upstairs house rehab as a bumper it was the perfect size to come up about 3/4 of an inch above the top of the plywood. I set a piece of 1/2" foamcore in the "pocket" leaving a 1/4 inch above that exposed. This keeps the foamcore in place- nice and tight without glue and it is easily removable, it also keep things like dice from rolling off the table which is nice. Given this setup I can swap out any foamcore top I want to create, or people can bring their own over and we could just drop it right in.

The play surface was spray painted black, then I used spray craft glue ( super 77) to hold down a dusting of fine sand. Then I used 4 different colors of spray paint to create the mottled battlefield surface. This is setup for Warhammer fantasy so I am concurrently working on a bunch of terrain for this., I'm sure I will tweak the paintjob a bit a time goes on as while you can't really see it these photos but its got a nice texture that will take well to drybrushing. Anyway as it stands I am quite happy with this so far and wanted to show it off.

Terrain Table

Here are some shots of my table for 40K, there are 3 different hills, two which provide good deployment cover or a ranged overview of the table, a center hill, and miscellaneous crater, and the crashed spaceship from the Battle of Macragge starter set. I am still working on the crashed ship and will eventually bring the color up to a battle scarred white (similar to the small piece in the bottom shot.) The tabletop itself can also use some work. I will probably glue down some fine sand in various spots and drybrush it brown to match the terrain. Regardless these are fine for playing the Macragge missions and I will continue to improve these during time I mentally need to work on something other than small figures. Current W.I.P- another tact squad, some elite units, and a Rhino APC. More soon..