Category Archives: Terrain

Wargaming terrain & scenery posts.

Infinity, Science Fiction, Terrain

Antennas for Infinity

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A number of the stock scenarios in Infinity need some sort of antenna or console for the troops to interact with/hack/seize/blow up/etc. You can use basic tokens on the tabletop, but real scenery looks better!

Antenna and consoles in Inf are supposed to be on a 40mm base, so I had a go at cutting 40mm circles with my circle cutter. The stubby blade won’t go all the way through the mattboard I build with, though, so I wound up basically scoring circles and then finishing them as carefully as possible with a new Xacto blade. It’s not an ideal way to cut circles, and for larger and more visible ones like a round roof I’ve started since building these antennas I’ve gone with multiple layers of light card, which the circle cutter handles very nicely, and glued them together in layers.

in-ant
Six antennas for Infinity on 40mm bases. Each is roughly 4″ high. Click for larger.

The antenna themselves are more mattboard, generally offcuts from other recent projects. No particular design ethic to these, beyond “angular and futuristic”, which is easy to achieve.

Even for scenarios that don’t require antenna on the table these are likely to put in an appearance as general futuristic clutter, which is always in high demand on an Infinity tabletop!

Infinity, Science Fiction, Terrain

Billboard Ads for Infinity

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While building another piece of scenery for our Infinity tables I built a roof that didn’t turn out; it just wasn’t working out physically the way I’d pictured it in my head. Turning the partially completed piece on one edge, though, I realized that what I’d created would work quite well as a display board for two big billboards – presumably video or holographic displays, this being a bright hexagonal future!

Here’s the basic structure, front and back views.

bb front
Front of the billboard. The whole thing is 6″ tall and 4″ wide.
bb back
Rear of the billboard. There’s enough space to balance a figure on the very top, if you’re so inclined…

To get something colourful on the two displays, I fired up GIMP and then went looking through Flickr and Google Image Search for source materials. It’s easy to just rip things off when you see them around the web, and far too many people do that. Both Flickr and GIS allow you to search for images that people have specifically licensed to allow free reuse of, though, and generally you have to pass on your graphics made using their images as sources – what is known as a Creative Commons Share-Alike license.

Haqqislam billboard - Kufic Arabic for Bismallah (God Bless) and various hexes, because Infinity...
Haqqislam billboard – Kufic Arabic for Bismallah (God Bless) and various hexes, because Infinity…
Tyrell Corp - one of everyone's favourite (evil) megacorps!
Tyrell Corp – one of everyone’s favourite evil megacorps!

For the full size, high quality, and uncompressed images, please use these two links:
Arabic billboard – 2.7Mb
Tyrell Corp billboard – 2.7Mb

Creative Commons License
These works by Brian Burger/Wirelizard Design are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Basically, this means that you can use these images as you see fit on the web or printed for use, including commercial use, but if you modify them further you have to share your version too.

Creative Commons sources:
Neon on Ferrari
Chevy grille
star twist origami
Blade Runner screenshot
Tyrell Corp logo

I didn’t wind up using either of these two (yet!) but they’re too cool not to share: 2nd Life cyber-art, and another by the same artist.

Fantasy, Terrain

Necromancer Beer – a Blood Bowl Sideline Ad

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Something quick and silly to break the month-long dry spell in posting!

On our local Blood Bowl league’s Facebook page one of the guys made a joke about “Necromancer Beer – one taste will revive you” and while I was waiting for dinner to finish I fired Inkscape up and cranked out the following bit of fluff.

Necromancer Beer - one taste will revive you! Feel free to print this for personal use!
Necromancer Beer – one taste will revive you! Feel free to print this for personal use!

This is the same height as a number of other BB sideline ads already floating around the internet, so should mix nicely with them.

Enjoy, and if you do use this, please send me photos of your pitchside scenery with the Necromancer Beer banner on it!

Infinity, Science Fiction, Terrain

Sci-Fi Warehouse for Infinity

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After building the first building to use on Infinity tables, which turned out to be a complex shape and two storeys plus roof, I decided the next building needed to be simpler and quicker to build, but still interesting.

Going through my building supplies I found a sheet of corrugated craft paper that became a feature of the new warehouse, both for the two large rolling doors and on part of the roof. The rest of the building is mattboard/picture framing card, which is cheap, easy to work with, and makes good durable buildings.

The whole warehouse is 9″ long, 5″ wide, and about 6″ to the highest point of the “sail” that divides the roof up.

More details on the picture captions below. There’s still some structural work to do on the back wall and on the roof, and a lot of detailing still to do. Paint will happen eventually, as well.

Infinity, Terrain

A Building For Infinity

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I’ve previously shown my urban scatter terrain for Infinity, and after getting that assembled I decided to tackle something more challenging and larger.

Quite a bit larger, actually. It’s a two-storey building that wound up being about 10″ long, 6″ wide and almost 7″ tall!

The building is entirely made of mat board, usually used as picture framing board. It’s good quality cardboard, easy to work with and it takes paint and glue well. Our local art supply place, Island Blue, sells the offcuts from their framing business off cheap! The roof and second storey come off to allow full access to the entire building during games, and I think I’ve managed to make the building tactically interesting for games of Infinity.

Check out the gallery below; the captions have a lot more detail.

  • hexcourt

If you’re interested in doing similar buildings for Infinity or any other skirmish game, I really like the ongoing “Cardbuilding” series of articles over on the Infinity news site Data Sphere: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 3.5, Part 4. Errhile is much more organized than I am, designing a whole system so that his buildings nest and stack for storage and reconfiguration, and he’s got lots of great techniques and ideas in his lavishly illustrated articles. I might well do some similar modular buildings, but for now it’s fun to just bust out a big, complex building — I haven’t done much terrain building recently!

Infinity, Links, Science Fiction, Terrain

Links of Interest, 4 March 2015

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Another handful of links of interest!

James Ernest of Cheapass Games has a short video on three ways to make cards. Nothing earthshaking, but a good short video laying out three easy ways to make cards for your games.


Corrugated metal from disposable roasting pans, via Rusty Robot, which has all sorts of fantastic modelling posts. A lot of his stuff is too detailed/too fragile for wargaming, but the roasting pan thing looks like it would survive gamers if given basic respect!

I’ve gotten into Infinity recently, which is a game that uses on-table markers quite a lot. Corvus Belli has PDFs of the markers available to download and print, and the idea of using 1″ clear epoxy stickers (Youtube video link) to make tough and easy-to-handle marker tokens is inspired. (Clear epoxy stickers on EBay.ca. They’re a crafting thing originally, apparently.) I’m actually considering doing some tokens for Chain of Command up as 1″ rounds with epoxy stickers on top now too… might have to fire Inkscape up!

Also from the Infinity side of the gaming world, Toposolitario has a great website with all sorts of paper terrain and some tutorials. Great stuff and all free.

I’m mostly painting up Infinity models these days, getting ready for Trumpeter Salute at the end of March, and considering entering the 9th Lead Painter’s League over on the Lead Adventure Forum – I’ve been in the 3rd, 5th & 7th LPLs, so continuing the “every odd LPL” streak seems like a good idea. Plus it’ll be a kick in the butt to get painting again, I’ve done far too little actual figure painting in the last year or so!

Terrain

Urban Scatter Terrain for Infinity

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So I’ve been persuaded (OK, it didn’t take much…) to get into Infinity, the fast and lethal science fiction skirmish game from Corvus Belli. I’ve been vaguely interested in Infinity for years, both by the high quality sculpting and because of the background and basic look of the game with it’s obvious influence from awesome sources like Ghost in the Shell, Bladerunner, cyberpunk, and a generally “hard science fiction” future – no skullz, no rusty Gothic goofiness, etc!

I’ve picked up a small Haqqislam force and started painting them up; they’re really neat figures that I’ll show progress pictures of later.

Being the sort of gamer I am, though, I also immediately started producing bits of terrain for the game. Infinity is a fast lethal game that demands a fairly high density of terrain on the table. Most of our terrain is fairly urban, lots of shiny new lasercut MDF buildings owned by the other players, so I decided to do some mixed scatter terrain to go along with that.

Planters seemed like a good choice – straightforward to build, plausible in an urban environment, a good chance to introduce some greenery and colour to an urban board, and a chance to use up some of my stockpile of scrap and offcut mounting board leftover from older, larger projects.

inf1
28mm planters from scrap card for Infinity SF skirmish gaming. Figure is a 28mm Janissary heavy infantry.

The largest piece is 6″ wide and 3.5″ across, mostly because that’s the size of a scrap of foamcore in my leftovers bin. The four smaller planters are 4″ long and 1″ across at the wide end. The small piece at the end is based on a 3″ circle of mounting board I cut as an experiment — yes, my circle cutter will cut mounting board. But not happily…

inf-planters_29jan2015_2

I’ll probably do another two or three of the long narrow planters, and then start exploring other shapes.

I did have to get into my uncut stockpile of large mounting board sheets for the end plates on the large raised piece, but basically everything else is from offcuts – total material cost so far about as close to zero as you can get!

I’ll get these painted this weekend, then break out the greenery to fill them in.

Fantasy, Terrain

My Blood Bowl Stadium All Laid Out

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Still loads of things to finish on the project, but after doing the crocodile head logo in the centre of the pitch this evening I just had to lay everything out on the dining room table and see it all together for the first time!

bbpitch
The whole in-progress Blood Bowl pitch laid out. Still lots to do, but it’s nice to have everything set up together! Click for larger.

The pitch still needs white field lines at both endzones, as well as possible decoration in the end zones – I’m thinking of doing a coloured background in each endzone, probably red at one end and blue in the other. I might also do the name of my Lizardman team, the Saltwater Slaughter, across the endzones as you see in a lot of American football fields, “Saltwater” across one endzone and “Slaughter” across the other.

Left to right behind the pitch, there’s the newest dugout/tracker temple, still bare styrofoam with decoration just barely started. Next to the right is the dice tower temple, which has been basecoated and still needs more paint. The plan is to have rare earth magnets built in to hold the temple itself and the sacred pool/dice catch tray in front of it together when it’s in use, so that’ll be some putty work to get the magnets mounted.

The scoreboard temple next is basically complete, except that I’m modifying the centre socket above the stairs with the scatter diagram so it holds the weather indicator cube more securely.

Finally on the far right is the first of the dugout temples, which still needs decoration and detailing on the roof but at least is partially painted on the rest of the building.

Much done and much left to do, but it’s nice to see it all set up!

Fantasy, Terrain

Stencil Test for a Blood Bowl Pitch

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I’ve got a felt Blood Bowl pitch that I have marked the standard grid on (15×29 30mm squares) but after months of using it I hadn’t gotten any further than that in transforming it from a useful but plain piece of fabric into a proper, good looking BB pitch!

Toward that end, I used some full-sheet self adhesive label paper to create a couple of test templates for stencils, cut them out with an Xacto knife, and stuck them down to a scrap piece of felt.

stencil
Phone photo of my test stencilling – the top lettering is with spraypaint, the bottom partial logo is with craft paint and a paintbrush. The stencil I used is just above the felt piece. Click for larger.

I tried red spraypaint on one part of the stencil, then used red craft paint and 1.5″ brush on the other part of the stencil, with the classic crafter’s method of brush painting a stencil – vertical stabbing of the brush down onto the stencil, so as not to get paint under the stencil or dislodge it while working.

Both methods worked just fine, and I’m not sure which I’ll ultimately use for the logo and lettering stencils I want on the actual pitch.

The pitch itself finally has a light spray of green spraypaint over it to make it look grassy (the felt itself is tan) and tomorrow I’ll mask off and spray the field lines a Blood Bowl pitch needs – centre line, wide zone and end (touchdown) zone lines being the most important, although I’ll probably do the field edge lines on all four sides as well, eventually, just to properly finish the pitch.

Fantasy, Terrain

Bloodbowl Dugout Temple Decoration

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In the local Bloodbowl league I’m currently involved in, there’s a pair of Lizardman teams, one using the regular GW figures for the team and my crocodile dudes from Impact Miniatures. Our League Commissioner is also playing with an Orc team, and will occasionally write a game report in the persona of his Orcish coaching counterpart. After thumping on the league’s other Lizard team 2-0, the Orcish coach was heard to say, “Herd der is some dat look like those Crocodiles on dem Golf shirts everyone is wearing dees days; CHOMP!!! CHOMP!!!!”

I was, at about the same time, wondering what to do for decoration on the dugout temple. A little bit of Google Image Searching and a little bit of Inkscape fiddling later to produce a basic image to guide my carving, I sat down with the completed temple, a very sharp Xacto blade, and this resulted.

croc1
Shirt pocket crocs? Sure! Still needs a fair bit of cleaning up and then of course paint! Click for larger.

I printed out a simple line-art version of the relevant logo, taped it down across the foam, and went at it carefully with the brand-new very sharp Xacto blade.

croc2
The logo in place waiting for carving. Click for larger.

On the front of the dugout above the three actual dugout areas, I put the logo of my lizardman team, as seen in earlier in the year. Same procedure, taped the printout down and carefully went at it with an Xacto.

croc3
Saltwater Slaughter team logo on the front face of the dugout. Or a generic crocodile head, as you will. Click for larger, as usual.