English Civil War/Thirty Years War, Historicals, Terrain

A 17th Century Bastion, Part One

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Several of the scenarios in Pikeman’s Lament ask for a bastion or earthwork to be attacked or defended, but at a maximum area of 9″x9″ it isn’t going to be some grand fortification or anything.

I wasn’t sure what, exactly, could be done in that area, so I cut a piece of heavy plasticard that size and started arranging my Assault Group guns and crews around the 3d printed gabions we found over on Thingiverse.

The 3d Printed Gabions

As seen previously here on The Warbard, my brother Corey owns a 3d printer. A Creality Ender 2, apparently. Gabions are big roughly-made wicker tubes filled with dirt, basically, used for temporary fortification for centuries – right up until at least the First World War, in fact. They’re iconic looking but would be really, really fiddly to scratchbuild. Finding the set of 3d modelled gabions for free over on Thingiverse was what kicked this whole project off.

3d printed gabions in closeup. The striations of the 3d print process nicely add texture. Click for larger.

If you haven’t got access to a 3d printer, Renedra will sell you a couple of sprues of quite nice-looking gabions for a very reasonable sum.

The Bastion

The 9″x9″ footprint was dictated by the Pikeman’s Lament rules, but proved to be a good size anyway for a bastion that could hold one gun with crew or a full unit of 12 infantry in the Pikeman’s system while not dominating the table. It’s still a very, very small bastion; even single-gun emplacements in the English Civil War were usually bigger than this once you included their surrounding ditches and such. Compromises are always made for tabletop usability, however!

The actual gabions and fortified part of this are raised slightly on a 6″x6″ offcut of 1/8th” EPVC plastic board, with openings for cannon to fire through on two sides and a ramp leading down and out on the third side.

Gabions in lace and planking started inside. Assault Group guns and crew and a Warlord plastic infantry figure for scale. Click for larger.

I used chunks of styrofoam to fill in the area outside the gabions, sloping up slightly from ground level, holding it in place with hot glue to speed up construction.

Styrofoam to fill in the slight slope up to the outer edge of the bastion itself. Click for larger.

To cover the styrofoam I mixed up premixed plaster, white glue, sand, and a bit of water to make a tough textured fill, then pushed it into place with a tongue depressor. The interior has flooring/duckboards made from wooden coffee stir sticks, with sand filling the gaps between the boards.

Plaster, white glue, and fine gravel over the styrofoam. Click for larger.

Paint tomorrow after the plaster has had a chance to dry fully. I thought about putting extra obstacles in the ground outside the gabions, but have decided to leave it mostly bare earth. I do have my recently-bought Renedra chevaux-de-frise to add around the bastion once it’s on the table, after all.

English Civil War/Thirty Years War, Historicals, Pulp, Terrain

A Graveyard (Much Delayed)

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File this one under “long neglected projects finally finished”, I guess. I’ve finally based, painted, and finished the last of the Renedra gravestones I started way back in February 2013, which were actually purchased in December 2012.

Back in 2013 half of them (one of the two identical sprues) got cleaned up, based, sand added to the bases, and grey primed, and that was it. For more than five years.

graves13Feb13
The original 2013 batch of graves, based but not yet primed. Click for slightly larger.

In early 2018 I pulled the 2013 bits out of storage and got them painted up and flocked fairly quickly for the game I ran at Trumpeter Salute 2018.

The paintjob was pretty simple. I hit all of them with a wash (GW Nuln Oil or Earthshade), then drybrushed and scrubbed various other colours across the stones. Two different shades of grey, some dark green, two shades of tan, and two shades of off-white applied in different amounts to different stones give a bit of variation to each stone.

Finally, this week I’ve pulled the second sprue out and got them all based up.

Latest graveyard stuff all based up. Click for larger.

The bases are all leftovers from various Warlord ECW plastic box sets. I think the newer stuff is from the Firelock Infantry box and the older from either the regular infantry or cavalry box. Waste not, want not, and I wasn’t ever going to use them for figures! The freshly dug graves (great potential plot points!) are just scrap styrofoam glued down and then sanded.

Latest graveyard bits. Fresh graves in front, regular gravestones behind. On the left is a base of chickens from Warbases, just for fun. Click for larger.

I’ve used the Celtic cross and some of the base pedestal bits to create a roadside cross or shrine. Just the thing to lurk on a dark and misty moor or something!

The roadside cross, still in progress. Complete with ominous raven! Click, as usual, for larger.

Finally, I used Rain City Hobbies tufts and flowers to add some detail and interest over my usual mix of flock. I really like the little pops of colour the flowers provide, and they’re becoming a standard feature on my scenery, especially the English Civil War items.

Finished, all these years later! I’ll get some photos of the full graveyard setup soon. Click for larger.

Should you want your own gravestones the two-sprue set is still available from Renedra which is definitely not always the case when coming back to some products after this long. Hopefully you take less than seven years to get yours ready for the tabletop!

Conventions, English Civil War/Thirty Years War, Fantasy

The Trumpeter Salute 2019 Haul

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Trumpeter Salute 2019 has come and gone. This was the first Trumpeter in many years where I didn’t run a game which felt kind of strange, but that did leave more time for other people’s games!

It was also the kick in the butt I apparently needed to devote a bit more time to gaming, after most of a year (two?) of basically doing squat except watch my gaming stuff gather dust.

Among the things I bought at Trumpeter was a pack of Frostgrave Wizards in plastic. I’ve been musing for a while now about mixing up 17th Century English Civil War/Thirty Year’s War figures with magic and fantasy stuff of some sort, and while a lot of things like wands or wizard’s staffs would be easy enough to add to figures with wire and putty, a couple of sprues of ready-made bits seemed like a good plan.

The Trumpeter Salute 2019 haul. First three Warlord/Frostgrave magic users on the left, new frogs on the right, chevaux in the foreground. Click, as usual, for larger.

It turns out the Warlord plastic ECW figures and the North Star plastic Frostgrave figures are pretty much perfectly compatible. Very similar heights and proportions, and heads and hands similarly scaled. The arms are jointed identically at the shoulders on both, too, although the heads & necks are separate on the Frostgrave figures but integral to the bodies on the Warlord stuff, so if/when I want to start doing headswaps I’ll need to do some surgery.

I also got a pack of four “Frogs with French rifles” from Pulp Figures, to give my Cthulhoid fishmen/frogmen forces some actual firepower. I’m not sure if these will be sold via Pulp Figures or Crucible Crush, but they’re awesome!

Finally, I picked up a pack of Renedra’s Chevaux de Frise for more barricades to scatter around – perfect for some of the Pikeman’s Lament scenarios that call for a line of barricades or a barricaded village. The pack contains a pair of sprue frames that will give me about 18″ or so of chevaux de frise all told.

First three magic users! See text for details, click for larger.

I whipped up the first three “weird ECW” magic users already. On the left is one of the regular Warlord cavalry figures with an arm and hip pouch from the Frostgrave wizards; centre is a Warlord firelock body with both arms from Frostgrave (usable as a religiously-inspired figure in straight historical games too), and on the right is a body from the Warlord infantry command sprue with arms from the same sprue and a wizard’s staff from the Frostgrave set.

I’ve got a whole bunch of photos still on my camera from the actual Trumpeter Salute show; I’ll try and get them edited and uploaded this coming weekend.

Inspiration, Terrain

Savannah Terrain

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This is diorama-level scenery building, but almost everything he does in this video is applicable to wargamer-proof terrain too and the final result looks awesome.

Paepercuts is a great channel; he was quiet for a while but has been putting out new stuff regularly now and is well worth the subscription over on YouTube. One of the comments in the Savannah video describes the host of these as “the Bob Ross of scenery videos” and I realized that’s one of the things I like about him, there’s none of the “HEYYYYYYY GUYSSSSSSSSSSS” weird loudness that is apparently standard issue in far too many other YT videos.

As for me and my house, I’m still not doing much gaming-related stuff but I can feel the new-project itch starting up. This might be something completely different, away from the various 28mm projects I’ve spent time on the last five years or so. Possibly Russian Civil War at a grand tactical small scale, 6mm or even 2mm/3mm for that “miles of open steppe” feel… we shall see!

Trumpeter Salute is next month in Vancouver and for the first time in years I’m not running a game but I’m still really looking forward to being there. Trumpeter has been great for blasting the wargaming cobwebs off in past years, we’ll see what it does this time around!

Asides, Misc

Twenty Years of this Nonsense!

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2018 has been a year of not much wargaming. I’m busy and well, just not doing a lot of gaming.

Last month was a bit of a milestone, though, that I should acknowledge: November 2018 makes twenty years straight of me having a wargaming presence online of some sort or another! Way back in November 1998 I signed up for a Geocities account (remember them?) and built the first version of this site in my college’s computer labs, because I didn’t own my own PC until 2000 or so.

While I’m at it: Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy New Year, and such. May the holidays season be what you need from it.

(also: the new post editor WordPress 5.0.1 ships with is shiny hot garbage. It’s deleted three draft versions of this post. Install the ‘Classic Editor’ plugin to restore WP to sanity if you’re a WP user!)

Misc

Still Around!

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No posts since mid-March of this year. Did’t realize it had been that long!

I’m still kicking, just doing minimal wargaming these days. First there was lots of family stuff (now mostly resolved) and then other hobbies and the summer weather distracted me.

I’ve got the usual heap of back-burnered projects, and I promise I’ll wander back into active gaming one of these days.

In the meantime you can follow some of the other stuff I do over on my everything-but-gaming blog, Turned Skyward.

Conventions

Back From Trumpeter Salute 2018

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It was an excellent weekend.

I was under-prepared for my Pulp Alley games but managed to get enough done to pull them off. The table, at least, looked awesome as I’d been distracted from other prep by the building of many new buildings.

Eight players each running a full ten point League is really too many bodies around the table and too many figures on the table, but it was glorious chaotic fun. The geese won.

Lots of other good games, and of course the meetings with all the folks I usually only see once a year at each successive Trumpeter Salute.

I actually have some great photos; I’ll get them off my phone over the next couple of days and posted here, along with a more coherent narrative!

For now, sleep!

English Civil War/Thirty Years War, Historicals, Terrain

Stable Genius

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After finishing the three little cottages on Saturday, I decided to do something slightly different on Sunday and made a building that could serve as a stable or other outbuilding for a manor farm on my ECW/English pulp tables.

It’s 3″ deep and 4″ wide, so actually larger in footprint than the little hovels. Horse need their space, tenant farmers not so much! Same construction, 1/16th mattboard (picture framing card) with wooden coffee stir sticks for the timbering. The roof is assymetric, with the peak closer to the front of the building instead of down the centreline, for no other reason than it looked more interesting and on a gaming table, people spend a lot of time looking down at rooftops!

Stable “blank” assembled, with window and horse both from Warbases. Click for larger.

A roof with a pitch like this should probably be shakes or slate or something, because a steep pitch is part of what helps keep a thatch roof watertight, but towel thatch is a heck of a lot faster to assemble than a shingled roof, even with Warbases’ nifty lasercut tile cards available! Perhaps I’ll go back and rebuild this roof with tile card in the future, when I’m not under a pre-convention time crunch… but don’t hold your breath!

All the half-timbering complete and unthatched roof in place. Click for larger.
Roof off, showing the card “beams” to give it some strength. Click for larger.
Towel thatch in place, including an extra strip across the top ridge. Paint to follow! Click for larger.

I’ll add open doors on the big doorway on the front; the doors are built but not installed yet. I might whip up a couple of horse stall walls to put in the interior, but honestly that seems like a post-Trumpeter addition to me…

English Civil War/Thirty Years War, Pulp, Terrain

Hovels & Gardens

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With the clock running on toward Trumpeter Salute 2018, I need to get serious about producing the new scenery the linked pair of games I’m running there need!

I’ve got more than enough hedges, dirt roads, and other greenery bits from previous scenery projects, but the farmhouse/manor, dovecote, and barn I’ve built previously need more buildings to hit the table along with them if I want to do a 17th Century English hamlet up properly.

This weekend I sat down and cranked out a trio of little (tiny, really!) thatched and half-timbered cottages or hovels, along with a pair of fenced gardens.

Three cottages underway. 28mm Warlord officer on a 25mm base for scale. Click for larger.

These are simple little buildings of 1/16th” mattboard with half-timbering from wooden coffee stirrers and thatch from towel. The windows are lasercut from Warbases in the UK. For a bit more bulk the roofs have a substructure of corrugated cardboard with the towel hot-glued to that and then further stiffened with white glue. All three roofs are removable.

Towel thatch roofs in place. Click for larger.

For the gardens I started with 1/8th” foamed PVC board as a base, then used some of the 3-d printed wattle fencing from Thingiverse that Corey has run off from me the new 3d printer he’s also using for the tricycle truck project.

Large fenced garden with a tree. 28mm Warlord officer on 25mm base for scale. Click for larger.

The tree has a core of paperclip wire, bulked out with soft iron craft wire, then covered in hot glue to fill in between the wires. The garden beds are also just hot glue “sculpted” into place with the hot tip of the glue gun.

Painted cottages and painted and flocked garden. Click for larger.

I’ve also done a second garden piece, slightly smaller, but haven’t gotten a photo of it yet. The cottage roofs need one more drybrush to really pop the thatch texture, but the cottages themselves are all done, and the gardens are fully painted and flocked outside the fence. The tree needs some foliage, and the gardens inside the fences need greenery and detail, but not bad for part of a weekend’s focused effort!

Historicals, Infinity, Pulp

BSC 2018: Correcting some too thin errors

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As I am fairly new to 3D printing, I am learning a tonne about what not to do. One of the biggest issues I have discovered is that things that look good in CAD can look absolutely terrible once printed, given the resolution of the printing or the limitations of FDM 3D printing. Today I wanted to talk about three different, but similar errors I made: making a part too thin to print correctly.

Back corner of the cab

First up – the back corner of the cab. As the backside of the cab is curved, it thins quite a bit at the very back corners.

Back corner of cab in blue. See the thin joint at the very end

When you bring this into Cura to slice it for printing, the problem becomes obvious.

Back corner of the cab, showig that when printed, it will only be two layers thick (~0.8mm)

The solution to this is to thicken the back wall of the cab, which I did by adding a flat piece to it:

Back corner corrected with additional piece (in red)

Once you bring that into Cura, you see that the narrowest part is now at least 1mm thick, so the piece shouldn’t be so weak.

Thicker corner sliced in Cura

Fenders

The next piece I tackled was the fenders. They were originally 0.25mm thick, which means that they were just over one layer thick when printed at 0.2mm and only two layers thick at 0.1mm. This meant they basically didn’t print at all.

Fender dimensions

Fender sliced, showing no overlap

The solution to this problem is two-fold: thicken the fender up to 0.5mm and also only print at 0.1mm (considered Fine quality).

New fender, now 100% thicker!

New sliced fender, showing overlap

Top of the windshield

This is actually entirely my error. I made the windscreen and frame around it taller than the sides or back of the cab. This meant when I cut up the model to slice, the top of the windscreen disappeared. Oops.

 

Top of the windscreen, showing the height difference

 

Top of the cab when sliced. That grey area is supposed to have yellow lines for printing

Wargaming & Such (formerly Brian's Wargaming Pages)