Terrain: Khador Burnt-out Building

 I get inspired quite often by thing I see online. More than once, I've imitated scenery that other folks have put together. Probably my favorite is this burnt-out Khador building. I saw photos of what the original creator called Khadoran Trenchworks at plarzoid.com, and I loved it. So I decided to create my own.

 

 

I started by cutting strips of wood, and breaking each in half at irregular intervals to get that splintered look at the top. These were secured at the bottom by laying a small second layer of wood on the outside, to which the vertical strips were super-glued, and some clay on the inside, which held the vertical strips in place while the glue dried, and then solidified for extra stability.

To match the one I'd seen, I put in two layers of vertical wood strips, gluing them to each other. This gave the whole structure extra strength.

 

 

After it was mostly assembled, I painted the base brown, the wood red on the outside and brown on the inside, and the clay on the inside had rubble pieces such as wood planks and small rocks pressed into the clay and eventually glued in place. I made sure that wherever there were gaps in the wood, I painted the brown between the boards.

 

 I printed a big Khador logo, cut it out, and then taped it in place and painted over it to get the Khador logo on the side, which turned out very nicely. 

Lastly, imitating the initial version at Plarzoid, I downloaded Khador propaganda posters from the internet and printed them out tiny, then glued them in place. They look great.

I'll continue looking for good terrain ideas online and imitating them where I can.

 

Battle Report: Ragnor Skysplitter vs Master Tormentor Morghul

I've started a new faction: Skorne. And my friends are getting into Trollbloods and Crucible Guard, so our new armies will be making some appearances here over the coming days and months.

We decided to try a game at the FLGS rather than in one of our homes. I brought Morghul, and my friend brought Ragnor.

Skorne (Masters of War)

• Master Tormentor Morghul
• Aptimus Marketh
• Cyclops Savage
• Cyclops Savage
• Cyclops Savage
• Titan Gladiator
• Paingiver Beast Handlers (max)

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My opponent's Trollbloods army was:

 

 

Trollbloods (Storm of the North)

• Ragnor Skysplitter, the Runemaster
• Trollkin Runebearer
• Troll Bouncer
• Troll Impaler
• Troll Axer
• Storm Troll
• Troll Whelps
• Troll Whelps
• Troll Whelps
• Valka Curseborn, Chieftain of the North
• Troll Whelps

 

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 As you can likely tell, we were playing 15 point lists, since neither of us yet owns much of our new factions. With such small armies, we just threw a single zone in the center of the table rather than rolling a Steamroller scenario.

I won the roll and decided to go first.

Skorne Turn 1

Skorne runs forward. Two cyclops get rush and end up in the zone.

Trollbloods Turn 1

Trolls move up. The impaler throws a giant sharpened telephone pole and injures one of the cyclops savages. Valka gets pummel.

Skorne Turn 2

The cyclops that got impaled moves back and has his boo boos medicated by beast handlers.

One of the beast handlers enrages a cyclops, and Morghul gives that cyclops abuse and admonition. The cyclops then charges forward to stab the impaler who hurt his friend. This is where things get weird.

Valka countercharges before the cyclops can attack. But then I remember admonition, and the cyclops backs away from the countercharge before it hits, then completes his charge attack. Yeah, weird. The impaler ends up wounded.

Trollbloods Turn 2

The impaler boosts a spear into Morghul, hitting. Morghul uses his only transfer to move the damage to the cyclops that had just gotten medicated.

The storm troll shoots lightning at the cyclops, and the lightning generator leaps hit Morghul and the titan. The third and final leap kills Aptimus Marketh.

The axer headbuts the cyclops and knocks him down, allowing Valka, a weaponmaster, to charge Morghul without taking a free strike. He does so and misses, then Morghul dodges back into the smoke cloud. A hit likely would have ended the game. Valka's second attack hurts a cyclops.

The brawler beats on the cyclops, but the cyclops survives. The rune bearer hex blasts the cyclops for good measure.

Skorne Turn 3

The cyclops in the back gets healed by beast handlers and charges Valka, killing him.

Morghul moves up behind the forest, feats, heals the knocked down cyclops, and it stands up and maxxes out its fury pounding on beasts.

Then another cyclops charges in, hacks away, and does lots of damage but kills nothing. Lots of whelps pop out.

The titan gladiator positions forward.

Trollbloods Turn 3

Ragnor isn't able to pull all the fury off his beasts, and both the storm troll and the axer frenzy. The storm troll smacks the axer, and the axer kills a whelp.

The brawler eats a different whelp, heals, and kills a cyclops. The impaler moves around the crater and throws a spear at Morghul, who transfers the damage to his whipping boy cyclops.

Ragnor feats this turn, which means that I'll be rolling one fewer damage die next turn.

Skorne Turn 4

The cyclops nearly maxxes his fury and thanks to Ragnor's feat barely manages to take out a whelp.

With that whelp gone, the titan gladiator slams the axer. It misses Ragnor by a half millimeter, but it does die. The gladiator takes a free strike while using his follow-up move, but ends next to Ragnor, and when Ragnor transfers titan's damage to the storm troll, the storm troll pops like a pimple. A cyclops finishes off the axer, and the other cyclops charges the impaler, failing to kill it.

 Trollbloods Turn 4

The troll brawler kills the cyclops savage. The troll impaler charges out of melee to try to hit the titan gladiator and dies to a free strike from the remaining cyclops.

Ragnor attacks the titan and leaves it on three boxes.

Skorne Turn 5

The titan gladiator gets abuse from Morghul, and the abuse spell damages the Titan for two points. If it had done 3 damage, it would have killed the titan. Then Morghul heals the Titan's crippled aspects, and it beats Ragnor to death.

Victory Skorne!

 

Final Thoughts

• This was a pretty close game, and because we're both new to Hordes, we both forgot things. I kept forgetting about the cyclops savages' future sight, and my opponent forgot lots of Troll rules which may have let him win. But we're learning.
• The round that the trolls frenzied really hurt my opponent. I'll need to keep this in mind in the future, as I have lots of models which can add fury to enemy beasts.

Custom Steamroller Zone

With all the terrain I've been designing, I decided that a 6 inch by 12 inch steamroller zone would be great. Plus, it would give me a chance to use this new roller I recently picked up.

I first used a 50 millimeter base to draw a circle in the center of a plank of balsa, and I formed modeling clay into that circle as best I could. After it dried and hardened, I glued it into place. 

Next, I printed and cut out a Cygnus. I held it in place and painted all around it. That didn't work great. I had to do it a couple times to get the shape right. When I had the rough design in place, I had to do the rest by hand.

With the centerpiece in place, my plan was then to lay clay down all around it to the same thickness, approximately an eighth of an inch. After I'd done so, I hit it with the roller, creating a textured tile effect in the clay, which I then let dry.

The result wasn't as perfect as I'd hoped. My clay was thinner than expected, leaving a bit of a step up onto the disk at the zone's center. Even worse, the clay at the edges of the zone was peeling up and was ready to break off. I had to cut the edge of the clay off and glue on a border similar to what I'd done with my docks terrain piece.

I painted the balsa border black, and hit the entire terrain piece other than the disc at the center with black/grey paint, mostly to get the area between the tiles. Then I started painting the individual tiles varying shades of brown and grey. This was the most time-consuming part of the process.

 After the tiles were painted, there was still a small gap around the disc and at the edges near the wood border. I put down some white school glue there with a toothpick, and smeared dirt from my yard into the glue. Figuring that the dirt wouldn't hold with just glue, I then sprayed the entire piece with a clear spray lacquer, layering it extra thick atop the dirt.

From there, I was nearly done. I found that there were a few sections where the roller hadn't impressed the clay as deeply as others. Those areas looked a lot like puddles in the cobble street. So I played into that. I lay down "streams" of clear gel gloss in those areas, attempting to make my puddles. And while they didn't end up looking exactly as I'd imagined, the piece does look pretty good.

Here's my custom Cygnar zone.

Terrain: Docks

After learning a new method for laying clear glaze over blue paint to make water, I had the idea to create a dock terrain piece. I hadn't really planned it out ahead of time, but it came together fairly quickly.

I used green stuff and super glue to stick down the eight posts holding up the docks, then I laid balsa planks between them. Cutting the slats that would sit on top was time-consuming, but I'm happy with the end result.

I glued down a border of balsa around the edges, then painted it and the bottom of the piece blue. I glued down a few small rocks, then used a putty knife to apply clear gel gloss around and under the dock.

 

 

When that had dried, about 24 hours later, I glued down some brush and stones beneath the dock. Atop the deck, I glued down a couple terrain crates and a barrel which I made with some leftover green stuff.

The bank beside the docks was the toughest part. The first version, which is not pictured here, was too steep, and models wouldn't stay on it without falling off. This version is better, but still not perfect. I put a small wooden plank on one edge to make it a bit larger for warjacks, but you need to imagine that it's ground level, and simply move models up and down as if it were.

In the end, it's not a perfect terrain piece, but it's one step in my terrain journey. I learn something every time I make one of these.

Custom Steamroller 2021 Objectives

 

I recently decided it would be nice to have a custom set of Warmachine objectives to match up with the list of objectives in Steamroller 2021: armory, observatory, cargo net, fuel cache, wreckage, and dugout.

The first objective, the armory, was made with balsa on top of the lid from a cold brew coffee container. The coffee lid's base happens to be exactly 50 millimeters: perfect. One side has warjack weapons, the other has a sword knight's shield and a spare sword, and another side has a stormblade infantryman's voltaic sword. Simple, but it works.

 

 

The second objective was one of my first ideas, and is perhaps my least favorite of the batch. The observatory is made from a painted plastic Easter egg. The telescope is a painted drinking straw. I cut it into segments and clipped it, incrementally curling each piece tighter and tucking it into the previous slightly larger piece. On the suggestion of a friend, I glued a tiny piece of plastic on the end as a lens. It doesn't look great.

 

Next, the cargo net. With painted clay to hold the four corner posts in place, I put some terrain crates in the center and tied together a makeshift net from twine, super gluing the twine to the posts.

The wreckage terrain piece was the simplest to conceptualize, but painting it took some time. I was pretty happy with how the Cryx wreck marker came out.

The fuel cache was another easy one. After I'd painted the barrels, putting down some clay onto a large base and painting it was nothing.

Lastly, my personal favorite, the dugout. I spent a long time asking myself what a dugout even is. All the image searches I tried returned baseball results, which wasn't very helpful. Eventually, I found images of a dugout shelter or cellar, like a root cellar. That works. The tricky part was making a hole in the ground as a terrain piece. 

I cut a hole in the top of the coffee lid, and built actual steps from balsa wood, going down from the surface at the top of the lid to the surface of the table. Then I built a shelter at the top from the same balsa. Paint, clay, and sand made up the rest. 

So how do you like my Steamroller 2021 custom objectives? The main thing I need to do now is design a case for them to transport them without ruining them.