Another Games Day, another project. Only this time I've decided to put my money (literally!) where my mouth is and do something about the absence of Epic 40,000 at Games Day. So there I was, back in January, rummaging through some of the more secluded boxes in my work area when I stumbled across some of my 'older' epic guardsmen. After much nostalgic chuckling an idea popped into my head, wouldn't it be nice I thought, now that Fanatic has helped breath life back into Epic, to see about getting it featured at Games Day once again. So I suggested it to Jervis. By the time my brain had caught on to what I was up to, it had already been settled. Now all I had to do was make it happen (oh dear!) In the beginning. Simply putting together an Epic 40,000 game is relatively straight forward, think of a theme and build the terrain and models around it. However, once I decided to do this, I decided it shouldn't just be any ordinary game, but something a bit more challenging, both gaming wise and more importantly modelling wise. At the end of the day, this is going to go to Games Day and ought to be something a bit special. With this in mind I literally sat down with a pencil and piece of paper and just scribbled some ideas out. The first idea and the one I originally ran with was to do a re-fight scenario based on the 3rd Armageddon war. Planning for this had got pretty far along when a small spanner was thrown into the works. Warwick was looking for somebody to supply an Epic participation game for the Warhammer World Open Day in May and asked if I could do it. Rather foolishly I agreed (well, a jolly up to Games Workshop HQ is never a bad thing). This obviously meant accelerating the production of the boards and armies somewhat, actually a fortnight to be precise. Knowing I couldn't realistically paint up enough Orks in that time as well as make the boards I had a bit of a rethink. In the end I decided to make the game Imperium versus Tyranids, with a few twists along the way. Terraforming
Having not long finished reading 'Necropolis', I was really took by the idea of a walled city under siege. With this in mind I sketched out a total of four board sections, with just under half occupied by the city. I started with four 2' x 4' pieces of 8mm MDF (Medium Density Fibre) board, which not only gives a very smooth and hard wearing surface to work on, but also don't tend to warp when stored upright. After marking out where I wanted the buildings and roads to go, I cut the hills and mountains out of pieces of dense polystyrene and fixed them to the boards using a 'cool melt' glue gun (you can get these from most hobby or craft stores, but take care with 'hot melt' glue as it will not only melt the polystyrene, but your fingers also!). To textures the rock faces I used an interior decorating plaster such as Polyfilla. This comes pre-mixed and is just applied straight onto the polystyrene. This is a great way to not only texture rock, as you can 'stipple' it with a brush, but also sets very hard and protects the otherwise flimsy polystyrene core. The roads were textured with car body filler which I simply smoothed on and sanded to the finish I wanted. Notes on using Car Body Filler: Ok, I admit that this stuff is great for sculpting with as it goes off incredibly quickly (in about 10 minutes in fact!), however there are a few things to be wary of if you have never used it before. Firstly it can be very expensive, so use sparingly. It also gets very hot!. The more hardener you add to the base putty the hotter it gets (and the quicker it goes off). Finally don't use this stuff in doors (and I really, really mean that!). It gives off a massive amount of noxious fumes and is irritating to the skin and lungs. The plus side however is it can be sanded, filed and drilled to an incredibly smooth finish. If you don't fancy using it, decorators filler will do just fine. The final base texture once everything else had set, was a layer of sand and gravel, which I sprinkled over a layer of watered down PVA glue. Painting the boards
Once all the colours were on, I then applied a further layer of various coloured flock, trees and moss. These were applied more sparingly and randomly using the following technique. Take a small spray bottle, like the ones used for spraying plants. pour in a little PVA glue and thin it down until it has the consistency of milk. Simply 'spray' patches you want the flock to go and sprinkle away. The end effect is a lot more natural looking as areas of the brown base colours show through the flocks. The entire board can be sealed then using more sprayed on PVA, just to keep everything nicely in place. The two boards above are the middle sections, although they are still far from complete yet as a lot more detail still needs to be added, such as more rubble, low ruins, defence lines and bunkers. But all of that I will cover in a later update nearer the time. Part Two: Making the buildings
The buildings roughly fall into two categories; undamaged and ruined. The undamaged buildings were easy, I simply purchased the amazingly detailed ones that Forge World had already created. The trick now was to make the ruined buildings appear like they were at least of a similar design and look. Over the past few years I have seen quite a few Epic games and if one thing stands out as being uniform across all of those games, it is the use and look of the ruins. I have noticed a tendency to assemble the buildings straight out of the box, generally as a straight forward hollow box shape. What I want to show here is that with a little imagination and a few extra bits, larger more intricate sets of ruins can be created. To make the buildings I used a combination of the plastic ruin frames from the Epic 40,000 boxed game (apologies if you are having difficulty getting these, I know they are becoming rarer than rocking horse poo!), plastic card, air cure modelling clay (such as DAS), spare bits from Warhammer 40,000 building and tank kits, and copious amounts of heavy gravel and sand for texturing the bases.
Here's
where a bit of imagination comes into play. Instead of assembling each set of
ruins into individual buildings, I started combining entire sections together
to make larger layouts. This process is kind of guided by the size of the
spaces you leave on the board between the roads. By deciding how big the
buildings 'foot print' is before you start assembling it, you effectively
force yourself into 'filling' that area, either with a building, number of
combined smaller buildings or even areas of paving. The images I have included
are examples of what I mean by this as no two buildings are identical. Once I
had finished each building, I went back and added some further details, such
as floors, paving slabs, craters and broken roof sections. The roofing was achieved using some of the window arches from the warhammer 40,000 plastic ruins frame, which I clipped off and stuck onto the base as large pillars. I used pre-textured sheets of plastic tiling (the sort used for 'N' gauge model railways) for the roof sections, which are stuck onto the pillars using hot glue. The floors were constructed out of the card sections that were supplied with the buildings, although any oldstiff card will do. These were simply coated in PVA glue and sprinkled with sand and gravel. The pillars at the front of the larger building were made by stacking wheels from the Leman Russ kit one on top of the other, before finishing them with the gothic gun towers from the Imperator Titan. All of the buildings were painted in exactly the same way as the textured boards, using a dry brush of codex grey, fortress grey and finally ghostly grey. I dry brushed the roof sections scab red and the textured bases with a little bestial brown and bleached bone. Theme Objects: (Five weeks until Games Day) Ok, now that most of the buildings are out of the way, I want to talk a bit about theme objects. Most Epic games are driven by a number of objectives, which are either marked counters placed by the players, or even special terrain markers, like bunkers and communication towers. Naturally I wanted to keep this kind of structure for the Games Day game, but at the same time integrate these objectives far more into the actual terrain and more importantly scenario we would be fighting over. I refer to these objectives as 'theme objects', or in other words actual tangible sections of the gaming terrain that are 'part of a theme' to the specific game we will be playing. An example in a Warhammer 40,000 game would be the model of a crashed shuttle or escape pod, something your army can actually take and hold that fits with the game scenario. With all of this in mind, I sat down and wrote out the scenario for the game in more detail, making notes of any ideas that would make a good terrain piece. As the game revolves around a Tyranid invasion, I came up with the idea of having a Tyranid drone ship as the source of the Tyranids attack on the city. I developed the idea a bit further and thought "what if the drone had been crippled in a naval battle above the planet, could it not have used its dying throes to enter the atmosphere before crashing to the ground a few miles short of the city". As luck would have it I was running a game of Adeptus Titanicus II at the Black Library Open Day and Mark Bedford was there working on some concept Tyranid ships for Battlefleet Gothic. After a chat with Mark a design was agreed for the Tyranid craft, which tied the two games together rather nicely. Putting my notes aside on the ship, I continued looking for other pieces of terrain I could use as specific objectives. In the end I cam up with a short list which included A power station, bridge, railhead, Astropath beacon, command bunker and of course the tyranid ship itself. I will cover the construction behind each of these in more detail in a later update, but for the moment I was happy with the final scenario design. |
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The
first stage in making the gaming boards was to plan out exactly what I wanted
them to look like. As 'City Fight' was going to be one of the themes running
throughout this years event, I felt some kind of city section ought to feature
(plus it gave me a feeble excuse to use some of Forge Worlds incredible
resin buildings).
I
firstly spray undercoated all of the boards black. You could do this by hand,
but I was feeling lazy and generous enough to purchase a few cans to save me
the time. I then dry brushed most of the areas bestial brown, bubonic brown
and bleached bone in that order. The city areas, roads and ruins I dry brushed
codex grey, fortress grey and finally ghostly grey.
Having
measured out the spaces that I wanted the main buildings to occupy, I started
assembling these separately on pieces of thin hardboard cut to fit the spaces.
Although you could easily glue the building directly onto the boards, which
would look a lot more natural, I wanted to ensure that they could be stored
easily once complete.