The scenery bug

   This post is a bit of a cart before the horse situation but I'm going to do it in this order anyway. Something that comes up a lot when I get chatting with the other guys on the Mournival Podcast is what sort of inspirational photos we all store on our phones. The other three guys all just store pictures of figures, while I store mostly photos of scenery and gaming boards and this got me thinking about all my half started scenery collections.
   I have tried in the past to collect enough scenery to fill a 4/4 or 6/4 table to suit whatever I am playing but in the last couple of years or so, I seem to have become really lazy when it came to both carting it to Wayland Games and actually finishing the stuff which is why there haven't been as many photos from my normal games - as they simply aren't as pretty. So with a couple of big figure count painting projects now behind me, I want to focus on the boards I play on again, I have at least 3x 30k/40k boards worth of scenery to do, a jungle board that I started, scenery to go with my Adeptus Titancius, my Saxon village, a modern city board that was destined for Batman and my Gangs of Rome scenery that is gathering dust. So, a fair few things to keep me quiet.

    So, back to the first sentence of this post. The Mournival guys have been planning a 30k campaign for months now and it had been decided that I would play on the loyalist side, so I dutifully got on with getting my Ultramarines finished and I meant to do a post or two on that project before the first weekend of gaming, but instead of blogging I got on with the scenery as I needed to supply at least two of the three tables. The first of the tables was already finished and I had just been waiting to get it out so I could take a decent photo of it, while the second was in various states of painted, unpainted and, in some cases, unbuilt and with a deadline looming it seemed like the perfect time to make it my priority.

   First up I thought I would focus on the Space Port table I started a few months back as it is the one that was already finished and is less likely to have anything major added to it. This table has been going on in the background since December with me painting another batch of Munitorum Container whenever I had the enthusiasm, although, I've not been putting any pictures of them on the blog before the first two batches*. I then added a SkyShield Landing Pad to ram home the space port theme and make sure the table had a big centre piece bit of scenery.
   The table will get some more scatter terrain in the future and maybe the odd extra container or two but it is essentially finished as it is. I'm aiming for my tables to be a mix of open and heavily enclosed so that no single army has a massive terrain advantage throughout an event, if we see a particular army is suited to a type of table and keeps rolling over their opponent's, we can swap them onto the opposite type for a game or two.

*I wasn't convinced 2 or 3 posts in a row showing near 

identical blue boxes would keep anyone else's interest, let alone mine.

 

   The second table is one that has grown from a different project. I initially planned to do a space depot board and a city fight board, and I still plan to, however, the city has gone on the back burner while the Mechanicum gantries are finished first. The Mechanicum scenery was originally bought to just be a small Kill-Team board's worth as I had seen what other modellers were doing with the kits and I wanted have a try myself, but as in many cases, it has spiralled way beyond the project's remit. I still want to do at least a couple more solid structures to really fill the board up but as it stands, with a few plasti-card walkways to connect the buildings up, this creates a really dense Kill-Team board which I am really excited to get some use out of.
   The buildings are mostly black washed metal, without too much colour, because when they are on a dense board, the colour really stands out and I didn't want it to look too busy. Getting this board done on the day before the event has got me thinking about what I want to add to it, so expect to see more of this one in the future.

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Royalists

   The second post in this quick two part project* is the other side, the Royalists. As I mentioned, I already had all the rabbits from Oathsworn's current range in my basket, so that left me needing a leader and something else to match points with my other warband. Looking through the models categorised as 'Large', as I wanted a slightly bigger animal to lead the warband to match the Freebeast's fox, I came across the Hare Warrior, which fitted the theme perfectly.
   When it comes to fantasy I normally associate myself to the ranger archetype and paint warbands in greens and browns, but the Freebeasts from the last post fitted that concept better, so my Royalist warband was painted in brighter colours to show the more structured lives that the Royalists would live in my head. That was until I got to the mouse ranger as I felt that the warband needed someone with that sort of skill set and also I liked the model too much to let anyone else use it.

*famous last words

   I have half a thought of going back and giving either the Hare Warrior or the Rabbit Warrior a shield but I'm not sure which would suit it more.

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Freebeasts

   I said a while ago that my plan for the future of my hobby was to try and avoid what I was calling 'specialist skirmish games', by which I mean games that require you to buy not just the rules and some generic models, but also some combination of the following; unit cards, special dice and game specific figures. I always felt that Burrows and Badgers fell into this category because of it's figures, however, I also have house rabbits and I've had the pair of rabbits that Oathsworn produce in my basket on and off since they first released them, then it was listening to Meeples and Miniatures finally made me crack and I ordered the rulebook and then both sides for a game (although slightly under-pointed for a full game).
   Before I get to the rabbit warband, I decided to work backwards. In the fluff there are 4 main factions: Royalist, Freebeasts, Rogues and Wildbeasts, however, as a casual outsider* it feels like there are 2 main sides and a couple of disrupting factions. The big fight seems to be Royalists vs Freebeasts - supporters of the monarchy vs supporters of a less authoriative way of life, so these were the sides I decided to focus on. The next thing I discovered in the fluff was that the Freebeasts are led by foxes, which really gave me my theme, I just don't see many rabbits joining a cause led by foxes, so my rabbit warband had to be Royalist, which gave me room to play with the Freebeasts.
   As my mate Steve B is more likely to use my second faction I gave him a message and asked what his favourite British animals were and the useful bits of the reply were; Squirrels and Hedgehogs. So a quick trip online and I had a fox to lead the party, a squirrel and a hedgehog as requested and a dormouse, because the mice are seriously cool models**.

*and probably going to cause offense

**a very real risk of a mouse warband in the future

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You call that a transport? This is a transport.

   In the last two posts I mentioned that I had another project lined up that had a deadline looming - this is not that project. That out of the way, this is a model that I bought fairly early on in my rush to build a massive 30k Sons of Horus army but one that kept falling to the way side. The model is a Spartan Land Raider tank and for those who don't really know the more obscure models that Forge World has been churning out, the best I can say is that it is what happens when a Land Raider starts to feel insecure about it's size and decides to bulk up, upping it's transport capacity from 10 to 25*.
   Weirdly, I haven't actually got an immediate use for this transport, but it was something I wanted in my armoury so it was ready as soon as I did have a use.

*Which is how you start to get Primarch's and their bodyguards around the board

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Gentlemen on Horseback

   The 3rd phase of my ACW project has focused heavily on the Union side of the conflict and today's post isn't going to drastically change that, but I did want to add something useful to my Southern army before I moved onto other projects for a bit and the obvious thing to add was a unit of cavalry. I've had a mental block on painting cavalry for years, which is why my armies tend to be entirely on foot, and this has led to my pile of potential including a worrying chunk of cavalry units that haven't made it into finished armies* but this has changed with the vast numbers of Union horsemen I've churned out recently. I already know what my next project has to be - due to a looming deadline - but I am now very tempted to pick another unit of horse from my backlog to focus on as well.

*There are units for my Napoleonics and at least 4 of my Dark Ages armies in there

   Lastly, I don't normally post a huge amount of games up on here - something I probably do need to change - but we played a game of Rebels and Patriots round my mate Neil's house recently **based on a battle in West Virginia called the Battle of Pine Mountain, which gave me a chance to get all of my toys out in one go***. According to Neil, the game played to a fair representation of how the battle actually went, with the Confederates losing badly in the last few turns after doing really well for the first half****.

 **loosely

***we had to sub some Union infantry for Union Cavalry instead

****No prizes for guessing which side I was on

The Confederates trying to stem the tide and hold the pass - but it was too little too late.

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