Slacker reporting for duty!

Well *that* didn't go as planned! I blink and it is suddenly December 2021... 18 months since the last post here. I blame lockdown as it only seems like yesterday since I last posted! It seems I not only missed posting last year's AHPC stuff... but all of the work done on the modular gaming table, an Age of Sigmar Flesh Eater Court *and* a vampire counts army! I have some catchup posts to do I think!

At present I'm prepping for this year's AHPC, so there's a bit of backlog clearance to do before that starts... as well as prepping anything I want to actually paint!

So what is the main change over the last 18 months? Well things have moved on quite a bit since then. I invested in an Ender 3 to go with the resin printer, which means I have the capacity to print larger, or lower quality, things... leaving the resin printer to deal with figures rather than terrain. Remember those foam hexes that I was making last time? They are no more*, they have been replaced by a combination of printed hex plates and some risers. These were based on a concept another company did with Openlock connectors, but each hex used significantly more filament and took quite a few hours to print. With these very basic ones I can print 4 risers in the time it would take to print 1 of the others. These are also scaled to match the foam hexes that I already have.

This makes storage a lot easier, as well as simplifying swapping hexes around as I can leave the risers in place and just swap around the top bits. This has meant that I've disassembled some of the foam from 2020 and rebased them, though there's still all the trees to work on. There's a little bit of tidying up that I need to do, then they will be going onto Thingiverse. It's not full terrain like Hexhogs' mountains/cliffs (more of which later), but encourages terrain building instead. For grasslands I've been using Vallejo textured earth paste

Larger buildings or set pieces are going on merged tiles, allowing a bit more scale to be added

Likewise, it's easy to create new details to completely change the scope of a layout. In this case a set of railway line tiled means a fantasy village becomes a pulp countryside setting instead. For the railway I also printed a resized crater from Hexhogs and added some railway lines to allow for some demolition scenarios to be done with a simple swap when the bomb goes *BOOM!*

Dakka Dakka had a terrain challenge, with the theme of books so I made a little swampy reading spot using some bits and pieces of plastic terrain and coffee stirers. The stairs were from the angelic character from the recent AoS box, with some Crooked Dice birds adding to the tree

Then I realised that the competition had another month left on it... so I may have gotten carried away and made loads of swamp, grasslands and road tiles to make a 2x2 gaming table. Adding in some other bits and pieces that already existed, this is now a 3x3 swamp table for an upcoming Fantasy 7TV day in February. I'm looking forward to playing some games over this one!

The one thing I need to work on is making the grass look better. Currently it is just coming out as *green* with some fairly bland brown bits for mud... I forsee some experiments over Christmas to try and improve these, especially as I have another 3x3 layout to make before Feb as well!

*so if anyone wants a giant box of foam hexes, the cutting templates and a lot of the tiles from the original layout, let me know!