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 They are no more*, they have been replaced by a combination of printed hex plates and some risers.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!

Table updates

No new 3d work recently, I've not really been in the mood after the roof for the pigsty failed to fit properly. I need to go back and fix both parts at some point, but I've sorta lost interest in that one.

Aaaanyway. I have done some more bits and pieces to go around the table though To get a bit more shape to the table, I cut a bunch more hill sections. I'm slowly getting to grips with cutting these things and only worrying about the edges cut to the right level neatly and hacking the rest in to allow for some variation in shape/curvature once the polyfilla goes on
 

The woodlands got some nice extensions too. These are the last two Citadel wood trees that I own now built, so I had to go searching for some alternatives. The joy of a 3d printer is there are a few decent alternatives out there. The ones I settled on were the Winterdale Gnarly trees from Printablescenery.com. They look pretty good, but not quite up to the same standard as the old GW plastics. Still, $9 for the file and about £1.20 per tree in resin and more variation is pretty good value for a bit of a quality drop. The added bonus is I've also printed out a bunch at 10mm for a different (new) project that will get it's own post at some point
 

The bushes are from the free sample pack on the Lost Adventures kickstarter page and the free Black Carrot Designs tree stump on Thingiverse. The fun of 3d printing is the ability to merge models to provide some variety, which you can see from the bushes merged into the treestump. I also added a little rabbit hiding in the bush, to see if anyone is paying attention while playing on the table ;)
 

There are also some squirrels and a magpie hidden in the trees if you look carefully. The last addition doesn't really fit the more fantasy theme, but will be a fun objective in more weird war/pulp games. I had the shelter for a while all painted up, but kept forgetting it existed... so it is now part of the table.
 

I put a hex on you...

Updating once a year is a terrible terrible thing and I need to be better at this. I know I say this every year... but *this* time... *this* time. I hope everyone is keeping safe at the moment!

I did start a Warhammer Quest blog over on my home domain, but that derailed slightly as I got distracted by 7TV... at some point it'll get resurrected when interests switch back to that I'm sure.

Not much painting has happened over the last year, but for the key bits I'll go back and add them in the next week or so. These are mainly the two casts taken to the Board in Brum's 7TV days that seem to have become my primary gaming outlet of late. But more on those later!

Lockdown has given me a good chance to actually get back to building my modular gaming table. I finished just enough of it to take to the last 7TV day and it seemed to go down well with lots of ideas thrown around for additions. This is what people got to play over at the time and went with my cast of scarecrows; the edge of Winterly with the windmill, blacksmith and the millers house

The buildings are all 4Ground, with the old GW woods fitting in really well as the creepy trees in this haunted village. Sadly they are no longer produced and are not cheap on eBay... if anyone comes across any spares that they want to get rid of, let me know as I'd love to have even more! The field is your typical doormat fair with a non-animated scarecrow being played by the Crooked Dice Mr Mangel

Some of the more recent additions to the board have been a stone circle

and a village pond. The pond is still awaiting some ducks and flowers to arrive to make it look a little less sparse, but it is the first experiment with water effects on the board. Some murkiness was added with some Vallejo slime effect in the lower layers. I forgot to paint the bottom a much darker colour though, so it's a very shallow pond...

The board has it's own thread on https://leadadventureforum.com/ but I intend to keep figure posts over here as well as other experiments

Gaming tables

During the painting challenge I started to finally build my gaming table using a hex tool that I bought off kickstarter from a company called HexTerrain. These mdf tools make it easy to create a modular table, which for me is a godsend as I'm fickle and get really bored of the same layout all the time.

While it looks great, it was taking forever to cut out all the hexes for this little section, which isn't even 1/8th of my gaming table surface... plus I've not even started on hills, rivers, cliffs and the riser blocks needed to make the different levels of the table. One of the main challenges for this is getting the two layers of the template lined up correctly. As you can see from the current tiles, there are some gaps and misalignments that have come about due to the two sides being a little bit twisted.

In a mad flash of inspiration and a call to foam cutting service, I now have a *huge* box of machine cut hexes :D

Long lost update

Apart from yesterday's Conan excitement, things have been a bit quiet here recently as hitting the initial goal of 500 points in the painting challenge seems to have burned me out a little. I think it was about this time last year that I also lost momentum. Still, we have a painting day arranged on the 21st, so hopefully I can get a kick up the arse. The last thing painted was Tank Girl, Camp Koala and Booga for the Hot sub-challenge. These three were from the Frother's Charity Model thing in 2013. Very nice models, though sadly TG had a mold line running right around her that was hard to get rid of completely.

It was also about this time last year that the urge to build a gaming table of some sort started... sadly apathy and dis-organisation set in and I never did get around to starting it. That too has returned. It must be something about seeing all those painted figures together that sparks it. Hopefully I can overcome apathy this year and actually make some terrain.

The main stumbling block is working out the best way to do the base board. Modular, thick foam is one approach so I can carve in rivers, coast lines etc. This one is appealing, but does lead to storage issues as I don't have a dedicated gaming room like some lucky people. This raises issues with placing buildings on non-flat terrain.

Option 2 is a gaming mat of some sort. The plain green ones, like the old GW mat, don't appeal as they look a bit lifeless. I've seen a few really nice ones made from thick canvas and caulking/sand, but this leads to raised roads and rivers which, for some reason, grate with me slightly. Probably from working in GW years ago with the flat green square with the wandering rivers that never stayed in place.

What do you use and what do you prefer?