Big Box Terrain, Part One
Rough Ground
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| Sand and rocks from the yard, glued and primed. |
As mentioned previously, the golden rulebook for this box is Neil Thomas’ One Hour Wargame Rules (OHW). In some eras some unit types cannot enter rough ground. In some eras some can. So we’re left with a bit of a dilemna. Do we fill the base with rubble, signifying a no-go area? Or do we scatter limited terrain (which doesn’t look as good but) which allows bases to fit into the area? What to do, what to do?
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| Drybrushed white to lighten up the piece. |
Paging Doctor Solomon to the baby splitting office! The compromise is to make pieces with visually interesting terrain, but which include “blank” areas where you can stick a full base in the event some irregular troop does enter the area. For the purposes of the game, the entire base is considered rough ground, even if the whole base doesn’t look it.
Wood Base
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| Primed |
These are both constructed of a simple base (CD on the left, craft circle on the right) to which short lengths of round toothpicks have been super-glued. I used sticks about 3/5ths of an inch (left) and 2/5ths of an inch. The nice thing about this trick is that you don’t have to be all that precise with the lengths. The tippy tops of the trunks are going to be hidden by foliage, so any gaps won’t show.
Here I’ve added a few small stones and a sandy base make a more natural floor cover. And things are looking good.
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| Drybrushed |
The woods on the left have a large open area where you can drop a full base of figures to show that they are in the woods.
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| Fully painted |
We could stop right here if we were making terrain for World War One. But we’re not, so next time let’s add some leaves and grasses.
Looks great!