Any terrain used by the Spodilicious posse has to fit several criteria. They are, in more or less this order:
- It has to be strong. At the end of the night it is stuffed in a box, which is then jammed into a cupboard. The terrain piece has to be still useable when it emerges for the next game.
- It has to be realistic. Although a lot of the games are about non-historical subjects the terrain must look plausible.
- It has to be multi-purpose. A piece should be useable in at least two periods. So the ruins are good for post-apocalyptic stuff, but are also free from obviously futuristic features so can do for WW2 as well. Assorted walls can do for ancient to Napoleonic, and maybe post-apoc too. Burned out cars are appropriate for PA and probably also for zombie games. Trees, bushes and hills are not period-specific at all, although they may be region-specific - the WW2 games are in Ukraine, but the DBA games in the Middle East, so fir type trees and palm trees are both required. And so on.
- It has to be playable. Ruins must have flat areas to stand on. Buildings must have lift-off roofs or flat roofs on which figures which are supposed to be inside can stand. Hills can't have sloping sides for bases to slither down. More on hills later.
- It has to be cheap. Bits bought off eBay are great. Any home-made items must be from materials scavenged from around the house, repurposed from rubbish, or at a push bought in the pound shop.
- It has to be strong. At the end of the night it is stuffed in a box, which is then jammed into a cupboard. The terrain piece has to be still useable when it emerges for the next game.
- It has to be realistic. Although a lot of the games are about non-historical subjects the terrain must look plausible.
- It has to be multi-purpose. A piece should be useable in at least two periods. So the ruins are good for post-apocalyptic stuff, but are also free from obviously futuristic features so can do for WW2 as well. Assorted walls can do for ancient to Napoleonic, and maybe post-apoc too. Burned out cars are appropriate for PA and probably also for zombie games. Trees, bushes and hills are not period-specific at all, although they may be region-specific - the WW2 games are in Ukraine, but the DBA games in the Middle East, so fir type trees and palm trees are both required. And so on.
- It has to be playable. Ruins must have flat areas to stand on. Buildings must have lift-off roofs or flat roofs on which figures which are supposed to be inside can stand. Hills can't have sloping sides for bases to slither down. More on hills later.
- It has to be cheap. Bits bought off eBay are great. Any home-made items must be from materials scavenged from around the house, repurposed from rubbish, or at a push bought in the pound shop.
The hills I have are fine for 15mm, but as I have moved to 28mm they look a bit small. It is hard to claim uphill advantage from a rise which only comes up to a figure's knees. I experimented with a hill carved from a piece of a sheet of pink foam found in the shed. This does count as scavenging as I do not remember buying it. I cut out a rectangle with the bread knife then sloped the sides using a serrated steak knife. All this was done outside on a windy evening so the bits blew away. Do not do this indoors as the bits of polystyrene are impossible to Hoover up. I sanded the slopes down and then painted it all with a tester sized pot of green paint (from Asda, £1). I then flocked it in a variety of colours. It looks okay, but DBA elements, which have magnetic sheet on the bottom for storage, slide down the slope and as the hill is all slope it doesn't really work.
The only alternative is a stepped hill, with a flat top to stand on and a near-vertical side. It is certainly clear whether you are on the hill or off it, but the sudden transition looks strange. I had a go, using foam scavenged from a two foot square board which I used to play 15mm on but which got snapped in two. I used the flocked side as the bottom and hacked the sides sort of vertical with a steak knife. I tried to make them slightly cliff-like. I then coated the sides and top with 'Spodilicious paste' (TM). This is a substance I am experimenting with. It is a mix of pound shop 'Sticks Like Nails' glue, PVA, and paint - in this case black, which as the glue is white gives the mix a grey colour. If I am using it to simulate concrete, on a ruin for example, I mix in sand, but here I did not. I makes the surface quite tough and, I hope, chip-proof. The sides were then drybrushed with lighter greys and the top flocked. This is the result.
It looks like it blocks line of sight, as it is taller than a figure. I don't have a problem with it in single-based figure games. Going up a hill in a Song of Blades type game reduces a figure's move and I can rationalise that as them finding a route and then climbing up. I imagine the figurines scrambling up like in the ancient Spectrum game Ant Attack, probably making a slight grunting sound as they do so. However the way a DBA element arrives at the foot of the cliff then effortlessly floats up to the top, as the hills have so far represented only gentle hills, makes me uneasy. The Warrior Miniatures Chinese archers shown below for scale give an idea of the thickness of the foam.
At the top of the page is a ger - not a yurt - for my Mongols to use as a camp. After a hard day spent devastating Central Asia and Iran and generally setting humanity back several centuries they need somewhere to rest. It began life as the inside of a toilet roll - the cardboard tube from inside a roll from work, which tube is of larger diameter and thicker card than the sort found inside the domestic toilet roll. I then cut it in half to give a tube of the right height. Then from cardboard I cut a circle a bit bigger than the tube. By cutting a slit in it from edge to centre I then was able to make this into a cone. You want the cone to have only a shallow slope on it; your real ger has quite a flat roof. I taped the cone shut and then taped the cone to the top of the tube to give the basic shape. A door and frame was cut from thin card and stuck on, and then I covered the outside, walls and roof, with PVA and stuck on torn up paper to simulate the felt panels the real thing has. If you make one cut the smoke-hole in the centre as soon as you make up the cone. If you make it too big you can always reduce the size when you clad the roof with 'felt'. Don't do as I did - forget about it then crudely hack an off-centre hole in the roof. Lastly add string to represent the ropes around the walls. In a real ger the roof is a remarkable wheel-like construction of springy wood, which is pushed up and the ends of the 'spokes' slotted into the frame of the walls; the ropes stop the walls being pushed out by the tension.
