Wargaming Anecdotes - The Land

One quirk of wargaming that I have always found mildly amusing is how the uninitiated relate to the hobby, particular in terms of the vocabulary.*  Someone who's never seen this stuff before and who wants to engage you in conversation about this very strange pastime will likely not know the proper terms for all of our hobby paraphernalia.**

One of my favorite all time examples of this is The Land.  In college my buddy Justin worked at a Wizards of the Coast store and they let him take home a War-Zone Terrain game board that got too beat up to be used in the store.   His roommates took to calling the board "The Land," as in "Justin, are you gonna get out The Land and battle?"  The name stuck and even though Justin has acquired a few other gaming boards, only this one is known as The Land.

Here's some action shots from our first game of 6th edition where we brought out The Land.  Take note of the matching hills that I got from War Zone.

The Orks and IG prepare to battle for The Land

Justin's Catachans take up position on one of the matching hills

*The same thing happens in the legal profession when dealing with laypersons, but it's not amusing when you're dealing with a client's employee whose eyes glaze over while you explain the importance of the declaration you need to them to provide in support of your motion for summary judgement.

**During a game at a GW store a passer-by asked if my Orks were Ninja Turtles.

Painting Plastic Palm Trees

Long time no post, but sometimes life gives you lemons and you waste a bunch time jerking around trying to make lemonade instead of painting silly plastic men and blogging about it.  Anyways, a few weeks back I painted up one of those nifty plastic palm trees I found at a craft store, but I just got around to snapping some pictures.  The whole process was rather simple, since the palm fronds don't come glued to the tree trunk, making the tree easy to disassemble for painting.  So, I took one of the trees apart, primed it black and then dry brushed with the appropriate colors.  The fronds have these little coconuts, which I was thinking about removing, but they look decent when they're giving some color to make them stand out.

Before & After

Great Find at the Local Craft Store - Palm Trees

I was out running errands with the misses this weekend and she needed to stop by the local craft store.  While wandering around I found the display for the California Missions model kits.  When I was growing up, if you went to a public school in California you spent a good chunk of the 4th grade learning about the Spanish missions.  At the end of the year you had to make a model of one of the missions (mine was La Purisima Concepción).  Nowadays, most schools don't make kids build a model as most of the work was, rather obviously, done by parents.  However, a few companies got smart and started making styrofoam model kits of the missions and selling little plastic accessories like farm animals and plants.  One of the things they make are these palm trees:

The Chapel of St. Nigel - Making Terrain on the Cheap

I'd been thinking about Dethtron's Gaming on a Budget series over at the House of Paincakes and I realized that I had a piece of terrain, circa 2005, sitting in the old storage cabinet that I could share with you to illustrate some of the principles that Dethtron has been writing about, hopefully motivating you to join the ranks of the home made terrain enthusiast - wow, I feel like Alton Brown.  Anyways, click on the links sprinkled throughout this post to read the related HoP article.

If you've played Warhammer long enough there are certain items that you've probably accumulated over the years, like the red plastic rulers that come in the boxed sets* and piles of tiny white dice.  If you had the 3rd edition 40k boxed set, or maybe even one of the original battle-forces, then you probably have some of the old plastic gothic ruins lying around.  Sadly, I never had any of those ruins, but I did amass a small collection of Lord of the Rings ruins from my days as a GW red shirt (we got a free box-game ever time one of the movies came out).  Alas, they are not nearly as cool the 40k ruins, but sometimes one must make do with the contents of one's proverbially terrain making pantry.  Here's what I did to spruce some of these ruins to turn a bland, ho-hum piece of terrain into something better, the Chapel of St. Nigel!

Castles Made of Foam

I was hoping to get enough work done on my Stegadon and post a WIP picture, but I didn't make as much progress on him as I would have liked this week. I wanted to offer up some "real" hobby content as a break from the maniacal ramblings of my last few posts (although Brent and John over at the HOP seem to have enjoyed some of it, much to my delectation). Thus, I bring you a castle!