Okay, here's the down and dirty of it. For those of you tuning in late, the goal here is to make 18 woods sections complete with flocked bases, 36 trees and 36 bushes... all for 39 $US. Today I cover the construction of the trees themselves.
Start by drilling 6 small holes in a GW round base, cutting 3 lengths of floral wire, and pulling 3 sprigs of greenery off the bunch you grabbed at a discount craft store. Take care to leave a section on the underside of the round base large enough to hold one of the magnets. (More on that later.)
Use floral tape to bind the 3 sprigs into a bunch as shown, and loop the 3 wires through the GW round base like so. The wires will hold the tree firmly onto the base so that even rough handling and ill placed tanks cannot damage the tree.
Place the bundle of greenery on the base and wind the three wires around it. I find that making one of the wires go the opposite direction from the other two adds stability to your tree, as well as forcing the smaller branches out and away from each other. Finish the top of the tree off by wrapping 1 wire around each of the sprigs of greenery, so that you get 3 large branches at the top of the tree going out in different directions.
Now take a bit of floral tape and wrap the tree trunk. It'll take a little practice to get the tape to go around the branches, but this too helps spread them out to make it look more tree-ish.
Tear off a bit of floral clay and cover the tree trunk. You can leave this step off if you're pressed for time or otherwise like the look of the floral tape tree trunk, but the clay allows you to texture the trunk a bit and allows you to create "roots" to cover up the wire and the slot in the GW round base. Give it a few days to dry so it's not sticky before you work with it further. It will never be as hard as sculpy or Green Stuff miniature clay, but it's a heck of a lot cheaper.
Fill the bottom of the GW round base (or the large half of the bottom if it has a slot bisecting it like mine) with more clay. Be sure to mush it in there real well, so that it flows around the wire in the base. once it dries, the wire will hold the clay in place. (if you find this isn't the case and your clay keeps coming out... superglue it.) BEFORE it dries, make an indent in the clay for your rare earth magnet, then glue the magnet in place once the clay is hardened.
Behold, one tree. And a very excited Kroot Mercenary for scale comparison.
Coming up in Part III... painting and flocking trees.
For the upcoming RTT at Origins, one of my tasks is coming up with enough woods sections to equip three 4x6 tables. Since we have no trees, I need to make or buy them. I could buy them, but each terrain base of trees would cost roughly 8 bucks if I use GW trees or a decent competitor, and that doesn't count the cost of prepping the base itself. Since I need roughly 18 sections of woods, that's over 130 $US... and that's unacceptable.
No, for this project, I'll be doing 18 woods sections, including 36 trees and 36 bushes, for a total cost of 39 $US.
Here's what we need for the project.
- 1 pack GW Round bases (37 count) - $8
- 1 spool Floral Wire - $2
- 2 spools Floral Tape - $3
- 2 spools Floral Clay - $4
- 2 bunches of small-leaf fake greenery, on sale 50% off - $6
- 2 buckets modelling flock, on sale 50% off - $7
- 1 pack 40 rare earth magnets - $5
- 1 tube PVA glue - $4
- assorted scrap sheet metal - free
The idea is that we cut the sheet metal and cover it in flock to provide the base of the terrain. Then I build up trees and shrubs on the round bases, and put a magnet on the bottom of the taller trees so they won't fall over.
Stay tuned for Part 2, the basic assembly.
Fast forward to sometime in 995.M02, or 1995 if you prefer. The Black Codex years of 2nd Ed are behind us, and while armor penetration rolls have gotten easier, everyone is still photocopying blast templates so they'll have enough blind grenade markers for a typical game. Meanwhile, Armorcast is making fantastic vehicles that we never thought would see the light of day in our favorite 28mm wargame. As a result, the battles are getting larger. We're still gaming every week, but now massed battles of 10000 points or more are happening regularly.
My own Space Marine chapter, the Distant Sons, are better defined now, and I've narrowed them down to a single paint scheme. The Distant Sons are unusual for a marine chapter at this time, since they're fielding marines in old-fashioned squads of 10. Better yet, I've got banners now, and they're starting to look like a proper force.
It's in the larger battles that Commander Qalsone (call-SOWN) loses his invincible aura once and for all. There's just too much armor-defeating nastiness roaming around now, and my typical opponant is now an Imperial Guard player, so I'm learning to despise battlecannons. It's because of all these imperial versus imperial fights and high body counts that we start to develop a storyline.
At first, Ranillon and I are just engaging in "war games". Qalsone and his marines attack an imperial guard garrison with "low power" weapons and they see how long it takes them to repel us. But the larger games played at the shop aren't buying that idea, so pretty soon we have our own Age of Apostacy going on, with marine fighting marine alongside IG players, and nobody is sure who is the traitor and who is the loyalist!
In the end, Ranillon's IG and my Distant Sons marines are on the winning side of the 60,000 point world-ending battle. [The game store closed down soon after.] Under Qalsone's leadership, the Distant Sons claimed the lives of a great multitude of loyal followers of the Emperor who had been led astray by their greedy commanders. A price was to be paid for this "victory", and our imperial forces were exiled and sent on an indefinate crusade. [Ranillon and I changed jobs and moved to Ohio.]
In 999.M02, Qalsone was given the opportunity to redeem his chapter's honor and return the Distant Sons to the Emperor's grace. Preparations were made to take part in a Great Crusade [the 1999 Chicago Grand Tournament], and new marines were drafted and prepared. Qalsone was promoted to Captain of the 3rd Company, becoming a Space Marine Captain at last. He was given one of the chapter's relics to aid him in combat, a weapon claimed from a fallen Inquisitor.
Onward...
Summer, 990.M02. (That's way back in 1990 for most of us.) Having been introduced to Epic scale 40K, my college friends convince me that to REALLY enjoy the hobby, I should get into the 28mm scale Warhammer 40K as well. Turns out, they were right. (Rob Elrick, wherever you are, I blame you for draining my bank account over the years in all the steady tithing to Games Workshop I have done since then.)
With a borrowed copy of the 2nd Edition "Black Codex" rules, I set out to create a Space Marine chapter. Rhinos are $15 for a box of three, but the plastic beaky marine sets have just gone out of print. So instead, I buy a box of Space Rangers minis for my first units of tactical and devastator marines. My painting skills are terrible, but I managed one decent model, an olive and yellow sergeant with a distinctive letter Q on his chest. He's the prettiest, he's in charge. So while he leads Q squad, this Veteran Sergeant is also in charge of R and S squads. I name him Qalsone. (call-SOWN)
For the next two years, Sergeant Qalsone leads his tactical squads against the worst my local gaming group can dish out. In the vast, futuristic wasteland that was the Craddock house's kitchen and garage, he and his men faced down Howling Banshees, genestealer cults, Goff and Deathskull ork clans, chaos marines of tzeentch, and even Squat warrior brotherhoods. Though the men he led often paid with their lives, Qalsone himself never died, his Refractor Field and Stasis Grenade were always just enough to keep him alive.
Thirty-seven consecutive games he survived, clearly blessed by the Emperor himself. The time had come for Qalsone to be promoted, and a two-wound lieutenant he became. He pioneered the new paint scheme that my Distant Sons marines would carry into the future as the game headed into it's 3rd edition, and he often assumed command of numerous squads of the newly minted 3rd Company. As armies got bigger and the stomping of Titans' feet could now be felt, grander things were soon to come...
Long time readers of this blog might have noticed that there are actually TWO people on the author side of this site. To the rest of you... hello. While Ranillon may have me out-posted by over 80 posts, and while his available time with the hobby has allowed him to surpass my armies in both quantity and quality, I have... uh... I have three kids in diapers.
Warning... PICTURE OF KIDS ...
Yes, life happens to every avid gamer in this genre and we find our priorities suddenly change. A move, a killer job schedule, a busy school schedule, a new relationship, or even having kids. All this and more can turn your gaming schedule on it's ear and leave you with precious little time to enjoy the hobby. You either know this already or you know it's coming. The trick is... what to do about it?
There are several key things you can do to maximize your remaining time and stay involved in the hobby.
- Personal Time - No matter what events in your life are eating away your precious free time, you have to set aside SOMETHING for yourself. Raising 3 kids makes this tough, but if the wife and I don't reserve "me" time, we'd go mad. Mad I tell you, mad. I get saturday evenings to myself (which is my reserved gaming time) as well as weeknights between 10 and midnight (which is when I paint and convert minis). Your schedule may be less demanding than this, but the principle is the same. Set aside the time, make a routine out of it, or you'll never get anything done.
- Deadlines - I'm one of those people who works best on a deadline. If I have two months left until that tournament, i can whip out an entire army in that time. But without a deadline, I never seem to get anything done. (Just ask Ranillon, he pokes fun at me for it.) If life is taking away your time, consider setting goals and deadlines for yourself. Give yourself so many weeks to finish that unit and schedule a game with friends to debut it in so you force yourself to paint it up on time.
- Discipline - When you're short on time, maximizing use of that time is key. With only two hours a night of personal time, it's easy to have too many things to spend it on. This is my biggest failing. I lost a lot of 2008 to Neverwinter Nights 2 and Civilization 4, and that killed my productivity in the hobby. If you're one of those gamers who can paint up one army and feel comfortable using it over and over again for years with your local crowd, then losing your time to video games or other things isn't so bad. But the true fanatic is one who wants to expand their collection, constantly adding new squads, new vehicles, new armies. And to do that, you need to avoid giving in to other hobbies until your army is done or until you reach the stopping point you set out to hit.
- Focus - Yes, stopping points. You have to focus on what you're working on. Painting up a unit of Kroot Mercenaries followed by an Orc warlord conversion followed by several test paints of High Elf Spearmen does you no good as a gamer. Those kroot should have been followed up by an Ethereal conversion and then a newly painted Sniper Drone team. THAT would have done you some good, and would have allowed you to field a better force. Stay focused. You can work on the elf army next.
With these things in mind, even a gamer with limited time such as myself can make decent contributions to his collection. In the next month or two, I'll be focused on producing terrain for Origins. Specifically, woods and trees for use in the Rogue Trader rounds. Stay tuned, and see if I can practice what I preach.
I'm talking of course about Titans.
With the re-invention of mass battles under the Apocalypse system, we've seen a tremendous effort of modelling on behalf of some brilliant gamers in our area (gargants, silver towers, tupperware titans) and we've also seen the re-emergence of a lot of the old armorcast superheavy models. The first Apoc game run at Armoury Games here in town featured a truly vast chaos horde approaching a dug in imperial force. I brought my old Reaver titan, who had LITERALLY not seen a game in ten years, and it paired up with Ranillon's classic warhound titan and a few shadowswords for our heavy firepower. Old Nobilis Indomitus was fielded with rules from the Bell of Lost Souls and literally towered over the battlefield, pattering fire off it's adamantine hull.
By the third game, however, titan fever had spread. The forces of order were fielding no less than two eldar titans and FIVE imperial titans, including a warlord titan someone had scratchbuilt out of power ranger bits and a rubbermaid storage tub. My reaver titan was no longer doing the towering. In fact, from it's position in front of the primer-black tupperware warlord, it looked rather diminuative by comparison. It still managed to steal the show though... by dying. The reaver got dragged down in HTH combat by a dozen greater daemons, and it's plasma reactor overloaded inflicting a strength D hit on everything within 31 inches. That 62" blast template wiped clean all the chaos models that were overrunning our lines, and pyrric victory never tasted so good.
But the genie was out of the bag (to mangle a metaphor). The old armorcast models were virtually unobtainable due to the prices they were commanding on eBay, making the new Forgeworld models seem almost sane by comparison. And the new reaver rules out of Apocalypse Reloaded were even more deadly than the ones the fanbase had published over at Lost Souls! Bigger is now better, and machines that tower over my old reaver titan are becoming commonplace. Once the grandest thing on the board, the old armorcast models are starting to look their age, as the scale and even the rules themselves are passing them by as being too small.
Glenn here, signing on!
Having attended Origins for the past many years, I've participated in 40K and watched it dwindle from a strong Rouge Trader environment to one with anemic participation at best. Being local to Columbus, I think we can fix this. We can rebuild him. we have the technology. better than before. better stronger... uh... sorry. 
Point is, we can do this. A savvy staff of 4 to 6 can run a RTT no problem, and I look forward to it.
