Verrotwood

Once in a while a game will just jump out and bombard me with glorious opportunity, Verrotwood for me was the trigger for a storm of ideas circling in my head. I had wanted to make a set of grim fairytale style forest, I own Silver bayonet and have a few props I could use to make a table, but a fairly generic, non-spooky one. Then I acquired Forbidden Psalm and I had another reason to want some grimdark terrain, but not really a great impetus to start.

I had been mulling over a corrupted forest set and then I stumbled across Verrotwood on Wargame vault. The art style and great miniature photos grabbed me. Some of the minis were similar to some of my Frostgrave (with one eye on Dragon Rampant) cultist kit-bashes I had been throwing together.

I starting cobbling together bits and pieces I will need to make the terrain and accompanying miniatures. You only need 4 miniatures to make your warband, going by my previous behaviors I will probably end up making about 40.

Much as I am itching to get a brush on some miniatures, I decided to start on the terrain first. To push myself a little I am going to try and make a couple of resin ponds and fully scratch build a witch hovel

I decided that it would be fun to create a list of cult names that could randomly generated. I was aiming for slightly silly results. There are a million combos, I decided to repeat the second (now seen as the third) column as a prefix too,  thus giving you  100 million possibilities! just put an ‘of the’ betwixt the ‘noun’ and ‘adjective’ column and you are good to go.

I have to give credit here to Limburg from the Beasts of War discord community who has created a handy online version of this generator . He has also bought the game,so I look forward to his tabletop creations too.

I decided to have a go at scratch building a bit of terrain, first attempt, fortunately the result was intended to look ramshackle so no precision engineering needed.

I was quite pleased with how robust the roof turned out with the supports underneath, I layered the outside with masking tape to add a little texture. Need to figure out how to do the buttresses. I want to be able to separate the tower from the finished board for ease of storage.

I added some cobbled panels to the outside.

Did a little more work on the layout for the hut I plan to add a pond with reeds and a resin fill, all stuff I haven’t tried before. Before I get much further in I need to test my armature trees out, to see if my idea for them works.

Verrotwood uses several types of terrain which makes terrain planning refreshingly easy. A lot of skirmish games suffer with needing a different center piece for each scenario. It can be tricky sometimes to keep immersion and keep terrain multi use

To create the poison terrain I will be experimenting with masking medium, alcohol inks and that GW snot paint, haven’t decided what to put on the raised platform yet, a small statue or perhaps some crystals printed with clear resin and an ink wash.

For the ground texture I used air drying clay and a bit of sculptamold.

For the burning ground I envisioned a smouldering bridge over some magma-like terrain. I sprayed a disc of mdf with white primer, then slapped some alcohol down on the top, you don’t need to be too precise as most of the colour will be covered in crackling paint anyway.

You only need four miniatures for a warband, I will still end up with 100 miniatures., although crossover potential with Reign In Hell and Idols of Torment eases the guilt a little. I normally buy new miniatures, but this time was different on two counts, I went onto ebay to look for secondhand GW stuff. While not a fan of the business entity they do some good minis and as soon as I saw Verrotwood, I had the dryads and chaos stuff at the back of my mind. I would do a bit of conversion work on these with the general brief being ‘clump foliage with teeth’.

For bigger beasties I had an extensive stl library to go at. Of course I needed to finish the terrain first…

Last weekend proved to be a great opportunity to devote some quality time to the terrain, time to root through my boxes of random things to create some new options, even managed to get the first three pieces done.

The gallery above shows the witch hut base, the burning terrain waiting for the crackle paint to dry, part of the elevated terrain and a very rough piece of climbable terrain -not sure if I like this piece but it does it’s job

So that was the ‘Burning’ ‘Scale-able’ and ‘poison’ terrains done. Inspiration had struck and I find a few more pieces come together much easily than the first one.I was on the home straight and it was onto the tree next.

I will post some separate pics for the ‘finished’ articles (I will no doubt tinker with them a little more. Once I had my method and sequence down I was able to polish them off in short order. Onto the trees.

I was tempted to leave them as is, or maybe go for a mangrove swamp effect. I had a bunch of hand dyed moss laying around, so I figured I would put it to work. Had considered selling some, but the dye was coming off in my fingers a bit (not enough glycerol).

Decided to go with some brand new paint ranges (new to me at least). I have never used Warpaint or Pro Acryl before. I also dug out the contrast paints no one talks about from Scale 75.

Had a lot of fun starting on the miniatures, also found another game I can use literally everything from this project in. Happy days. So I decided to be a bit more adventurous with green stuff for once and came up with my first cult leader figure and a couple of greater forest beasts

Monsters, I tend to avoid painting monsters or leave them until last. Characters and soldiers are easier, defined articles of clothing and equipment. beasts have no such guidelines. So far the pro acryl paints have been the most enjoyable to use. Warpaints are pretty thin but alright, the scale 75 are a hot mess, they don’t know whether they are paints inks or wash and they look almost the same in the bottle by colour, ie all the greens look the same. all the blues look the same. I can see why noone talks about them.

I find myself dragging my heels over the painting at time, especially when I am making up the colours as I go. I decided to get a bunch of the figures finished and based up. I usually find that helps me focus on completing the rest when I can see what I am working towards.

Having got ludicrously carried away with the amount of cultists, I decided to go full army for Dragon Rampant, but they could be handy for The Weald, 5 Leagues from the Borderlands, Frostgrave and so on. I will probably make that a separate project.

A push over the weekend let to the completion of several cults and a few extra critters, some of which are unique to the scenarios I am piecing together. I am really liking the Vallejo Express paints.