Verrotwood

Having waited for over a year I finally got a chance to play Verrotwood. I had rolled a couple of cults for my friends and we got stuck in.

The scenario was a relic hunt, so we scored VP for relics, enemy cultists killed and any critters killed.

We tried a relic hunt scenario, three teams five relics and a randomly determined piece of special terrain in the middle.

We got Wicked Terrain which lures people in and requires an intelligence check to escape from. Not sure we got the rules 100% right on these bits. But it’s not an exhaustive ruleset so a bit of common sense and house ruling is inevitable.

Combat is brutal enough in Verrotwood, but two cults ensnared made for a bloody scrum. The third cult, the Halflings became embroiled with a shambling undead critter, strong and hard to kill.

We added a house rule to increase the chances of more beasties being added. We came up with ways to keep track of things as we went along. The next game will be slicker and even more fun.

For the scenarios detailed in the last section I needed patches of mushrooms to put on the table. I stumbled across some plastic/resin fairy garden mushrooms on Temu.. I ordered them and then set about making them look like wrong ‘uns.

I primed them black, dry brushed the stalks then added a fine flock. Once dried I added a little Nurgle rost and some AK grime. Then I topped it if using a blend of fleck I have used throughout the project. The final touch was to add a few tufts. I then sealed the whole lot with matt varnish after put some ipa on the flock.

Leshen Leashing Lessons

A Verrotwood mini campaign

In the two rival villages of Hexeter and St. Hives the ringing of the bells brought madness and death and the inevitable early ending of the crown green bowling season. The respective of captains of both clubs in their despair found new ventures and have turned to Necromancy, which just goes to prove you shouldn’t trust anyone under forty who does crown green bowling. Noting the proliferation of small cults popping up and vying for power, Derek the Unpleasant former captain of the Hexeter Hawks CGBC has decided to reclaim the trophy won by Satanic Stuart , captain of the awful St Hives Bees CGBC at the end of last season.

Part the first: Leshen Learned

Legend tells of a cave mid way between the towns wherein a Leshen purportedly sleeps. Unfortunately the cave is infested with Urghlocks , cave dwelling bestial subhumans (rumour has it they were the remnants of the Hexeter croquet and crochet society, but you wouln’t trust these evil smelling gits with a mallet). Derek, or the Derekromancer as he calls himself has convinced a couple of cults to come and bash urghlocks heads  (and your rivals) while he performs the ritual to awake and bind the leshen.

Part the second: Cooking Leshen -nom nom nom -gnome?

As the Leshen lumbers laboriously to St. Hives the cults are summoned by Stuart, who is having something of a Satanic panic, if you will. He needs to to conduct a ritual to put the Leshen back to sleep. He needs to make gnome soup, the Leshens’ favourite meat. On the field of play are several clumps of zoom shrooms that when eaten as a free action grant and extra move, hardly fair as the gnomes have little legs to begin with, but hey, this is grimdark. Gnomes move a short distance in a straight line, if they run through a shroom patch there is a 1 in 10 chance they hulk out and become a red cap (major forest beast). It’s also fair to say gnomes can also travel a great distance in the straight line, if you push one into a quarry. So , the aim, catch gnomes, avoid red caps, put gnomes in pot. Attacking someone carrying a gnome will cause the gnome to drop. Optional 1 in 10 chance of getting a doom shroom instead of a zoom shroom, causes DoT

Part the third: Here Endeth the Leshen

The Leshen bears down on St.Hives, fortunately for Satanic Stuart and the rest of the village, there is hope in sight. Using the previously captured gnomes  as poisoned bait (use one poison terrain as starting point for the gnomes) in tandem with the three ballistae left by the Barking Pig Darts Team (this being the local hostelry, the darts team were reportedly eaten by a weregoat). Our cultists must find ammo and throw gnomes or go toe to toe-claw to sandal – with the beast itself. Again zoomshroom patches litter the area of play. Points scored for each gnome or ballistae hit. Killing the beast by your own hand is worth a lot of points. Points for taking out other cultist too. Ballistae should be  number of players +1

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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…

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.

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.