Return to the Cursed City of Ulfenkarn

I have not updated for a while I have been busy building and priming items for the build. I am hoping to catch up on the updates to cover what I have managed to do so far.

The original plan was just to focus on the city locations however I had a change of plans and wanted to put together an outside location. Recently I was playing games like barons war so want to put together a location that I can use for both.

The idea is to put a farm together using module elements that i can re-arrange to reflect a number of different battlefield locations.

For the farm location we need the following :-

Farmhouse
Barn
Fields
Roads
Fences / Hedges
Rocks
Hills
Farm Scatter

The farm location is going to be based on this 3 by 3 mat from Kraken Gaming.

Return to Cursed City of Ulfenkarm

We are back for Terrainfest 2024 to carry on with the cursed city project. I had not really planned to leave this project a full year but here we are. After last years monster task of building a city in a month it did leave me a little burned out. Taking a break well I just never got started again. That is not to say I forgot about it. I have been collecting bits over the past year with some ideas in mind.

During this time cubicle7 have released a book based on Ulfenkarn. Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Soulbound, Ulfenkarn: City at the Edge of Death. I have not had chance to pick the book up yet but I am sure it will be a great source material reference.

I did finish reading some time ago now the Cursed City novel by C L Werner. What sparked my interest in that book was passages about the every day life in Ulfenkarn. People having to move about during the day and still earn a living with death around any corner. The main industry covered in the book was based around the docks and hunting whales for processing the fat for oil and even the bones.

White dwarf games workshop monthly magazine also posted cursed city contents including a Mad King for the flesh eater courts taking over a sector of the market place to turn it into a court.

So we have a lot of background material to review for the next location, we have some buildings and parts collected over the year. The plan for this week at least is to build stuff and get it primed.

Project – Return to Cursed City

Task List for week one 

• Build all the terrain, MDF build, Plastic buildings,
• Prime all the MDF build, Plastic buildings,
• Come up with a more defined plan for the city

The Vharngate – Completed (for now)

We are at the end of the month and the end of the Terrainfest and for now the Vharngate location is completed. I did have a few additional things I wanted to add such as some banners but in terms of a gaming table we have one.

The core of the map features the the wall and the Vharngate itself protected by the skeleton guards. Behind it we have a ruined barracks of the skeleton guards. On the other side we have a location of ruins, houses and small chapel with grave yard.

The project is not finished but its time to play some games on the map and take a little break or at least slow down on the terrain.

The final last touches to the city are the extra details. A mix here of GW items I have picked up in the past some generic barrels, wooden fences. When you see the full city pictures later I painted some tomb stones and a few trees I had from mantic.

These are really used to try and pad out the city a little more to make it feel busy. Trying to fill a 4 by 4 area as I have found is not as easy as it seems. I guess you are stuck with this position of having a gaming area to move units about while trying to make it look real.

It perhaps echo’s the point Justin made when a table is purely for gaming and when is it a narrative table. I think we can make a gaming table feel narrative by using such items to tell a story.

Finally I did paint a model this month. It is for the soulblight grave lord army from the GW collection a vargheist. I figured this would be a good boss model for the city gate to zone for people to have to beat.

Well that is all the work done for now time to put it all together and see how it looks…

Ruins (I lied we have MDF)

Some of the comments I had back on the build so far was I need to add more levels in terms of height. Mordheim as mentioned before tends to be more open plan buildings, basically ruins with 2 or more levels to provide vantage points for archers. The other issue I had was trying to have enough buildings to cover the 4 by 4 area at a reasonable cost. 

I ended up going with the Kromlech Frostgrave ruins which are MDF kits. I know I said at the start no MDF but I just could not find any plastic ones. While 3D printed might have been an option the cost of each building was about 20-40 pounds. The Kromlech kit you get nine buildings in the set which work out to about 4 pounds each. 

I have had other MDF kits before but the Kromlech I found is a step above them. The first thing I noted was they had cleaned the kits. Normally the MDF are covered in soot which has to be cleaned first but in this case someone from Kromlech must have already done this. The kits are also lettered and the parts numbers with clear diagrams showing how they are built. Other companies should take note here the biggest crumble I had with previous ones is trying to understand the build instructions.

Short of time I only built 3 of them for now. Gave them a quick gray spray can primer before base colours of dark gray, brown for the floors and walls and cream for the panels. The stone work then got a wash with watered down black ink, a basic dry brush with the lighter gray. The floors got a brown wash to muddy them up a bit.

  It is basic level table top standard for now but I will come back to them in the future to clean up the paint work. They are good enough to play a game which is all that matters at the moment.

Buildings

Part of Ulfenkarn which is south of the wall is where the population live and work. I wanted some buildings I could use to represent this. While looking for the walls I noted the same company also did some plastic buildings. They have a cottage, a couple of houses, barn etc.

The kit is really easy to put together. The base has a number of slots around the outedge that the side walls slot and then push into to secure. The end walls then click into the base and then click into the side walls. The upper floor if the building has one rests on tabs located on the inside of the wall giving some of them 2 levels. The roofs are two halves which click together and sit on top. The walls fit together without the need for glue and can be taken apart again if you really need to. The roof I found would fall apart a little too easily so I glued those two parts together the rest I left unglued.

I finished painting up the chapel. I wanted to keep them the same theme as per the walls so I kept with a dark gray and just picked out random stones with different gray and blues I also used on the wall. Then it was a dry brush of gray and white to pick out the edges. The roof was done using an orange contrast paint.

For the houses I used whites and creams for the walls and painted the wooden parts using a contrast brown colour. Having to pick out all the beams and trying to avoid getting the paint on the walls was a time consuming process. The buildings have internal details as well like beams, benches on the side for the chapel. I did not bother to paint these as we wont be using the inside of the building, I just did the floor. I could always come back and paint these later if I wanted to use them for D&D.

Overall the buildings are really nice. They are better than MDF and a lot cheaper than getting resin ones. They fill the board up nicely and at least give the impression people are living in the city.

For Mordheim Typically they have ruins which are open plan and have height and levels to move between them. While I could have bought more of these buildings and taken clippers to the walls they are a little too good for that. I will work out something else for ruins and use these as more of a background for the board.

The Vharngate Towers

The gateway now completed we move on to the two towers which will stand either side of them. The tower come from the same company as the gateway and come in sprue form. The bottom element is in 3 parts which create a circle lip section. On to this 6 curved walls are joined together to form the lowest section which curves out at the bottom. The middle sections are nicely detailed floors with the stair case in the middle. Around the floor you glue more curved section some with arrow slits. On the top floor section you have to build three sets of crenellation and glue them together around the top. The effect is a top of the tower overhangs the body slightly which gives it the look you see on these tower.

The sections have tabs around the side on the inner section. This allows you to slot them into place to hold firm enough that you don’t have to glue them. This allows you to open the section up and place minis inside if you are playing D&D. 

 The tower are smaller than square one form Renedra but scale up well to walls from them. I am impressed with the overall look of the towers. They do remind me of the ones at Windsor castle I have seen and overall very happy with them.

Once built the towers are sprayed black with the colourforge primer before a drybrush of dark blues to light and finally a soft white to pick up the stone edges. I did try to put a wash on the wall after but it took away from the mottled blue of the stone work so i left them as they are.

I will look to add some more details later but for now the Vharngate is complete