Mordheim in the Cursed City of Ulfenkarn

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

The Vharngate

The original plan was to use the tower as the gatehouse but i feel it would serve better as a rather more grand building later in the project. Search around for other options I came across a gateway listed on e-bay. The product is from a company called Tabletop Workshop and they have a range of buildings and towers. The website is no longer up what little I can find suggests company stopped trading under its parent company Enigma Design LTD in 2015. I think at this point e-bay might be the only place to buy them.

What I like about this kit is the level of detail. The door for example is able to open backwards and not fixed into place which is a nice touch. The kit as you might expect is a more complex in the build process. It is not a difficult build it contains more parts so you have to glue the floor, support and walls into box sections with the door in between. The gateway has two levels which you glue on top of each other and a walkway on top of that to complete it. The module approach would give you a lot of scope of leave back wall sections off to place models inside. If you wanted to use this as a D&D location you have some scope to use the internal elements.

The walls are slightly different in size to the Renedra Wall they are slightly smaller in height and a little wider. To bridge the gap you could just make some small steps so it flows down to the gateway. In the picture they showed the gateway with two towers either side so I purchased two towers which we will cover in the next update. 

The Tower

The walls nearly finished I moved on to the looking at options for the gate house. Renedra who make the walls also do a tower or as they also call it a gate house.

The tower like the walls is a plastic set on sprue that you clip out. The basic shape is a box in the set you get 3 groups of 4 walls which make up the bottom of the tower, mid section and the top. Construction is a simple as gluing the interlocking walls together and top and bottom elements have a floor.

The gateway has some options in the build which we can see below

The Gateway

The tower bottom section can be build with a standard closed wooden door you just glue on the surface or a portcullis. The instructions tell you just pop out the section and add the portcullis. Not sure pop out is quite the way I would put it. You have two guide lines either side of the support section. You have to break the walls at that part then glue the supports to the portcullis. I would suggest running a knife down the guide lines because they are not very deep you may end up breaking the support when you try to break out the middle section.

The rest of the build is easy to put together for the top you also get a set a crenellation  and elements such as torches and other elements to finish of the look.

For the price it is a really nice kit. You dont get any interior the middle section has no floor you dont have steps leading up between the sections. Which for me is fine and it would be the good basis as a starting point to add your own.

You can also buy additional mid section which will increase the height of the tower which I brought a couple off but as yet have not used.

What surprized me a little is size of the building. It is in scale of the walls but is rtaher large, big enough you could use this as a keep for the castle. Which had me thinking I might use this for another part of the city and look at other choices for the city gate. This is almost too good for a city gate.

Wall Placement

The idea with the walls was to run across the 4 foot map. I am sure most people would checked the size of the walls and measure how many walls they needed before purchase. Ah. While I am a little short on walls it perhaps allows me to get a little creative we still need a gatehouse for the middle. For the other gaps perhaps I can get a little creative with rock fall in between the collapsed walls to pad it out.

I added some Warcry Terrain which I had painted some time ago. The original set came with the ruins and gates structures which placed together might just dol for an undead guard post. Not sure the undead need sleep but in this city they only work at night. Maybe they have a good undead union in this city which prevents them having to work 24/7

Battle Map

Mordheim is played on a 4 by 4 typically but could also fit on a 3 by 3 space. I would have loved to do a fully designed board but time, skillset and most important space does not allow for it. I started to look around for a battle mat for the city. Battle mats are typically a cloth mouse mat design with a printed pattern which can be rolled up for easy storage and transport.

Sadly the price of battle mats have gone up quite a lot in the past few years like a lot of products have with rising costs and inflation. It is a worthy investment because they do last as long as you clean and look after them.

Looking around hobby stores in my country a lot of them appeared to be out of stock. Typically companies like Pworks, Deep Cut, etc. While you can order direct from them shipping costs, tax has to be paid so it is even more expensive.

I did find one from a company I had not heard of before Kraken Gaming Mats. I believe them to be based out of Germany but had a large stock in UK hobby shops. I was looking for cobble street mat of which they had two designs: a snow based street map and a standard one. Given I play frostgrave and Ulfenkarn is based in the north it seemed a logical choice to pick the snow one.

It arrived a few days ago and overall I am very impressed. People have commented Kraken mats are a little thinner than Deep Cut. I didn’t really notice the difference. The mat feels smooth made from a higher quality cloth, it lays flat and the print quality is very good. The mat is just perfect for what I was looking for.

Ulfenkarn appears to be a walled city. A city within a city as the inner section is sealed of and guarded by the Vharngate.

Ulfenkarn maybe run by vampires, werewolves, skeletons and other undead roam the streams by night. The city is still home to 1,000 of people making a living mainly during the day.

The cititizens of Ulfenkarn generally live on the outer edges of the city with few daring to vendure into the inner sectors. The city is hence split between the humans on one side of the gate and the domain of the undead on the other.

This provides an interesting narrative for the board with the city walls spliting the 4 by 4 board down the middle with one half being human side of the city the other undead. The whole city has fallen on hard times but i doubt the undead would worry about the upkeep of the buildings as much. So the plan would be for the board to have a contrast in buildings between the two sides.

First we need the walls.

As mentioned before the walls are from renedra. The walls are pretty cheap i doubt i could make them this cheap and being plastic they are light weight and can take a bump or to.

https://www.renedra.co.uk/product-category/castles-towers/

In the pack you get two halfs of the wall which you glue in 4 spaces and glue the outside of the wall to them. On the top you have the walkway which glues into place. For the top you get crenellation for one facing which you can either glue in place or leave sperate.

The walls are open at each end so you can glue tabs into place to form longer sections of wall. In my case I am going to leave them in seperate sections to make it modular.

I have just primed the walls in raven black spray from colour forge. Most castle walls appear in a very light grey. I am thinking of keeping them dark and drifting into the blue tones to keep in the with the vampire theme. Perhaps have them as if the walls are under a moonlight night.

Locations

The Cursed City board game is played out in a number of key locations in the city. Either with a series of random ecounter adventures before facing a main boss in one of the key locations.

• Barrowmark: Scholars Hall converted by Torgillius into a horrific visceral laboratory.
• The Clot: A canal filled with blood and worse where carrion horrors hunt.
• Corpse-gardens: Graveyards and pits tended by Gorslav the Gravekeeper.
• Ebon Citadel: A mighty fortress and seat of power in the city.
• Ghiestgale: Haunted area that few dare to venture near.
• Hangman’s Copse: Former Embassy of the Sylvaneth.
• The Screaming Spires: The once noble blood children of Radukar lair here between the towers.
• Shadowed Crypt-Halls: vaults where haunting music and screams echo from within.
• Van Alten Skydocks: Once the bustling centre of trade for the city.
• The Vharngate: The stronghold of the Ulfenwatch.
• Haven – Outpost of Defiance
• The Bone Tower – a mysterious strcture raised by the Ulfenwatch
• Bloodmanse rambling stately home is patrolled by the dead
• Scholars Walk a towering almshouse claimed by the Pact Mortalis
• Ven Alten Vaults Richly-appointed storerooms teeering on the precipice of the abyss

The plan is to use a 4 by 4 area to represent the location including the main feature but also in most cases the buildings or environment around it. To keep costs down a lot of terrain used will be generic to the city so we can use it again in other locations.

The Vharngate

The Vharngate: The stronghold of the Ulfenwatch sounds like a good place to start. On the map it is pictured as gatehouse with castle walls on either side. The shopping list for the location is pretty easy

Shopping list

Gatehouse

City Walls

Looking around at the options Renedra have a number of walls and tower which I think will fit the shopping list

https://www.renedra.co.uk/product-category/castles-towers/

We are not after the whole castle we just need a few walls at that stage

The Plan

In recent months I have been drifting towards the game of Mordheim with a view to the Old World coming back to the table top. The goal is a simple one in theory to create some terrain to use in the game.

Rather than using Mordheim as the location as the original game it would be interesting to set the location in the current AOS timeline and the city of Ulfenkarm the Curse City.

The story of Mournhold and to become later Ulfenkarm does mirror the the fate of Mordheim’s downfall in terms of ruin brough to it. The cause is different but the city is ripe for bands of treasure hunters picking the remains of the once rich city.

Trying to replicate the vast city of Ulfenkarm on a 4 by 4 board would be too much so the plan is to focus on city locations in the city and use terrain to create that location.

Due to a lack of space storing phyiscal static boards is not possible so the first rule is that the terrain has to be portable. A “board” of terrain I can set out and pack away once the game is over. Aside the rule I dont have any set plans in mind.

Terrain Skills

I should point out that my ability at making terrain is zero. I have painted a few terrain bits for games before but never tried anything like this. Dont expect to see scratch built buildings, and amazing layouts. A lot of this will use items I already own and need to paint up or kits bought from other places.

Hopefully even if the quality is not goign to be high it will at least be fun watching the city of Ulfenkarn come to life.

It is also important to note that I expect this project is going to take months to do. The plan for TerrainFest 2023 is one or two locations