Magical woodland terrain- For Moonstone / Arcworlde / Frostgrave

A big thank you is due from me to all the team at Ontabletop, Wayland games and indeed anyone that took the time to look at this or comment on this project.

There was some great stuff made this year, and I learned a fair bit by looking at it all, so I am doubly flattered at this result.

This project really isn’t finished yet (How many ever truly are?) as i have a few unrealised ideas for it so I am going to leave it open.

Also, if anyone games in the Canterbury/Folkestone area that’s where a few of us meet to play Moonstone, in the local venues. If you want to see this terrain and learn one of the best contemporary games in the process, get in touch via this site…

And once again, thank you.

In the meantime, I’m thinking of where that prize money should go…

I finally got these to the table for a day of Moonstone. Felt good. We might have converted someone too…

It’s such a pleasure to work up the  nice, big details on this stuff. Such a welcome break from CAD sculpts.

You’ll notice, as well, some old Warmachine sculpts. I’m very concerned the SFG are going the annoying route over-detailed sculpts, like so many others! I kinda hate it tbh. I really wanna play Warmachine however….

I hoped my skills of just throwing the paint around might translate well, but I think that the real masters of this craft spend way more time and attn than I wanted to. Still I feel like I learned a lot already that is useful to ALL building projects…

There isn’t much to tell about attaching the ropes. Except to say that they were quite thicklyy drenched with superglue as that goes a long way to making them rigid and strong.

The painting was slopping browns around, followed by liberal washes and drybrushing.

For the observatory, it”s more of the same but fairly simple paintjob and washes for the render and brickwork. The Verdigris I worked at until I was happy with it. No real process to recount.

I might buy some specific tech. paints at the show in Tonbridge this weekend….

I’ve now glued everything together into a bridge. I added sevveral small details along the underside of the structure, in part for aesthetic reasons but at least as much because it adds rigidity. I was a little worried about it feeling and looking a little too much likke one of those “before” diagrams in a engineering demonstration about loading; compression and tension, etc. I think they add to the ramshackle nature and will hopefully make them more table-proof….

I was wondering how funny it might be to try and use an actual rope bridge, in miniature. Briefly and not very funny, is the  most likely answer. So I need to create long-ish curves that are strong as a basis for the wooden platforms.

I’m going to try to create curves in a laminate fashion out of coffee sticks. I have experimented with steam-bending coffee stick bbefore, but these curves only need to be shallow so the glue will hold them.

I used a little light reading to keep the shape I wanted — using the curve of a wooden chair. This gave me two nice shallow curves (of reasonable strength.)

I built two stations for either end of the bridge and will carve out some holes to house the “ropes”.

Had I known that Terraforming Mars would have me thinking of nothing all day but strategies and synergies, I might have held off from buying it. I didn’t, however, and now I’m compelled to endlessly terraform the same landscape, again and again…. I’m assuming that I will get bored of it in time? Mars willing.

I did tear myself away from that game to get a few things sorted!

I greenstuffed-up the cracks, and added a little more stonework detail.  I’m going to leave it here though and prime it: