Making sludge for Sludge

Last post I made a list of things I wanted for my Sludge wargaming table. Hills are not among them. I don’t know why. I love a good hill in a wargame. Not in real life. Nooooo. I’m Dutch.

Anyhow, I went out looking for styrofoam, since somehow I didn’t have any of the stuff in my home. I went to various hardware stores where you had to buy 6m2 of the stuff at the minimum, which was a bit much for me.

Feeling somewhat down, I got back on my bike (as we Dutch tend to do) and went on my way home. I breaked not even a hundred meters later. There, next to the hardware stores where I’d been I saw a big old dumpster, belonging to the neighbouring bathroom shop (or whatever it’s call in English).

My Dutch frugality winning from my shame, I parked my bike, clambered over the hedge and quickly snatched a nice big sheet of styrofoam, and cycled back home!

Reinventing the wheel, I found out that cutting styrofoam is an utter pain. Breaking it was a lot less messy and much quicker! So I did, in parts of various sizes.

I then made a mixture of 50/50 water and wood glue and applied this to the tops of the foam bits. I found out, however, that I was out of sand to lightly cover it with. I still had some in my garage, but this was a bit wet.

I thus took a few scoops, put them on a baking tray and dried it in the oven at 150C for twenty minutes. C’etait parfait! <chef’s kiss>

This then needed to dry overnight. In the meanwhile, I tried to make myself some mud! I had found somewhere that you could mix wood glue, wall filler, paint and some extra flock to make something mud like.

I used this to base the minis I had painted for my main Sludge project. When wet, it looked VERY muddy, as you can see in the first two images below.

Once dry, however, it looked more like mud that was a bit dry. Those of you who know my other projects will know my answer to this: good enough! I just added a little drybrush of some lighter brown and that’s that.

By now the styrofoam had dried and it was time to add some paint to it. I made a happy mixture of brown and black. It may have been a bit on the dark side, but hey, Sludge is all about dark ‘n stark.

Again, I gave it a quick drybrush with some lighter brown to finish it off.

As you can see from the images below, the finished product can be stacked to create higher hill/rock formations. Only the smallest rocky pillars were glued together, other than that they’re all separate.

Bringing the hasty earth works, the based miniatures and the hills together, you get the following, which is starting to look pretty cool I think.

The only downside is that I don’t have a nice cloth, mat or table to go with it. I will have to think about this. I have looked at some mats, but none have the print I’m looking for really…

Wargames look so much better, when surrounded with nice terrain. To my shame, I’ve never bothered to create really create nice terrain for my games. Yes, I was fine with stacks of books and pencil cases for hills and walls. And does my unpainted MDF terrain count? My paper printout trees?

Who am I fooling?

As you may know, I’m slowly working away on a Sludge army or two. There are few games that have fired up my imagination as much lately as Sludge has. And with a name like ‘Sludge’, I really cannot put it off anymore: I need to make some terrain for this. The sludgy kind.

To be honest, I’ve always found making terrain daunting. I don’t have large amounts of foam lying around and wouldn’t know where to find it really. No. For this to work for me, I need to start out simple: KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!).

I’ve made a list of things that would spruce up a gaming table and seem easy enough for me to get started on terrain building. Humble beginnings!

• Hasty earthworks
• Redoubts
• Some gabions
• Dead forests
• Log cabins and/or mudbrick buildings (in various states of disrepair)
• Exposed Great Roots

I think most of these speak for themselves. Only the Exposed Great Roots could perhaps do with a brief explanation (Blaster vol. 3, page 26):

“The decaying world is the defining feature of the age. Three hundred years ago, the lands began to break apart. […] At the time, the kings denied their actions had any hand in the matter. Despite countless bleak prophecies, those cruel rulers spurred the arcanist guilds to consume the heartwood of the world tree.

The final crisis was unlike anything that could have been predicted. The entire world broke apart. What remained could be likened to a clot of dried earth held together by strands of spindly roots. Billions were lost as the whole world crumbled apart.”

The idea is that such roots are imbued with magic that can heal anyone, but at a price…

I’m at home with my youngest for a week. And for entertainment, I got some cheap clay from a local store. While we were making some hedgehogs and snowmen, I also took the opportunity to start on a few redoubts and some earthworks!

I started by cutting out some bases for the terrain to go on. I’m actually following tips and tutorials from Napoleonics scenarios:

• Hasty earthworks 
• Shevardino redoubt

After that I added some clay and tiny wooden skewers.

That is it for now. My next step will either see me continue on this terrain or start on one of the others on my list!