War of the Flamin’ Roses (Terrainfest 2025)

It is starting to look somewhere half decent! I obviously can’t fit all the river onto a 4×4 mat, but here is a little layout of some peices, fun to play with!

I want to build a fair bit more on there, as there is nothing worse than every game having the same elements just shuffled around. I can’t just keep doing this forever though, the stack of mdf I have waiting to become a Blade Runner-esque board for Warpath Epic isn’t going to build and paint itself! Left on the queue right now:

• 2 more 3D printed buildings, on of which is two storey.
• A windmill and a furnace (I think that is what it is) with associated scatter (also 3D printed, all from the aforementioned Kycapas collection)
• More random scatter.
• I have ordered another set of forest tree bases, this time from Battlekiwi, as I would like the option of more varied/ thicker tree cover.
• A couple of ponds.
• A grave yard.
• A vegetable patch.
• Some stone walls and plant hedges.
• a couple of bridges to go over the river sections.

I would like some random animals, and have been brainstorming rules for their random movement. I love the idea of some vain glory seeking lord dashing across a field, only to trip head over tip over a pig, right into the mud.

Given I have added all this in one night (so smart), I havent really gone into any depth about paints used or any other stuff. ANybody reading, please feel free to leave me a comment, I will help however I can 🙂

If anybody needs more/ better photos for any reason (hint hint 😉 ), let me know, I will get my wife to take the photos you need, she is far better at that stuff than me!

Okay, what terrain set would be complete without rivers? Fresh, back from a family (we are a family now, it is very exciting) holiday for a week, I thought it would be fun to knock this out quickly.

What an idiot.

I wanted to future proof this set, so that it could be easily used to larger and smaller games. This meant that at a minimum, it had to be able top go straight across a 6 foot table.

I ended up making:

• 9 straight sections (two of which have rough rocks for crossing)
• 2 small adapter sections (being a metric country, the sheet of EPVC I was using was just over 1cm short of 2 feet. so I made a small section so it could go straight across a 4 foot board, and a lsightly larger one so it could go across a 6 foot board)
• 4 90 degree turns, so you could make moats or some other man-made river course.
• 3 gentle turns (more natural, 3 because that is what fit evenly across the sheet I was using).
• 2 y-sections to split the river.
• 2 long dead ends and one short one

Crikey. All sections were measured and cut out, and then the edges bevelled with a Dremel. I then glued large rocks and cork rubble along the sides. I then used hardware store wall filler to make the slopes, and then dremeled them again once they were dry. After that, I airbrushed the slopes brown, and the water a few different shades of blue.

In the above step were two unexpected sources of additional work: making sure that slopes on the sides would match up evenly with all the other pieces once sanded (ugh) and making sure the deeper blue sections airbrushed in the river matched up in width at the ajoing ends, for the same reason (double ugh). I should probably have just let my mate 3D print me the river sections, but where is the fun in that.

Once that was all done, sprayed Sceneic cement, flock and then sealed it. Varnished the river with gloss varnish, and then poured over UV resin once the varnish hardened.

I find the UV torches never completely set UV resin, but luckily (?) Australia has that gigantic hole in the ozone layer right above us, so I have all the UV radiation I need! Lucky me. Anyway, outside next to the pool for a wee bit, and then job is done!

1 1/2 – 2 weeks all told. Not so quick.

The next two buildings. Wooden trim aside, they are quite fun to paint.

Variation in the paint colours is a bit obvious here. The wood was also shaded with Tamiya Deep Brown enamel panel liner, and the sides of the building with Brown Panel liner. I quite like the enamel washes, it is like a quick and convenient oil wash.

What village would be without a wheat field nearby? Not this one at least!

This was quick and fun. I cut up some squares of cheap doormats made of coconut rough material, glued them to EPVC bases, added a little filler to cover the gap and Bob’s your uncle!

Obviously I had given myself a task that was too quick and easy, so I decided to add a scarecrow. I took an archer from Perry Miniatures, but the legs off, glued grass tufts to the various ends and finished by drilling a hole and sticking a bamboo skewer right up somewhere very impolite. Also quite fun, at least for me. The archer may have other ideas, but he is busy scaring off crows, so no need to ask him.

Still avoiding more buildings, I wanted to add some marsh(es) to the table, to act aas difficult terrain.

I figured that marshes/ bogs tend to have smaller sections before you hit the big pond/ puddle/ marsh?  Look, I am from Western Australia, so my personal experience with this kind of geography is largly abstract and conceptual I am afraid, so I was leaning on descriptions from fantasy novels and photos on the internet.

One thing the photos also suggested to me is that the water isn’t so dirty really? All the wargaming terrain I found online seemed to treat marshes and swamps as interchangeable terms, but I am not sure that is the case.  Anyway, accordingly I painted the water a deep green-blue, rather than the green-brown you see swamps painted in.

I added a thin layer of UV resin to add a little depth and water- shinyness to them as well.

I needed time to recover from timber frames of the building, so I thought I would try my hand at some scratch built terrain, starting with some height variation.

The Ruckus rule book suggests that you would have hillocks rather than hills per se, so I have kept both of these to single height, just above head level.

I thought I would have one with more gentle slopes, and another with rocky sides. I used a handheld hot wire cutter on XPS foam for the basic shapes, then glued large rocks (also cut from xps foam) along with smaller rocks and cork rubble on the sides of one, leaving a wee path up. If I did it again, I think I would try less to make the distribution of the rocks random, and more focus on large rocks at the bottom, getting smaller as you go up. Oh well, lessons learned and all that.

I have once again included a photo showing the table progress.

Here is the first of the buildings.

I have decided to not keep notes as I paint each building, to help encourage me to play around with the colours a bit, add a little natural variety.

Good lord, but I underestimated how tedious painting all the wooden trim on these Tudor houses would be. They are just three dimensional enough that you have to paint all the sides of each beam, but so thin that it is a real chore trying to get it done neatly.

I have included a photo to show you the massive (ahem) effect this one building has on the terrain!

Right!

Last year, I had a big old entry where I built a huge amount of terrain to play Gangs of Rome. It was awesome. It took awhile. So long in fact, that I left it to very close to midnight on the last day to enter…

… and then after I finished putting everything in, it all fell apart, because of some digital nonsense. At that point I had work the next day, so I just told myself “I won’t leave it so late next time!” and went to bed. So, here I am , a whole ONE DAY EARLIER than last time, putting this years Christmas project in. That, my freinds, is measurable, quantifiable progress.

Anyway, as my project description states I have just painted a warband for Here’s the Ruckus, but have no terrain to play it on, just the 4×4 mat and the three tree bases in the picture. Should probably do something about that, so here we are. I figure that a lot of what I make will be useful for other games (such as the looming shadow of Silver Bayonet), and even bigger scal games like Kings of War. So really, by doing lots now, I am saving time later … right?

I have begged a very kind friend to print me a bunch of houses and so forth, which I bought from Keycapas on MyMiniFactory, and have mebarked to build the rest myself from scratch. Which I have nere done before, so please be kind! This year there is a 7 month old child in the mix, so my progress was not as fast as last year!