As some of you may know, I worked on some of the terrain at BoLSCon last year and was overseer for one of the Narrative Track games. This year at BoLSCon one of the tables will be Beta Anphelion IV, which is also a beautiful terrain set sold by ForgeWorld (and seen above). Unfortunately there's no budget for the ForgeWorld piece, so I'll be making it by scratch.
One part of the board I'm not sure about is the swamp and jungle pieces. (I think the interpretation for the board is going to a little more Dagobah and a little less Jurassic Park.) I'm a little disappointed with the swamp and jungle above, since it just doesn't look "wet" enough for me. Plus since this will be a Narrative Track table it will be home to Apocalypse level games and probably be about 15' x 5' and setup temporarily on conference room tables.
So how do I cover a whole board with swamp and jungle (without actually making a huge board) and still have enough space for Apocalypse toys? If you've worked on any jungle or swamp pictures I'd love to see what you've done.
Put the jungle terrain on a collection of small bases and treat the whole table as difficult area terrain. That way, people can just move the jungle pieces around as they need to fit/move models.
ReplyDeleteI'd doing a tutorial for FTW on jungle/alien terrain this wednesday, check it out to see what I mean.
Can't wait to see how yours turns out.
Ah, good idea of just counting the whole board as difficult!
ReplyDeleteI look forward to your tutorial, and stealing your ideas. :)
Have you seen the rules from the old catachen codex re fighting in jungles? Might work really well for you.
ReplyDeleteIf you haven't, drop me a mail and I'll send you a copy.
I don't have pics yet but I have made a ton of jungle terrain. You can use poker chips for the small bases, they are 40mm and cheap. For the foliage get a ton of aquarium plants from a cheap online retailer. You can hot glue some rocks down onto the base, then while that is still drying stick some plants in the cracks with more glue. After that sets you can add moss or flock.
ReplyDeleteFor water features I recommend DAP clear weather sealant, unless you need something more durable in which case clear resin works well. The downside is that the clear resin is expensive and can be a pain to mix and pour, although the sealant takes a while too. The sealant will not run while the resin will. Another option is to get a sheet of clear textured plastic from TAP and paint the underside of it with watery colors.
Try doing the entire table as swamp/fen, alternating wet passages and matted grass/reeds. Then place bases of swampy trees across it. Rather than just move them out of the way, perhaps house rule it so vehicles can crush segments of trees smaller than them (perhaps also allow flamers to destroy them as well)? That would offer an interesting "shifting" amount of terrain on the battlefield.
ReplyDeleteI look forward to seeing this at Bolscon this year.
ReplyDeleteYou can define the edges of difficult terrain with a different color / style of flocking, and then use the mobile jungle pieces.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I'm discussing it with Bigred now. If we make the whole board difficult, then we can have select pieces of terrain count as clear and then just scatter jungle pieces around the table (which we don't know the exact size yet) and not worry if the jungle bits are in the right place or get put back in the right place, making it easier to play on.
ReplyDeleteThat exactly how the rules work in codex catachens, a basic reversal with the clear terrain have clearly defined edges much like area/difficult terrain in normal games.
ReplyDeleteI'd also consider restricting ranging through the jungle, perhaps using night fighting rules for shooting through jungle.