Mordheim - Building the City of the Damned (Part 1)

Some bright spark (me :P ) recently decided it would be a god idea to get some of Games Workshops old specialist games being played at our store Kirton Games. We settled on starting up Mordheim as the first delve into this, after getting some popular support for it from several local gamers.

Mordheim for those of you who don't know was a skirmish game released by Game Workshop in 1999, set in the Warhammer World in an Empire city of the same name which is destroyed by a comet. The comet scatters a precious material, Wyrdstone across the ruins of the city, which warbands, mostly of human but also consisting of many other race from the Warhammer world seek to collect and come to fight over.

Its a very terrain hungry game, and belated I realised we'd need rather alot of ruins, given we did'nt just want to end up using the store extensive 40k ruin collection.

After a bit of research looking at the options, I decided that the best way forward was to build our own, despite the fact though I've been in the hobby for years I've never really built much in the way of terrain!

I've started off with some basic materials, a pack of A3 Foamboard, a little bit of scrap plasti-card, lots of PVA glue and some pin.... these were the first results.

I've gone for just building lots of houses to a similar design for now, with 6 completed to this stage.  I've not bothered with templates as they are fairly simple to construct, each floor allows around 2.5" of headroom suitable for most standard sized models.

Of course while functional they are no where near finished, so the next stage is detailing, a process I'm just starting to experiment with. For now I'm only working on one building for this, with floorboards added from lollypop sticks. I'm now waiting for a big delivery of these so I can do joists and beams on the exterior as well.

Once these are done I'll be using some filler and textured paint to finish the buildings off, before basing and painting the buildings. The lat piece of the puzzle for now though has been ladders, settling on a easy if time consuming build for these of two toffee apple sticks with holes drilled into them, into which cocktail sticks are fitted as rungs!

The build continues!

Necromunda Terrain (Part 1)

Just a quick post, to prove I'm alive and finally doing something hobby shaped!

At the moment there are plans for a Necromunda campaign here, of course you need some decent urban terrain to make that viable. The old boxed game came with a set of plastic bulkheads and card pieces to make a gantry network, those are very hard and expensive to come across these days, so instead after a little hunting I found these. I picked up three small sets on eBay, there are two types Hexagon and Platformer which come in large and small packs.



They are cheap, in more then just price, to be honest the plastic is'nt great, but at least the flash - of which there is lots, is easy to remove. They are also clip together, so if you wanted you could keep them unglued to give you complete flexibility.



I'm going to glue this set together though and base it, I've still got some cleaning up to do and this is only a test fit, but as you can see it does'nt look too bad once assembled, and fits the fill spot on for Necromunda.



And once combined with a few bits of GW's Cities of Death terrain - well that'll be the core of a 4x4 table for Necromunda!

Hobby Tutorials

Sculpting -

How to Sculpt Mordian Style Caps
How to Sculpt Pith Helmets
How to Sculpt Epualettes
How to Sculpt Valhallan Style Caps

Conversions -

Converting Praetorian Plasma Guns from Meltaguns
Converting a Swapable Basilisk and Medusa Artillery Piece

Terrain -

Quick and Easy Minefields

Quick & Easy Minefields

Apocolypse includes the excellent Strategem 'Minefields', ideal when your facing an opponent who has to get to grips with you in assault, or an objective in your area. For a recent game against Tyranids where Imperial Forces would be defending against an endless tide of Tyranids (all the 'Troop' Tyranids would respawn in the turn immeadiately after they were destroyed) I decided it was a must have.

Without much time, but not wanting to resort to simple card markers or the like I needed an easy and quick way to model a minefield, this required something that could be used as a mine, was cheap (or free!) and plentiful. After a quick rumage in the bits box one thing jumped out at me, the small Imperial Guard Tank Wheels that anyone who's bought a few tanks will almost certainly have plenty of spares of. Too get the mine from these I simply cut the wheel down a couple of mm's in from the outside rim's edge.



These were then spread out fairly evenly and glued down to one of three 6"x12" sections of plasticard which would act as the base, though anything sturdy would suffice, this is just what I had to hand. You could use any of the different combinations of sizes given the the minefield area in the rulebook, but I think the three 6"x12" gives the most flexibility.



This surface was then scored using a scapel (so the material had something to grip too) and a mix of sand and ready mix plaster was added for a textured surface. You could use just sand, flock, or really go to town on the bases with added debris, craters from mines which have gone off, warning signs, barbed wire etc for a really effective look, it really depends entirely on your inclanation, time and what materials you have. I will get round to painting them eventually and will update with pictures when I have.