Lead Adventure Forum
Miniatures Adventure => Fantasy Adventures => Frostgrave => Topic started by: Wirelizard on June 01, 2020, 04:11:22 AM
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Apparently it takes a global pandemic to get me gaming again regularly.
A few weeks ago our local COVID-19 situation reached a point where we were able to (cautiously) open our "pandemic pods" up to a limited number of people, so my brother, a friend, and I decided to "open the pod bay doors" in the name of gaming and actually getting some goddamn socialising done. We did a one-off ACW naval game the first Sunday, then decided on Frostgrave as we'd all picked up ebooks of the rules during the Osprey freebie offering a little while ago.
Today was our second outing with our current "we have no idea what we're doing" warbands. I'm running an elementalist, as is Sean, and I think my brother is running an illusionist but can't remember for sure.
(https://i.imgur.com/mHY50E4.jpg)
To make three-way games fairer my brother took the trouble to cut a 4 foot circular mat; this was slightly undercut by the fact that our dining room table is less than four foot wide and my 2 foot by 4 foot gaming boards are still at a friend's place. The Forestgrave table still looked pretty darn good, I think.
We've decided to re-set with brand new warbands for next Sunday, so we can explore new magic users and totally different warband compostions. After we each have a pair of warbands up to about the same levels (3-5 or so) we'll probably just swap back and forth as the mood takes us, or retire the older warband entirely as we settle into a play style.
More over here on the blog: http://www.warbard.ca/2020/05/31/forestgrave/
We're enjoying getting into Frostgrave, and I see just recently the 2nd edition is now listed as "probably summer 2020 publication" over on the Osprey website, so that's something else to look forward to.
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good looking set-up.
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Congrats on getting a game in.
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Great looking table. Sounds like you had a good time.
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Very cool looking setup! What's the mat you're using? DIY?
Rounded edges for a game like frostgrave is a good idea I think, looks more natural.
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Very cool looking setup! What's the mat you're using? DIY?
Rounded edges for a game like frostgrave is a good idea I think, looks more natural.
The mat is DIY, done on canvas drop cloth with paintable caulk, brown paint, and lots (and lots) of flock.
It's actually at least a decade old, at one point my brother and I made a huge 9x6 mat from drop cloth over the course of a long weekend, but it was so big it was awkward to transport so it mostly sat around. Last year my brother chopped a 4x4 square skirmish mat from it, and now he's cut this 4 foot circular mat and I think just has offcuts remaining.
The rest of the scenery is a mix from all three of us. The conifers based together in the foreground I bought from some guys in Vancouver, the big tree trunks in the background are 3d prints, the ruin bits are new from Corey and mostly Hirst Arts plaster, and the rest of the vegetation bits are mine, mostly scratchbuilt at home. The GW plastic bits are Sean's, he's not much of a scratchbuilder.
I badly need to re-sort my terrain, I have more brush and shrub areas somewhere but they're buried with other terrain. That will take an entire long weekend, though, and involve covering the dining room with gaming stuff while it explodes out of storage to be re-sorted, so my enthusiasm for that job is not high, to say the least.
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Great looking table and congrats on getting a game in!
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Started on my first piece of dedicated Forestgrave terrain last night, aiming to have it table-ready by Sunday midday. Work from home, while otherwise horrible, makes this more possible as I can wander between my "work" desk and my hobby desk, as they're a couple of metres apart.
Here we have a tree that has lifted a huge stone platform up into the air, somehow. Part of a huge stone platform, anyway. The whole thing is about 6" tall and made almost entirely of scrap diverted from the recycling bin!
(https://i.imgur.com/TQXxLUw.jpg)
Junk CD from work, with some random large washers hotglued to it for ballast. The trunk of the tree is cardstock from one of the Frostgrave plastic figures boxes rolled up and scrunched around, slathered in lots and lots and lots of hot glue. The whole trunk got covered in white glue and toilet paper, which makes awesome tree bark.
(https://i.imgur.com/wRLRt0n.jpg)
The platform is just a chunk of half inch insulation board, that old standby for stone modelling. The small branches above the platform are toothpicks, bulked out with hot glue and also covered in toilet paper.
(https://i.imgur.com/3Fi1283.jpg)
28mm plastic Frostgrave figure on there for scale, on a 25mm base.
Black primer over everything, mixed with white glue for extra toughness. I've done sand and fine gravel on the base, will paint that up tonight and start the drybrushing of the tree and more on the platform.
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Fantastic looking tree!
I know what you mean about working from home making hobby stuff better. My hobby desk is about 90 degrees to my work desk, so I end up doing stuff during conference calls :D
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My computer desk is socially distanced from my painting/modelling desk, just enough that if I've got headphones on (ie am suffering through another goddamn conference call) I can't reach over to my painting desk and grab something to work on. Plus my computer desk is small and crowded already. Ah well.
Weird tree is finished, anyway. I wanted something weird and fae and impossible, and I think I've managed that. Lots and lots of different flocks, tufts, flowers, and such on the base helps a lot.
(https://i.imgur.com/kYvkMD5.jpg)
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All the different textures really look good on the base as well as the tree.
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That's a very cool idea! Might have to steal it ^.^
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That looks great! And thanks for the tip about the tissue paper/white glue bark - that looks very effective and I will attempt to imitate it!
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That looks great! And thanks for the tip about the tissue paper/white glue bark - that looks very effective and I will attempt to imitate it!
Doesn't it look great? I didn't come up with the idea, but I can't remember where I found it, so consider this me just passing it on.
If you're interested in tree ideas, Dr Mathias's Arboreal Extravaganza (http://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=41545.0) over on the Tutorials board is well worth going through in it's entirety. That may actually be where I first heard the TP-as-bark idea, actually.
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8) way cool!!!
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Quick bit of filler scenery done in a few minutes here and there over the course of a day of work from home.
Scrap of 2" pink insulation, junk CD, some flock. I want to do more flowers and such on the base, but I'm going to wait until I have a couple more scenery bits done then do all the base detailing all at once.
Rolled a tinfoil ball over the surface of the foam to get the nice texture, painted it up black - grey - tan - pale blue - white, then edge highlighted with more white to emphasize the edges, which helps make it look bigger.
So simple I didn't even take a single work-in-progress photo, but can if people are interested as I intend to do a few more of these.
(https://i.imgur.com/zBknceY.jpg)
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Simple but effective. Your going to have quite a nice table for gaming.
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Looks lovely, I'm surprised by the pale blue in the paint list! Did you drybrishe it after tan and before white? Over the whole thing or just selectively?
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The giant rock looks great. I tend to add browns into the shading of rocks... I'd not thought of blues for more flint-y stones
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Looks lovely, I'm surprised by the pale blue in the paint list! Did you drybrishe it after tan and before white? Over the whole thing or just selectively?
That's correct, drybrushed after the tan and before the white over the whole thing but concentrated slightly on the edges. It's subtle but it gives a really nice tone to the rock, and if you go a bit heavier with the blue as I did on the stone platform seen earlier in this thread it gives a good sort of magic weird glow to the piece too.
It doesn't photograph well, but the final white edge highlight really, really makes a difference. It seriously "pops" the edges out, especially at arms length or greater distances (actual tabletop in-game viewing, in other words) and makes the dimensionality of the piece way more obvious.
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could you share your formula for the basic grassy ground-cover seen on that last piece?
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could you share your formula for the basic grassy ground-cover seen on that last piece?
Not easily, no, because it's a semi-random mix of all sorts of ground foam turf, flock, and randomness that's been changing gently over the years. I have a big margarine tub with a few inches of the mix in it, big enough to submerge a CD in.
Woodland Scenic's mixed fine turf is the base mix, there's some GW bright green grass flock, some WS dark green fine flock, a couple of colours of WS coarse turf (medium and dark, I think?)
For scruffy looking ground like this, I put slightly watered down glue down on the base, sink the whole thing into the flock mix, make sure all the glued areas are covered in a generous layer, then leave the whole piece in the flock for at least an hour or two. That helps the glue soak up into the flock and gets a thicker layer attached securely to the base. Eventually I'll pull the piece out, shake the unglued excess back into the bin, and add a bit of extra very watered down glue to secure everything.
For less rustic turf, take the piece out of the tub almost right away and shake it off; you'll get a much thinner more lawn-like layer.
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thanks very much.
that's the kind of thing I had in mind - I have some similar WS stuff etc, and your notes are a great starting place.
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Thanks a lot for sharing! Great to be able to use someone else's experiences!
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Wrote up the new standing stone for the blog, with a couple of photos I hadn't put here, and included the rebuilding of the mushroom ring to make it more gamer-proof.
http://www.warbard.ca/2020/06/19/a-standing-stone/ (http://www.warbard.ca/2020/06/19/a-standing-stone/)
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You going to summon DeafNala with that mushroom circle?
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You going to summon DeafNala with that mushroom circle?
He's an inspiration for sure, I don't have his talent or patience for all that sculpting and scratchbuilding, though!
I'm thinking of doing some giant fungus scenery just to add to the "weird Fae forest" vibe I want to aim for, and I'm very, very tempted by the Dark Fantastic Mills (https://darkfantasticmills.worldsecuresystems.com/index.html) "Doomcap Shrooms" terrain, although they're not cheap. Might need to be my tax return indulgence...
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Decided to crank out a strange magical portal archway thing, so this was about three hours casual work with a knife, ball of tinfoil, hot glue gun, and some offcuts of dense styrofoam insulation.
(https://i.imgur.com/FzbMMsm.jpg)
Paint in the next few days, probably going to do some reverse highlighting to have weird magic energy between the stones of the arch itself
More photos and such over on the blog: http://www.warbard.ca/2020/06/28/a-fantasy-portal-part-one/
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Looks great, definitely something magical about it already! Probably because of how it defies gravity!
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Kudos!. I really like the look of this - very different than the typical fantasy gate/portal