City Terrain Wrapup and beyond...

Hard to believe that its been almost three months. Back in early February of this year, Hyv3, Calypso2ts, and Crispy approached me about becoming a contributing author to the Mandulian Chapel. While I was honored that they asked me to contribute, I was both excited and nervous about the prospects of writing for this blog. I was excited that they all felt that I had something worth contributing to the greater community but at the same time I was nervous because I was not sure I would find enough stuff to talk about each week that would keep you, the reader, interested and engaged. Boy has that changed. These past three months have been a blast and due to the blog I have found myself taking on more hobby related projects and pushing myself to try new techniques in modeling and terrain building. With that being said, this week I will be wrapping up the “Creating City Terrain” series by showing you how to create unique terrain elements out of items that you can find relatively cheaply and easily. Hopefully my articles have inspired you to go out and build terrain pieces for your own collection, or for your gaming club or store.

Creating City Terrain: Tank Traps

So far in the Creating City Terrain series I have shown you how easy and affordable it can be for anyone to make their own terrain suitable for use in their warhammer 40k games. To date I have showed you how to create city ruins (part 1 and part 2), rubble, and tanglewire. Today I want to walk you through one of the simplest city terrain projects yet, tank traps. Tank traps, in theory, are designed to slow down or halt the advancement of vehicles by creating a barrier made of concrete, steel, or wood. The most common images of tank traps can be seen by looking at pictures or film taken during WW2 with the most iconic being the tank traps employed along the Atlantic wall and the traps setup along the Siegrfried Line. The concrete barriers setup along the Siegfried Line were often called Dragon's Teeths due to the square-pyramidal shape that they were constructed in. The idea behind the tank traps were to impede the progress of tanks and funnel the vehicles into killing zones where they could be destroyed with anti-tank weapons. Mines, pole, and barbed wire was often placed in and around the tank traps to slow down infantry that often accompanied the tanks.

Creating City Terrain: Tanglewire

Concertina wire, also known as razor wire or trip wire has military applications dating back to World War 1 when soldiers would take barbed wire and string it along the trench lines and in the no-man's land to make it difficult for enemy troops to quickly charge their trenches. At first it was strung up between posts or stakes but during artillery barrages the wire would become a mass of loose and tangled wire which provided to be more hazardous to enemy troops trying to overrun the trenches. The troops learned this lesson and started to deploy the wire in loose coils to hamper enemy movement. After WWI concertina wire became massed produce for military use. The wire was harder to cut and came compressed in flat coils that could quickly setup by a few men and did not require posts or supports and is still in use today. In the 41st millennium, concertina wire, or tanglewire, is still in use by defenders as a quick and easy way to block open avenues of attack in clogged city fights. As per the rule book, tanglewire counts as dangerous terrain and confers a 6+ cover save to untis behind the barricade. In this article I'd like to walk you through how to create your own sections of tanglewire to use with your terrain to add an extra element of realism to your table.

Incident on Nadine Prime

I played an 8000 point game this past weekend with a friend of mine and we decided the matchup was going to be my Word Bearers versus his Grey Knights. Since we were playing with a double force org chart we decided to limit special characters to 1 per player. I had the option of either running Abaddon or Ahriman but since this was a battle versus Grey Knights I thought it would be iconic to run Ahriman with some Thousand Sons. Plus, I've had the Ahriman model sitting in by "to-paint" pile for 5 plus years and I figured this was the perfect excuse to get him painted up.  Paul decided to use Mordrak accompanied by his Ghost Knights. I typed up this report in a twofold manner, meaning that it is a turn-by-turn report with narrative elements, maps, and pictures added in to help you follow along with our game. I hope you enjoy reading the report as much as I had playing the game.

Creating City Terrain: Rubble

In my last few articles on creating city terrain I walked through the steps of making city ruins using Styrofoam, pink foam, shale, and other odds and ends. Well, after making the main ruins you should have amassed quite a pile of left over small chunks of foam littering your work space. Hopefully you did not throw them out as I am going to show you how you can use those pieces of foam to create rubble terrain pieces. I like to use rubble in my city fight boards because it helps flesh out the visualization that you are really battling it out in a city landscape.