April 2023 – Lair of the Lagomorph

Campaigning in the Border Princes

In my last post (Dwarven Cannon) I mentioned that my friends and I were thinking of embarking on a map-based campaign for classic Warhammer (6th/7th edition era). Enthusiasm has not waned and we’re tentatively up to four players interested! We’re still likely to want to have 6 factions involved to flesh things out so it’s likely a couple of us will play 2 factions. What the factions are is likely to be decided over the next few weeks, so an update on that will happen at some stage! To play a map-based campaign one needs a map, and I turned my attention to that this week.

One of the lingering questions after the initial discussions last week was whether to play the campaign presented in the book as is or to use the rules to create our own campaign. In the end we decided to play the Border Princes campaign from the General’s Compendium with a few tweaks. The map locations are really nicely fleshed out and we thought we could learn from it to allow us a good chance of creating a good campaign of our own in the future. While the book originally came with a poster map of the region to use for campaigning, the second hand copy of the book I got did not have the map with it (lost a long time ago presumably!), and I set about replacing it.

I tried scanning the small version of the map shown in the book with a view of printing it on a few A3 sheets to make a map large enough to hold models. Unfortunately while my scanner has high enough resolution to provide images that would work blown up to that size, the source image was to small and scaling it up just made the printing dots very visible. SO I decided to do the next best thing: draw my own version of the map!

*I uploaded this photo at a higher resolution than I usually do, should let you zoom in if you feel like it!*

This then is a bit of an unusual post, not about model painting by about map making! I spent most of my spare time over the last week putting this together, thoroughly enjoying the process. The General’s Compendium actually provides pretty good instructions on how to draw your own maps and I mostly followed that process supplemented by helpful advice from my wife who is an artist.

I started by drawing a grid on the map, and overlaying a matching grid on the scan I’d taken of the map in the book. This let me roughly copy the layout of the original which I pencilled in using an HB pencil (the book recommends using a light pencil to avoid smudging – HB was the lightest I had but the book suggests 2H!). With the layout marked out (I mostly just drew the roads and river sections to get my bearings) I started adding details. I started with the mountain sections, as there was a lot to fill out. I generally tried to replicate the style displayed on the original map but ended up making it my own by adding shading in the line work. At this stage I was pencilling in sections of mountain and then tracing that pencil line with a the grey Uni pin brush marker you see in the photo above. These are pigment based and water resistant once dry, very important for a later stage!

I tried to keep an eye on where the original map had place location names to make sure I left space for them. I made a few mistakes there and decided to write place names before drawing detail to avoid doing that again! I initially used a permanent marker to write location names, but that ended up bleeding in the paper a bit and generally looking a bit icky so I switched over to the red Uniball pen you see in the tools photo.

The photo above shows the difference between my two pens. The uniball pen ended up much cleaner and I wish I’d done some trials before diving in … but what are you going to do, this project was powered by enthusiasm and enthusiasm has no time for trials! The lettering was based on the original map, I tried to copy the letters best I could, and am ok with the outcome. Anyone who knows me in person knows I have dreadful handwriting, so the fact these are mostly legible is a good outcome!

I’m also no illustrator, and I tried best I could to replicate the illustrations that were on the original map. They’re a bit crude but they’ll do! The original map had forests as collections of roundish shapes and I went for a similar look which was quite the effort. That was a lot of repetitive drawing which given my recent bout of RSI meant frequent breaks and lots of stretches.

*Just in case we forget where we’re campaigning!*

Once all the line art was done, I sponged on a large amount of tea water (hence the need for water resistant ink!) and let the map sit overnight. The book suggested using water colour paints for this step but I’m a veteran of a great many childhood pirate maps and knew I could get a good outcome out of the humble tea bag. This gave that nice creamy-brown base all over the map, which provided the first stage of colour. The next day I used Burnt Umber ink to paint in the shading on all the details. I did this in multiple passes with different dilutions of ink, with the forest sections getting the most variations in intensities. The original map did this for its forests and I thought the look was very effective.

Overall I’m very happy with the outcome, we’ve ended up with a very practical map and I really enjoyed myself making this. I’ll have to try map-making again.

Dwarven Cannon

Warhammer: The Old World

With my newly refound ability to paint, I’ve been looking for things to paint (which I’m not short of) and where better to direct that energy than at a new project rather than work towards finishing one of the many existing ones I have!

I got a book in the mail last week I’ve been looking for for a while, and said book triggered a flurry of conversation between my regular gaming partner and I about campaigns in the Warhammer world. The book in question is The General’s Compendium, a book published during the 6th edition of the game which contains a lot of ideas for what we now call narrative games, including a whole three ways to run wargaming campaigns. I read the book cover to cover over the last few days, and I really want to run a campaign now!

One of the map-based campaign systems in the book has the factions involved in the campaign have “banners” on the map, each representing an army. Rather than tracking army composition, the players just pick a game size they want for the campaign and each time enemy banners meet on the map, a game of Warhammer is played at the size specified at the start. The players are free to alter their army lists between games, that being rationalised away by reinforcements and units being shuffled between banners.

The details are still fuzzy, but the leading idea for our campaign is to each have a number of factions under our control. As we are just two and that will be a lot of games and a lot of painting, we decided to keep the point size for the banners to 1000 points. The opportunity to paint multiple small armies is one that I very much welcome, and here’s the start of that:

This cannon and its crew are models from the Battle For Skull Pass starter set which was released for the 7th edition of the game. I’ve had these dwarves for quite a long time now, and in fact dwarves were my first ever Warhammer models way back when (over 20 years ago)! It’s one of my biggest Warhammer regrets to not actually have a painted dwarf army considering how long I’ve owned some of these models. Time to fix that!

I decided to go with the Karak Hirn colour scheme (i.e. green), as that was the studio army that was done up in the army book back then, and I have fond memories of looking at those pages back in the day. It’s also the scheme that I used for that first box of Dwarf Warriors I got at the time.

Most of the painting was done using contrast paints as a base coat, with the exception of the green tunics which these models acted as a testing grounds for. I wanted to make sure I matched the green of the studio paint job back then, and luckily for me the army book had a nice guide on how to paint it … with 20 year old paints. Luckily I was able to match the paints with some in my collection, and it’s quite simply Vallejo Heavy Black Green as a base coat followed by successive highlights of that same colour with more and more Scale75 Sherwood Green. I’ll do up a proper painting guide when I paint up the first block unit and have finalised how all of this is going to look.

Anyhow that’s it for this update, these models were very quick to paint, upside of their relative lack of detail due to being ~15 year old single piece plastic models. I have plenty more from that starter set to get through, so expect some more stiffly posed dwarves to grace these pages soon!

Dusty Panzers

Bolt Action

With the wrist on the mend and itching to get back into some painting I decided to tackle something with limited amounts of brushwork: tanks!

I’ve had a Panzer 3 half built for my North Africa Germans sitting in a box for a while and this seemed like a good occasion to finish it up. I then decided that the two P3s I painted for my late war Germans would make much more sense as reinforcements for North Africa, so decided to repaint them as well.

The two already painted had the longer later barrels, so step one was a bit of surgery to shorten them down to match the new one. I think it turned out pretty well, can you tell which are the cut down ones*?

Painting-wise these were pretty straightforward, just an all-over coat of Vallejo Model Air Sand Yellow, followed by painting the tools attached to the outside of the tanks, and a lot of chipping and the rubber wheels with Vallejo German Grey. The fun came from the oils and the pigments, I wanted these to be very dusty so I went much heavier than I have on tanks in the past. These are covered in a variety of sandy/cream oils, and covered all over with pigments in the same kind of colours.

I did not enjoy putting on the turret decals last time, and was dreading it again this time! Things went much the same: a lot of repositioning and dousing on decal setter and crossing my fingers in hope! Overall though, I can’t complain with the outcome, I think they turned out pretty good.