Tuesday 21 July 2015

Tephra Board and NPC wIps

Now I have that out of my system.. lets move on..



I thought I would pop these up - just a few build  shots of the board - unfortunately I didn't have the camera for  the first week of the build when I drilled  the forgeworld buildings off the board ..




The aim of the build was to build a gameboard with a rogue trader eastern rim & Grimdark  40k vibe.

it had be relativity easy to build ,storable   potentially saleable have lots of cover and open spaces for large vehicles - and be evocative

The board had to be cheap comparative to the ygg- fortunately I reused most things - the only new stuff I bought was the  promethium pipes and the build materials - 

sand
pva glue
liquid nails
superglue
bicarbonate of soda

hardboard
mdf board

spray paint

I also used the casting plaster i had bought for the bromholme project and some RTV silicon for a mold.

everything else I already had.. plasticard, the buildings I traded with Thistle , I cut up the ygg board
and reused the zonemortalis walls  and landing pads ,barrels, boxes etc..


the design took a while to come up with.. but once I settled on a promethium refinery - and received the boards from John everything else fell into place.. the most difficult and time consuming aspect of the build was the bunker house roof and the engine house roof.. these two thing used up two thirds of my build time.. consequently i only had a few days to paint and build miniatures..

great weather blessed me with this build and it was lots of fun..




But for those curious - I just drilled hundreds of holes around the edge of the buildings successively connecting them up - the forgeword boards are brittle and did snap in places so I tried to give myself plenty of room for manoeuvring . it produced loads of resin dust -so a dust mask was essential - I also  placed several sheets of durable big box cardboard underneath the board during the process .

once removed I based the board pieces on 3mm thick Hardboard/fibreboard I picked mine up from B&Q here in the UK..

I used liquid nails to stick the board pieces down and then coated the liquid nails with pva white glue and children's play sand . this became very robust..


after the pva and sand dried ..  (which did not take long in the uk heatwave a few weeks back )

I used a wire brush on the the sand to remove unwanted sand and glue.. this made the whole thing rock solid..



the bunker house ( zone mortalis building ) was put together in the same way - I used 2 left over pieces of forgeworld  realm of battle tiles floor pieces to create the roof.. and I cast up a part of the zone mortalis corner sections to sit atop the original zone mortalis corner pieces.. I then added the aquilla landing pad  barrier to the edege of the forgeworld tiles..

i was left with a huge hole in the centre of the roof where the tiles were mismatched .. i fixed this super gluing strips of plasticard in-between the gap cementing them with a bicarbonate of soda and super glue..mix.





The landing pad was edged with the wall of martyrs kit.. adding a spare landing pad section for the ramp.. i wanted this landing pad to resemble the one from the aphelion complex..



in fact i wanted the whole complex to have echoes of the aphelion base.. the fact the you could enter the interior of buildings and remove roofs..

the engine room was the hardest part of the build.. the roof section took days to complete - making sure the roof was sturdy and looked like it fitted on properly to the base section.. loads of pieces of plasticard had to be measure precisely and placed at weird angles - all superglued in with bicarb for strength - the roof was cut off in the same way as the board sections- drilling hundreds of holes and joining them up.

detailing the interior of the engine was simple and fun..the quantum gothic generator worked well within it imo..


















the board was a 6mm mdf 8 by 4 board  that was cut down to 6 by 4 ..

I wanted to create pathways inbetween the added on scenery so i squirted  ( jackson pollock style )

pva glue over where i wanted the pathways to sit.. and created sand banks for untravelled areas of the board.. i then scraped and shaped the glue before sprinkling play sand over it.. after it was dry i used a wire brush to futher shape and harden the sand .

after that used some cardboard to scrape a layer of Liquid nails where i thought the roads would be and other well worn areas..


i sprayed the whole board with cheap grey hobby spray.. ( from Wilkinsons ) the sprayed a black shadows and white highlights - i tried to spray the whole board in one go to get a unified look.. but i had to go back several times after touching up some of the white areas of the buildings..







































 the generatum was based with skulls from the bromholme 
board unfortunately the liquid nails covered up the details


 The missile silo was the underside of the yggdrasillium tree  



 the skewered pole man courtesy of Phiq  !





 Minefield and robot torso
Inspired by the film hardware 

Dunny

I had wanted an Australian outback Vibe and an
1920/30's American bootlegger vibe too.
so the dunny and the wrecked jalopy with spider on it
seemed appropriate.

Jalopy


Merc encampment







I wanted the scenery to be interactive so the bunkerhouse jailbird
 was not just for show- if freed he could have joined the fight.
both the captive stranger  and blip tokens harking back to 
Advanced space crusade rules..