The raid on Hilfenhaus

Today was a momentous day - my first game of WFB3 in over 20 years! Not only that, but the first game I've ever played using fully painted miniatures and decent terrain (back in the day the Australia tax made minis too expensive, so we played 3,000 point games with cut out pieces of cardboard!).

My brother provided the opposition, and a variety of 3-7 year olds were the occasional spectators. Rules-wise we kept it simple, really just using the summary sheets at the back of the rulebook as our main reference. Given the small number of troops, that worked really well - no point over-complicating things when we're just (re-)learning.

The brief scenario was based around the models that I've painted over the last year or so. It was actually quite fun coming up with a storyline that fit with what I had available. I didn't bother with points values, instead coming up with what I thought was a good balance based on the figures available.

In brief, a ragtag band of orcs and skaven - down on their luck and hungry - led by Bane Spittlebreath stumble across a lonely house near the edge of a great forest. Figuring on an easy meal, they plan a raid on the house. They realise too late that a band of wood elves returning from a Great Council have spotted them and taken up defensive positions behind the walls of the estate. Victory would go to whichever side destroyed the other.

At this point I'll apologise for the quality of the photos - I had the white balance set all wrong!

This is from the end of the battle, but shows the layout of the table

The board is about 3' square - a piece of mdf I found on the side of the road and used as a tester for making a gaming board. The house - Hilfenhaus - is surrounded by walls and hedges and sits on a bend in the road. A ruined watchtower on a hill is there simply because I wanted to use the terrain piece! Out of shot in the top left corner is a small field enclosed by fences.

The elves (played by my brother, Ismaan) deployed first, taking up defensive positions behind the walls. They numbered 10 archers, Aralorn Lightblade and his 5 house guard, and Skyrla Wildcall and her two ferocious wild cats.

The orcs deployed on the opposite edge - Bane Spittlebreath leading 14 heavily armed and armoured orcs (Ruglud's Armoured Orcs, in fact) on the right flank, with a unit of 8 skaven and a fearsome rat ogre and its handler in the middle and left flank respectively.

Aralorn Lightblade and his house guard take up defensive positions

First turn went to the orcs and skaven (aka 'the bad guys'). They advanced, with me making my first tactical error of the game by sending the rat ogre off on his own down the left flank. The orcs were going to have a pot shot with their crossbows, but with total to hit modifiers of -4(!) it didn't seem worth it.

The elves began by dispatching the wild cats to advance on the rat ogre (cue cat-and-mouse jokes), and unleashing a volley of arrows from the deadly Laurelorn longbows. I didn't take notes, but I think the orcs survived this volley unscathed.

Elvish archers behind cover

Hold your line, men

I'll depart from a strict turn-by-turn description at this point (no notes, you see), and give you the vibe of the battle. The bad guys continued to advance in the face of the elvish barrage, with the orcs taking a few casualties as they inched (3" movement!) their way forwards. The wildcats charged the rat ogre, and with the two cats having 8 attacks on the charge they soon gained the upper hand.

The first melee of the game

The orcs continued to be whittled away, while the skaven made it to the elvish line and stabbed furiously over the wall. This became an epic battle, with the initiative see-sawing. The weight of numbers favoured the skaven, but they struggled to land a blow on their opponents, and so a game of push-back and counter-push-back took place.

killkill elfthings

Meanwhile, the orcs had lost a rank to bow fire but finally made it to the line of archers. Here's where our confidence with the rules maybe got in the way. The orcs pushed the elves back, but didn't have enough move to get across the obstacle and maintain base-to-case contact. By my reckoning they would have been half an inch short, and been split across the obstacle and so at risk of being charged while unformed next turn. As a result, they declined to follow up and this spelled their undoing.

An orc's eye view of the battle

Meanwhile the cats had pretty easily accounted for the rat ogre, and had set their sights on the orcs (given that the house guard was holding its own against the skaven). The house guard, in fact, managed to land a couple of blows on the skaven, winning the combat despite having been pushed back that round. Unsurprisingly the ratmen failed their Ld test and all bar one were hacked down. The sole survivor had the good sense to not stop running until it had cleared the table edge.

In the thick of it

Seeing the wild cats approaching, the orcs turned to face their new foe, copping more of a beating from close-range arrow fire in the process. They avoided being charged in the flank, but those 8 attacks came to bear, killing a greenskin. Not being able to land a blow, the orcs were pushed back, failed their Ld test and routed straight of the edge of the table. Game set and match to the wood elves!

It was great fun, and really nice to be playing again with Ismaan after all these years. And nice to get my miniatures out the the cabinet and into battle! I was a bit surprised at how easy the elves had it. They were always going to be outnumbered (by virtue of my not having painted many of them), but I thought that they'd have a tougher time of it. But that said, it wasn't too unbalanced and if I'd made a couple of better decisions it could have gone the other way.

Rules-wise, I'm sure there's plenty that we missed or got wrong, but it didn't detract from the fun at all. I was a good re-introduction to a great game!

I'll give it a month or so to get some more minis painted up and then see if Ismaan fancies a rematch!

Building a ruined temple - Part 2

As I mentioned in part 1, the columns were conveniently shaped pieces of plastic that I found at a great shop in Brisbane called Reverse Garbage. They are hollow so the first thing I needed to do was plug the end. I cut a plug of the foam the same diameter as the top of the column, then picked bits off it with my fingernails to make it look like broken stone. Repeat for the rest of the columns, then they were stuck in place with PVA. I only bought four columns, not being sure what I was going to do with them. I figured I needed six for a decent temple, so I made the remains of two other columns by cutting out two circles the same diameter as the base of the columns from some cork sheets (also from Reverse Garbage). Bits of column were cut from the foam, distressed as before and glued in place with PVA. Giving you something that looks like this.

Columns and rubble are in place

To texture the model, I covered everything in a this wash of Spakfilla (polyfilla) mixed with water.

Unfortunately from a blogging perspective, this is where I stopped taking photographs. I'll use photos of the finished product to show illustrate the next few steps.

Larger pieces of rubble were cut from the foam. The smaller rubble is coarse sand. I got some from a bag of sand I bought ages ago for a garden project and put it through a sieve to get rid of the fine stuff. To make the effect of a pile of rubble, I used small pieces of foam glued into a pile, with the sand glued on top.

Rubble - up close and personal.

Next was painting. It was sprayed with white undercoat. Then painted a mid-grey using acrylic from a tube I got at a cheap shop for $3. It's that artists' stuff that comes in a tube. Mix it with water til it's the right consistency and away you go. Then I did a very heavy drybrush of a light grey. Didn't really work the way I had in mind, and in hindsight I think I should have skipped the mid-grey, or used a lighter grey first up and stuck with that. I was hoping that the darker grey would show through more and add some shading but it didn't really. I drybrushed with white to try to bring out the texture, and shaded with gaps between the blocks with GW Nuln Oil wash.

The small rubble was painted GW Gorthor Brown, and drybrushed with VGC Plague Brown then with Plague Brown plus white (I think).

The weathering was fun, with the technique courtesy of an article on building a ruined temple from an old White Dwarf. The green was a mix of VMC Goblin Green and Escorpena Green, and the brown was Gorthor Brown plus VMC sepia ink. Both were thinned to a thin wash. I painted clean water on to the area to be weathered, and then painted green or brown over that. The water spreads and softens the edges of the colour. Easy and effective!

The tufts of grass are old toothbrush bristles glues into place and painted, and the bushes are bits of loofah dipped into a very watery wash of green with a touch of brown (the $3 paints again). The base is covered in PVA with fine sand glued on to it, then painted with a mid-green, then drybrushed with brown just to tone it down a bit, then a couple of lighter shades of green + white, with I think GW Ushabti Bone at the end.

I'm pretty pleased with the overall result though I probably should put a wash of Nuln Oil over it just to darken it down a bit as it's a little too clean.

Thanks for stopping by, and hope you found this useful.

O

Building a ruined temple - Part 1

My latest completed project is a ruined temple, made out of bits and pieces I had around the house or that I got from the excellent shop Reverse Garbage, which sells random stuff reclaimed from businesses that would otherwise have sent it to the dump. I posted some pictures on the Oldhammer Community Facebook group and had a request for a tutorial. So here's my first stab at a how-to-make-this tutorial.

The ruined temple of doom

The main materials were a piece of polystyrene foam, cereal packet card, foamcard, the four plastic things for the pillars and some relatively dense foam. I'm not sure what the pillars were in real life - I found them at Reverse Garbage, and they're just hollow plastic tubes really. The foam isn't I think as dense as insulation foam, but is denser than polystyrene foam and isn't made of little balls. Any fairly dense foam would do I'm sure.

A piece of foam

The first step was to trim the polystyrene foam to size - about 15cm2 - and glue it to the base with PVA. For the base I used a scrap of - well, not sure what it is. It's not as thick as MDF - I cut it with a stanley knife - but sturdier than mounting card.

I then cut out two strips of foamcard the same length as the front edge of the polystyrene, with one piece twice the width of the other. The smaller piece was glued on top of the larger piece and the larger piece glued to the base butting up to the foam and there's your steps.

Next step was the blockwork. I wanted the effect of large blocks of marble - similar to Roman or Greek temples. For the floor of the temple I cut out a piece of cereal packet card that had a width equal to the width of the floor (about 15cm) plus the height of the piece of polystyrene times 2. This way, I can fold the card for the blocks at the ends of a row which makes for a neater edge. the length of the piece of card was the length of the floor plus the height plus the distance from the floor to the top of the first step. I ruled lines where I'd need to fold the card and scored along it with the back of my craft knife. Then using the knife I cut the card into strips about 1.5cm wide. each strip was cut into individual blocks, alternating between 5 blocks of 3cm and 4 blocks of 3cm and 2 blocks of 1.5 cm. This was I can offset each row of blocks so that the cracks don't line up. Here's what it looked like with the stairs and about half the floor done.

The blocks were glued in place with PVA. The stairs were done in the same way, with the width of each strip being the width of the stair plus its height, again so that I could fold the block.

I wanted a couple of patches on the floor where the block had cracked and filled with rubble, and I wanted the back right corner of the temple to have fallen off. Before I cut out the blocks, I drew the outline of the ruined parts on to the card, and when I cut the blocks out I cut around the outline as well so that I was cutting away the parts of the block I didn't need. That doesn't sound very clear. Hopefully this picture helps.

So the holes in the floor were cut out of the card before they were stuck to the polystyrene. Once all the blocks were on, I used my knife to cut into the foam to give it a crumbled look. 

Because block of polystyrene was actually 15.3cm wide, and my strips of blocks were 15 cm (because it was easier to cut 5 blocks of 3cm rather than whatever 15.3 divided 5 is), there were some large gaps between some blocks. I rubbed polyfilla into the cracks with my finger and then when it was dry I used the end of a wooden skewer to rub some of it away so that there was some definition between the blocks. I also put polyfilla on to the polystyrene where it showed through the crumbled bits, to hide the balls of polystyrene.

Right, that'll do for this part. In part two we get to the columns!

Welcome to my blog

Having been lurking about the Oldhammer scene for a year or so, I've decided to start up a blog. It'll likely not get updated all that often, but I'll try to post about most of my projects. I'm a very much a newbie when it comes to painting and terrain building, but hopefully other new starters can learn from my inevitable mistakes!


I played Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Fantasy Battles back in the late 80s and early 90s. I had a clear out a few years ago and nearly all my Oldhammer stuff went in a garage sale, barring (thankfully) by White Dwarfs. I discovered the excellent Realm of Chaos 80s blog a bit over a year ago which reignited by passion for the hobby, and since then I've been slowly acquiring miniatures as well as a copy of the WFB 3rd ed rulebook. Painting time is limited, but I'm chipping away at enough minis to be able to field a couple of small forces. I've also got the terrain bug, and have a few ideas that will hopefully turn into projects soon.

For a bit of fun, here's a picture of one of my few surviving, painted minis - a skaven musician from about 1987 I think. I would have been about 14 when I painted it. It's awful, isn't it! I think the paints were Humbrol enamels. The splodge on the back of his robes is supposed to be a baleful red eye!

Thanks for stopping by!