Unlikely combinations

Since I started my latest project, getting my Temple of Ro-Kan models painted for Bushido, I have been looking at some of Oshiro Model Terrain's rather lovely er... model terrain (the clue is in the name). If I'm going to be playing more of a game set in a kind of fantasy medieval Japan, I want my table top to look the part.

SO far, my Japanese-ish scenery collection consists of a handful of cardboard buildings printed from a PDF (I would credit the designer, but I got them from a link in a forum post ages ago and I honestly can't remember). They actually look very nice, cost very little and took, probably, no more than an hour to assemble.

I am generally very much in favour of cardboard scenery. I have a small town's worth of medieval fantasy buildings made from Fat Dragon and World Works PDFs. There is no way I could have afforded that many buildings made from any other material and building from scratch would have taken ten times as long and probably not looked as good. And, frankly, given the choice I would rather be painting models than scenery. Plus, cardboard is more sympathetic to buildings than more organic structures like rocks and trees.

But the problem is, once you've started with cardboard you can't really stop. Your cardboard town, with its cardboard streets, cardboard buildings, cardboard carts, market stalls and goods all look nice together, but once a plastic or resin building sneaks in it looks weirdly out of place. All bumps and grunge next to the nice smooth surfaces. It's like photo shopping an illustration into a photograph, both might look good but they don't look right together (unless the incongruity is the point).

So far, I have been looking at Oshiro's smaller items, grave stones, barrels and assorted brick-a-brack. But they also have a nice range of full sized houses, as well as some smaller, but still sizable items, like drums, arches and even an outdoor toilet. But the bigger I get, the harder it gets to mix them with my existing buildings. And I've seen the price of those Oshiro buildings. They look gorgeous, but my wallet can only take so much abuse.

So I face a dilemma. Stick with what I've got, replace it piecemeal as I can raise the cash or live with a mismatched 2D/3D world.

Big new project

Despite the appearance of some new Chaos pictures last week, I haven't actually been working on Chaos for a while. In fact, apart from a few Anima Tactics models (of which more later) I haven't done a lot of painting this year. The reason for this is below.

Behold Dragonshire:


Not my name, I hasten to add or even my designs. The designs come from Fat Dragon games a company that specialise in card terrain in PDF form that you print and assemble yourself. You buy a product and are given a link to a zip file containing a number of PDF documents. You can then print these out to card, cut them out and stick them together to make your scenery.

A number of companies doing this that have sprung up in the last few years taking advantage of the Internet as a distribution system and broadband making large downloads a reasonable possibility.

I have been using cared scenery in my games for a while. You may have noticed card buildings and fences in my previous posts, these were made by World Works games (and two of their buildings have been added to Dragonshire with a few modifications), another company doing the same sort of work. I don't have any strong preferences between the two companies, they both do fine work, but Fat Dragon had a sale on and so I scooped up Dragonshire for less than ten quid.

Card terrain is becoming increasingly popular, though it seems to be aimed principally at role players, possibly because of the need for a range of layouts assembled quickly. In the wargaming world there is an element of snobbery about this kind of terrain, with some gamers preferring more three dimensional models, either built from scratch, from resin or, increasingly plastic.

The drawback is that this kind of scenery can be expensive and usually has to be painted, if not made from scratch. It can look stunning, but not everyone is an expert modeller and painter. The advantage of card modelling is that with a relatively small amount of work you can have a range of scenery that looks good on the table. If not quite as good as the sort of thing the experts produce.

Dragonshire comes with a range of base tiles you can print out to form your town/ city streets. Fat Dragon recommends mounting them on foam card. But I preferred to mount 12 onto large sheets of thick card, as its cheaper and less likely to come apart in the middle of a game. A bit of careful planning and I was able to produce four base boards that can be arranged in a number of formations.

Below are the four different boards:




If you look carefully, you can see that they all have a road leading off at the top, bottom, left and right, so they can be put together in any formation. That should make for a fair variety of layouts.

I still have plans for a couple more boards as well as a few more extra bits and pieces, such as carts, market stalls, barrels and so on to make games a bit more cluttered and interesting. The town will probably be principally used for Anima Tactics and other skirmish games, but a city fight version of Warhammer might be interesting.

One big advantage of the Dragonshire buildings is that they are designed to be taken apart so that you can see, and place models inside.


The building divides into a base, roof and two floors. In this example there is also a balcony that hangs from one wall. The tabs on the base and just visible under the second floor hold each level in place making the easy to disassemble but still strong enough to hold together. Models can smash their way in and out of houses and even fight on roof tops thanks to some useful stands that balance on the roofs and provided models with much needed stability.

Unfortunately none of this is as cheap as you might expect. The set itself was a bargain, but you have to add the cost of glue, card, paper and, most importantly, printer ink. I have gone through three colour cartridges already and each building uses about five sheets of card. Of course if these were plastic Games Workshop buildings each one would have set me back £15 at least and the whole layout would have had to be be painted as well, so in the long run this is probably much cheaper. Just not quite as cheap as it first appears.

Hopefully more pictures when the whole thing is finished.

Hikone castle rises

Ever since I decided to put together a Samurai army I wanted a castle to go with them.

When I decided on 6mm scale it became even more important. The reason for this is that, while I have a lot of scenery for 28mm scale, much of it isn't really transferable to 6mm scale. The hills are fine, they just become bigger hills or even mountains. But 28mm forests don't work so well. I have seen people use large scale trees with their small figures and while they are fine for gaming purposes, they never look quite right.

Most importantly, I needed buildings, specifically Japanese style buildings in the right scale. This is easier said than done. Not many manufacturers make 6mm Japanese buildings. In any case, I was keen to save some money and wanted to do it myself.

Starting with the castle was probably not a sensible idea. But I like a challenge and loved the idea of my army of Samurai lined up with the castle in the background.

I ummed and ahhed for some time before deciding on a castle to model. I thought about creating a generic castle, but was worried that it wouldn't look authentic. I considered Gifu castle, because the Red Devils had fought there and seen some action.

But in the end my eyes were drawn to Hikone castle. This was the castle of the Red Devils themselves and, fortunately, one of the few Japanese castles to still be substantially authentic. Most are reconstructions. This meant I could find lots of nice photographs of the castle for reference.

Of course when I say 'castle' I am really referring to the keep, the large central building within the castle compound. The whole castle is made up of dozens of buildings surrounded by walls. I plan to do more buildings and some walls, but I had to start somewhere.

Hikone Castle keep as it appears today

Hikone wasn't constructed until after the battle of Sekigahara, and was not completed until after Ii Naomasa's death, so it was almost certainly never besieged. Using it in battle would be necessarily anachronistic. But I decided I didn't care. I could play an 'alteranate history' game or use it to stand in for another castle. The chance to build the Red Devil's own castle to go with the army was too good to pass up.

Unfortunately I had a great deal of trouble finding any plans or blueprints for the castle. In the end I relied on a dodgy translation of the Hikone city website, that stated the castle was 21 metres tall and measuring numerous photos to work out the scale of everything. The results are less than precise, but should do for gaming purposes.

I also wanted to be able to put models inside, so I decided to build it with three seperate detachable floors. I am clearly insane.

I started by making the walls of each floor using foamboard (two thin layers of card with a layer of foam in between). Foamboard is nice and thick and can be pinned easily for extra stability. I then gave the first two floors a flat roof. This allowed the second floor to sit on top of the first and the third to sit on top of the second. The flat roofs were made using 1mm thick card.

After that I made the curved roofs out of more thick card. These had to be carefully cut to match the design of the castle and still allow each floor to be detached.


This work in progress shot shows the keep at this stage. At this point I made a major blunder. I measured the heights for each floor, taking into account the added depth needed to clear the roof of the floor beneath. Unfortunately, I screwed up the second floor and made it 10mm too short. It dissapeared under the roof of the first floor. I ended up having to scrap the whole second floor and start again.

After that I neede to texture the roofs. I spent a lot of time looking around for appropriate thin round objects to stick to the rooves to give them an authentic look. In the end I settled on barbecue skewers, which were probably a bit too thick, but look okay in this scale. I cut them into small pieces and glued them on to the rooves covering up any visiable card.

I added windows and wood panels with more card. Finally I had to build the base. All Japanese castles are built on a mound of tightly packed stones for added defence. These mounds are fantastically tough and in many cases the mound of stones is now all that remains of the castle. I build my mound using more foamboard with a flat card 'roof' for the castle to sit on top of.

Completed, but unpainted castle.

Finally I painted it. This wasn't too hard as the castle is mostly black and white. I gave the whole think an undercoat of black primer before painting the walls in two coats of white. The roofs were touched up with more black, to give them good coverage before being drybrushed, first with Tamiya Nato black and the German grey. Finally, I gave the windows a quick go with German grey to simulate pains of glass.

Painted Keep

So far, I have only partly textured the mound, by gluing a layer of small stones. I intend to add smaller stones to fill in the gaps before painting.

Painted keep with partly texture, but unpainted mound

This was an ambitious project and took the better part of a month to complete. I still need to add more, I think a few extra details, like the gold stars on the original castle would look good, but I have to figure out to do them. I also intend to add more buildings, the keep has at least two further buildings attached, and no castle would be complete without some walls.

First, though I think I will do some smaller buildings that I can use as a village. After the Castle that shouldn't be too challenging.

I am very pleased with the three level effect. It means that a good six warmaster stands can be placed inside the castle ready to defend it. Given that Warmaster Medieval has siege rules, this is quite a tempting prospect.

The three levels of Hikone castle keep

If you're interested in seeing any more pictures of the model you can find them here: http://s663.photobucket.com/albums/uu353/Humorous_Conclusion/Hikone%20Castle%20model/

Hopefully, I will have pictures of my completed Ii Red Devil army soon.