Making a board!
The levels came together quite nicely, but at this point I should have been much more careful about removing the very obvious moulded polystyrene look. I thought they would be hidden with the texture paste, but that didnt really work and they became impossible to remove later. Just don't use polystyrene.
The little tower base on the top is the base of an old dreadstone blight tower that I was going to use as the centerpiece. This didnt end up happening for reasons i'll get into later, but it served as a good scale checker regardless.
I bought some XPS foam from the lovely modeldisplayproducts and used it to make some large stone steps. This was my first time doing this, and im not suuuuper happy with the texture, but hey I rolled a stone on it so it can't be too far off.
I secured the steps in place with little wooden toothpicks and some wood glue.
I was actually very suprised at how sturdy they were when all set up!
I thought I had better start planning some gameplay, and the routes that models could take around the board. I wanted play to be able to happen low ground to high ground AND level to level through the valley.
And of course because it's necropolis I needed a big drop. This isn't as big as some, but still a decent threat for any archers camping up top!
To protect the foam and add some texture, I mixed up some texture paste. This is a couple of different stone grits, bird sand, baking powder, pva glue and brown paint. When dry the different grits would add some texture, and the pva would seal all the foam in making it nice and sturdy. The brown was so that any gaps I left through to later wouldnt go through to white, but to be honest the warm brown shown here wasn't much better.
The brownie stage...
As the PVA set, the grit became more pronounced, making a nice stony texture.
At this point all the slopes and steps I would need to play were in place, so I tried a test game! It went well overall, the middle sections with lots of elevation changes were really fun and engaging. The tower on the top though, didn't work. It took up too much space and make it incredibly difficult to navigate the top flat section. I pretty much decided at this point the tower had to go.
I wanted a bit of "organic" matter in the build. There is nothing living in the world of necropolis, but trees can be undead too!
The are a couple of broken bricks scattered around as well, to look like old walls and crumbling ruins.
I clustered the graves into little groups for areas of added interest (and to hide some of the particularly agregious polystyrene holes)
I had collected some acorn caps recently in the woods, and thought they looked like cute little urns, so stuck them on under this little overhang.
I primed the whole thing with black craft paint. This was kind of a mistake. I didn't want to use rattlecans because I was worried about the foam, but in reality it probably would have been ok because most of it was sealed. What ended up happening was because of all the gritty texture, there was no way I could get into all the nooks and crannies with a brush. I did th best I could, and it looked ok in the end, but im still considering spraying the whole thing black and starting the paint job over because I hate seeing the brown in the recesses.
This step was really fun, I slopped on a load of bright coloured craft paint over the black to be an undertone to the stone work. This came out really cool.
I did a black wash over the whole thing to tie it together.
The final steps was a couple of grey drybrushes, starting dark and getting gradually lighter.
Overall the board came out really well. It's fun to play on and definitely looked cool on the table at fringe SW. I learned a ton, and unfortunately didn't get time to build anything different to replace the building on the top. At the event I used a bit of warcry terrain, but I still plan to make some ruined corner walls or standing stones to hang out up there. Thanks for reading, love ya.
-Aden
