Ah yes, it never fails. I resolve to finish some projects but instead start a bunch of new ones…

Chris dropped the first full cast of the stone henge pieces he’s been working on this week and they’re so nice I was instantly compelled to start building a piece of WHFB terrain with them!

Here they are unpainted and arranged in your classic ‘druid circle’ with a Mordheim Necromancer attempting to invoke the dark gods of Spray Undercoating.

The pieces are all nicely textured and should be easy to paint with a black base and several layers of drybrushing. Chris even included a stone altar and a group of four tall entrance stones in the set.

In this overhead shot you can see I’ve already planned the simple grassy hill I’m going to build the druid’s circle on. After I took these photos I cut the MDF, glued high density foam to it and hot-wired/sanded the foam into a smooth hill.

Hopefully this terrain piece won’t take too much effort to complete as all I have to do is texture the ground, paint everything and apply flock and grass matt around the outside of the circle. I’m confident I can manage that this week.

Before I start assembling the Hirst Arts Cathedral I’d like to finish some of the my incomplete terrain pieces.

This weekend I’ve made some progress on the ground floor of a Vampire Counts Tower for WHFB. The tower was started in October 2004 when I was casting wall and tower builder sections.

It’s largely inspired by the buildings that appear in the WHFB Vampire Counts Army Book (very similar to this effort) as well as Parasitic Studio’s Vampire Manse. That odd hole in the ground near the start of the stairs is for a Hirst Arts resin wrought iron fence which is going to surround the stairs and the small graveyard to the right. The gravestones, stairs and tower are all Hirst Arts plaster pieces. Mordheim players may recognise the plastic doorway which has been filled with a balsa door. I’m not entirely happy with the higgeldy piggeldy staircase but it’ll have to do.

Round the back is the tradesman’s entrance where I imagine Igor sneaks fresh body parts into the dungeon. I really should have created a grilled, ground level window in the hill as well. That doorway will be sealed with a wrought iron grill and possibly capped with a minor roof as well.

The whole base needs to be flocked with greenery, some weeds around the graves and of course I need to build the overhanging first and second stories too, which will rest over the mess of unpainted plaster and foam card you see in these photos.

This week I’ve seen two orders from Hirst Arts arrive in my mailbox, both with a 7 day delivery time from US to NZ which is superb.

So I now possess all the required molds to construct the monster Hirst Arts Cathedral. Today I also picked up a full 1.2m x 2.4m sheet of 3mm MDF from Onehunga ITM ($15.99) and an entire new 22kg bag of Ultracal 30 from TopMark ($53 for a pail refill). So I really have all the supplies req’d!

The million dollar question is do I have the gumption to complete such a monster project? I reckon this beast will take at least a year of solid effort to create at my normal modelling pace. So should I? Or not? Feel free to comment!

I’ve long been an admirer of Wargames Foundry’s 28mm Pirates.

However I’ve yet to order any, possibly because what I’ve really been looking for all along is Cursed Skeleton Pirates!

These boney fellows are from Moonlight Miniatures and are very tempting. They’d make for a great Mordheim Pirate warband!

Spied on the Tabletop News Blog.

I recently finished ‘Freyberg’s War‘ by New Zealand historian Matthew Wright. I found it an interesting and reasonably balanced view of Freyberg’s efforts leading the New Zealand 2nd Expeditionary Force during WWII.

Some local critics found it overly defensive in Freyberg’s favour but I thought the author provided good historic and anecdotal evidence in this biography.

Imho Freyberg surely couldn’t have been as incompetent as he has been portrayed in other modern works considering he led the NZ2EF for the entirety of WWII and earned the respect of his men and numerous friends and foes during the course of that war.

I also enjoyed ‘Desert Duel - New Zealand’s North African War, 1940-1943′ by the same author. The numerous black and white photos also make it a fine resource for the historic gamer.

Chris (a fellow gamer) has been working on a set of 28mm stone henges for Warhammer Fantasy terrain.

His latest efforts are looking pretty good to me. He’s planning to mold and cast them in Ultracal 30 to produce enough for a full circlular stone henge. They were apparently created by casting rectangular blocks and then attacking them with a hammer! A simple and effective technique.

The Dice Tower is a superb Podcast about board games by Tom Vasel and Joe Steadman that has been running for a number of years. Each epsiode is over an hour long and packed full for board game goodness! They even have an ‘on the ground’ German correspondent who covers the Euro game scene. Definitely worth checking out if you like to temper your tabletop wargaming with the occasional board game.

Full disclosure: They’re currently running a competition with some nifty prizes for promotion…which is only part of the reason I’m promoting them - their podcast really is top notch.