Barry (aka Leadbear) is an Australian customer with an online gallery of very well painted terrain, including a couple of Tabletop Terrain pieces in the Misc section.

I particularly like the way all of his painted work has a very natural feel to it and those balsa wood trench floors look very nice. He’s done commission work in the past, so if you’re interested drop him a line.

He’s also started creating his own resin terrain based on a discussion we had on Terragenesis a while ago.

As an aside one of the bonuses to starting this blog several years ago is the number of interesting hobbyists I’ve encountered in New Zealand, Australia and further afield. There’s nothing better than bouncing ideas of similarly minded people to improve your own skills imho.

I’m hoping to run a Pulp .45 Adventures campaign for my gaming mates over the next couple of months. So last week I finished a some more pieces of Egyptian CD terrain to add to my existing collection. They’re a couple of sloped towers that will form stand-alone ruins, or together represent entrance markers to a lost temple complex.

I ruined one simply because I ran out of blocks to build two entire towers. The ruined one, while not realistic as presumably it should be filled with solid blocks, should be good for gaming over because figures can hide inside giving them excellent hard cover.

I’ve been basing all my Pulp terrain on CD’s like this because it gives you a lot more variety when laying out ruins on a desert table than say, monolithic ruined buildings would.

I have noticed though that if there’s a lot of CD lip around the terrain (as in the obelisk piece for example) the CD can warp around the edges which is annoying. So these towers extend almost to the edge of each CD and have had their bases filled with Ultracal 30, up to the first row of bricks which gives them a nice weighty feel.

The sphinxs that feature were originally just an experiment in painting this desert terrain. They don’t offer a lot of cover, but the desperate .45 Hero can occasionally hunker down behind them while the bullets fly.

I arrived home yesterday to find both a large box of Crescent Root Studios 28mm Middle Eastern buildings and three new Hirst Arts molds waiting for me. Naturally I had to unpack them immediately - here’s some of the buildings arranged into a street to give you some idea of how useful they’ll be.

While I ordered two each of the 28mm Middle East line I’ve only used one of the largest buildings (the 28d1) in the photos for this review. This is because the other buildings are built to exactly the same scale, so the doorways and windows are comparable sizes, and they all have the same removeable roofs and doors. My order was also for unpainted buildings just to save a little cash, and because I don’t mind painting terrain.

First Impressions

As usual my order from CRS was well packed and even double boxed! Each building came in a separate sealed plastic bag, while the various roof and door pieces were packed into several ziplock bags. Nothing was damaged in transit thanks to the careful packing. As I live in New Zealand and usually order from the US/UK, it’s comforting to see a manufacturer pack their orders so well.

These larger 28mm buildings are cast from the same off-white resin as CRS’s smaller 15mm buildings. I don’t know what this material is but it’s tough while being quite light which is ideal for international shipping. Every part has been sprayed with a gray primer which means you can paint them straight out of the box. Checking the buildings and extra parts I noticed no miscasting nor any bubbles which is superb.

Assembly

This photo shows the largest 28d1 building broken into its parts. For scale indication I’ve placed a 28mm DAK German (holding the SMG) from Artizan Designs and a 28mm Archaeologist from Copplestone Castings in each shot as well.

Each building is cleverly designed so the removeable roofs are well supported at each corner. The roof pieces are all a good 2-3mm thick and the hard resin is unlikely to chip or break during gaming. All of the buildings are also cast onto a harder sheet of white plastic which is a thoughtful detail as it should stop the buildings from wearing around the edges.

The removeable doors drop into a slotted frame behind the doorway. They’d be a little fiddly to open and close during gameplay because you have to remove the roof first to get them out. However for pre-game set up they’re excellent, allowing you to close and lock certain rooms or buildings in a street.

The parts fit together surprisingly well. I received eight buildings and only had to file two of the roof sections for best fit. I suspect on these two buildings a couple of the walls around the roof sections had bowed in slightly (say ½mm to 1mm) which explains the tight fit. The bowing isn’t at all visible and may just be a side effect of the curing resin.

Apart from the two roof sections, the only other clean up I did was file around the interior frame of each window to clean away a bit of a resin lip left from the casting process. All up it took me maybe 10 minutes to clean everything up ready for painting.

The Buildings

Here’s the building put together with our German friends again. I’ve placed the Archeologist in the doorway for scale. He just fits underneath the door frame, but it’s worth pointing out this gent has a small metal footplate that has been glued down to a GW base. So he’s gained at least 3mm extra height from his basing.

This close-up nicely shows the rich texturing, with exposed bricks, rough patches of plaster, cracks and broken sections of wall. Several walls also have a light scattering of bullet holes across them. Depending on your tastes you may want to patch these holes prior to painting. The texturing means these buildings should be quick to paint with ink washes and several layers of drybrushing. You can also see the rough stairs with appropriate platforms for ascending figures which will be useful during games.

Here’s the SMG totin’ trooper peering through a window. I took this photo to give you some idea how the figures will look up against windows during gaming. Figures with extended rifles and pistols should easily be placeable so they’re firing through the windows.

Incidently look at the bottom of the building and you can see the way it’s been cast onto a thick slab of white plastic for extra strength.

In Conclusion

I was very interested when Crescent Root released these buildings back in July because they seemed ideal for 28mm skirmish and Pulp gaming. Plus I already own a set of CRS 15mm Middle Eastern buildings and anticipated the 28mm versions would be at least as well made as their smaller brothers.

Now I own a set of these buildings I can happily say they have exceeded all my expectations. I was particularly surprised at how well they went together out of the box! Believe me it takes skill and not a little patience to create modular terrain that fits together so easily. I’m really looking forward to getting them painted up and playing some fast and furious .45 Adventure scenarios over and through them!

In conclusion if you’re looking for 28mm scale Middle Eastern buildings for gaming I believe you need look no further than Crescent Root Studio’s excellent (and expanding) range of terrain.

Last night Flashpoint Miniatures made the BETA version of their Middle East Moderns ruleset available for download from their forum.

Beware that it’s a Microsoft Word document at the moment, I imagine the final version will be in PDF form.

I’ve also been looking at playing the free moderns Company Commander ruleset with Flashpoint’s excellent 17mm Modern miniatures.

I’m just reading a couple of old paperbacks I picked up some time ago with the Spike Milligan war diaries. One of which is ‘Those Devils in Baggy Pants’, written in 1951 by Ross S. Carter, who served in the US Paratroops during WWII.

It’s certainly an interesting read, being essentially an edited and expanded wartime diary. The prose is fairly simple and a little out-dated but Mr Carter pulls no punches while describing his war-time experiences. For example, the Germans are more commonly referred to as ‘Krautheads’.

Worth checking out if you’re interested in the day to day life of a US paratrooper in WWII, particularly since it was originally published only five years after the close of WWII.

Last week a couple of EBob Miniatures Dromedary Camels arrived in my mailbox. I ordered these beasts as ’set dressing’ for my Egyptian Pulp .45 Adventure games. Here’s a quick review!

They arrived in the usual EBob clam-shell style plastic blisters and are a one piece white metal cast supplied with a round plastic base. For scale comparison I’ve placed the camel next to an unsuspecting gentleman from Copplestone Castings. The camel is nicely sculpted and in proportion, well I assume so, it certainly looks like a camel! The hair texture is well done and hides any noticeable mold lines. There was no flash at all on my two camels.

However one issue is that the legs are quite thin and I did have to straighten several of them out on arrival. So I’ll definitely be pinning both my camels to plastic bases for gaming - on rectangular Games Workshop cavalry bases rather than the large circular bases they came with.

As these are supplied ‘naked’ I’ll probably be adding some green stuff or fuse wire in the form of a simple rope bridle, and possibly even try my hand at sculpting a full saddle from plasti-card so I can add some baggage. This is simply because I’d like to use them as tame camels for desert villages and Cairo streets etc.

In summary these beasts are up to EBob’s typical high standard and will form a welcome addition to my Pulp figures. They should also be pretty easy to paint with a little careful drybrushing. Hmmm, wonder if I should create a ‘Villainous Spitting Camel’ archetype?

Rattrap Productions are revving up to release the Gloire ruleset on the 1st of November. From their website:

“Gloire is swashbuckling adventure, like the stories of the Three Musketeers, Dr. Syn and the Scarecrow, and Scaramouche. Players can control master swordsmen, nobles of the court, highwaymen, military heroes, spies…”

Gloire is based on the original .45 Pulp Adventure ruleset and actually expands them in a few interesting directions, in particular the melee system has many more interesting cinematic options for overpowering your opponent and controlling the outcome of a scuffle. In fact I’ll be using the Gloire ‘pushback’ rules in my .45 Adventures from now on.

A demo subset of the full rules are available for download now and are definitely worth checking out.

There’s a Yahoo Groups forum for Gloire as well, which the author visits regularly.