Inspiration-credit for the models in this post goes entirely to Thomas, from High Times on the Eastern Fringe. When GW released their (apparently now discontinued as a standalone set) Shardwrack Spines kit a couple of years ago, my reaction was somewhere between indifference and thinking that they were a bit shit. Over time, I saw a few that looked decent through to good, such as the ones on Sho3box’ blog. Even then, though – I still had no interest in the kit.

Then I saw Thomas’ ones. And all of that changed. I thought his made what I thought was basically a shitty kit look pretty fucking amazing, to be quite blunt. Not too much later, he posted up a tutorial on how he did them, and the wheels started turning. A little while later, I bought two boxes, and then did nothing with them for a year or more. Last year (2018) I got started with the spray cans, but then got delayed for months because I didn’t want to buy two or three pots of Rakarth Flesh to do the drybrushing. Later, the Killzone: Death World Forest box came out with a few more, so I picked that kit up and then got the new ones up to the same point.

After we had some time, Marouda did a Bunnings run for me and matched a close-enough square of Rakarth Flesh into a sample pot of house paint, a couple of tubes of craft paint (white and when normals call “cream” and we hobbyists call “bone”) and then last week, I finally got it going – with Thomas’ instructions as my guide on the PC screen – and a couple of days later, we were done!

Clearly, these are really only of much use for Sci-Fi and Fantasy gaming rather than Historicals or more grounded gaming, but I’m good with that. In closing – thank you once again to Thomas – because of you, I now have a solidly decent-sized set of very spiky terrain. If anyone stabs themselves badly while gaming with them, I’ll be blaming you for that, too!