Shardwrack Spines: January Terrain 2019

Games Workshop Citadel Death World Forest Terrain Shardwrack Spines

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.

Games Workshop Citadel Death World Forest Terrain Shardwrack Spines

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.

Games Workshop Citadel Death World Forest Terrain Shardwrack Spines

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!

Mantic Terrain Crate – Barricades and Barrels, Conan’s Chests

Mantic Terrain Crate, Barricades, Kegs, Monolith Conan Boardgame Chests

My plans to get a ton of exciting Heroes and Villains done in December have had a few large wrenches thrown in the works, and as a result, I haven’t really painted for almost a week. Getting back into it, I decided to work on some simple stuff that had been sitting around in the way on my painting desk – in this case, more Mantic Terrain Crate scatter pieces.

Mantic Terrain Crate, Barricades

Mantic Terrain Crate, Barricades

Two different types of barricade – and three of each. I varied the colours just a little in order for them to be a little unique and not just look like clone-pieces. I kept them all to natural, “woody” tones, and this time I varied the crates and barrels a little from the tones I’ve used in previous sets.

Mantic Terrain Crate, Barricades

Mantic Terrain Crate, Barricades

As you can see, they’re not exactly scales as proper barricades – more in a boardgame scale, if anything. Our model here is Forlong the Fat, one of GW’s “true-ish”-scale, LotR models. Even though he’s positioned behind them and is raised by a slottabase, you van see that they’re not exactly very big as far as barricades go. I’m sure they’ll be fine as generic scatter, though.

Mantic Terrain Crate, Keg Barrels

The other pieces are much less interesting – three larger keg barrels and three sets of triple-keg barrel stacks. Dark wood here, with brassy taps. While the barricades will easily make a bit of extra colour in fantasy wargames as well as dungeon scenery, these keg-barrels are a fair bit more limited. If we ever need to kit out a tavern for a game, we’ll certainly have a well-stocked booze supply!

Monolith Conan Boardgame Chests

Finally, some chests that I made myself finish off, after they’ve been sitting around for 6 months or so. These are from the Conan Miniatures Boardgame, by Monolith. I remember some time ago in the comments, someone (Dagger & Brush, from memory) suggesting that I could paint some of the chests in a set I had in different colours to distinguish the quality of them. Rather than paint the same model chests in different colours, I decided to make these slightly more fancy coffer sculpts a little more fancy in turn when it came to their paint. Baal Pteor, also from the Conan game provides us with our scale in this shot.

I’ll have some real models painted for you all. Soon.