I know, right? Another bloody unwieldly post title. Basically, as I’ve mentioned before, my Dungeons and Lasers Woodhaven Kickstarter pledge arrived recently, so I’ve been doing quick review and paintups of several of the kits I got in my pledge …uh.. recently.

So I had the bright idea of cracking these Kickstarter Stretch Goal Extras boxes open and knocking out a whole bunch of interesting scatter terrain quite quickly. Unfortunately, “quickly” is rarely as quickly as we might hope, so a few fiddly bits caused these to take a few days longer than I’d hoped. Not the end of the world, mind you, but I had been hoping to be finishing off several other models in the time I’ve been buggering about with these, and my time off work has expired so it’s back to the grind with fewer finished stuff than planned.

Anyway, this first box comes with six distinct sprues including one on transparent plastic, that’s much harder then the softer-than-GW HIPS used.. I’ll share ’em with you here:

There’s a fair bit of variety here – it’s all fantasy themed this time but still pretty random feeling. There are also a few critters in the set as well.

Now usually I like to have smaller posts with specific things in them, but in this case I thought it more approriate to have all of the stuff I managed to finish from this first box in September in the one post. I’ll continue to (slowly) work my way through Box 1, then move onto Box 2, and then… well, I’ll leave the following step as a mystery. Also – I got two sets of these – one included in my pledge and then I added a secodn set of Stretch Goal boxes to my pledge – in this post I’m showing both of them, but you won’t get dupes if you end up picking these up via a late pledge or retail/website purchase.

So first up, I’ve got the Blacksmith’s Forge. It’ll be something that I can pair with all of the Anvils that various Kickstarters keep throwing my way. It’s a pretty nice little piece. Quick and easy to assemble. I used white ink followed by yellow and orange washes to create the glow in the coals. I then drybrushed the top of the coals with german grey and then black to create that nice contrast.

Here we have a pair of Archery Targets. I googled the colours of the rings and found an article on coiled straw mats for targets, and then went with a more archaic colour scheme from over 200 years ago, given the styl;e of the targets and the whole “fantasy/historical” gaming thing that we do. These were almost entirely painted using contrasts over grey primer, except for the base white on the target’s face.

The safe is …fine. I painted them with metallics and washes. They’d have been much faster if I hadn’t decided to get fancy with them. Something that certainly haunted me later on…

A Mummy in “box” style sarcophagus. Apparently I didn’t bother to photograph these in naked plastic. Probably because there was no assembly required on these as a one-part casting.

The Spellgates are cast in the transparent blue plastic. Did I say getting fancy earlier? I masked off the gates with blu-tac (poster putty to some of you), then sprayed the models black, drybrushed grey then some greens (because magic!) Carefully dripped my old friend Nihilakh Oxide into the runes for a glowy effect, then some thinned White Ink for highlights in there that you can barely see in the photos. Went over the super-plasticky rubble with texture paste. drybrushed – then peeled off all of that unhappy blu-tac, leaving the bare plastic underneath. I then spray varnished the whole thing satin which also serves to give some texture to the transparent plastic, which then allowed me to use some thinned Contrast paint to the portal, giving it some depth and leaving it to dry on its side (covered). Once dry, flip over and repeat. Once dry, gloss varnish one side. Once dry, flip over and repeat. Te last photo shows it with a light behind it. It’s more exaggerated than you’d see in a real game, obviously, but it still illustrates the effect kinda nicely. A little weathering power on the steps to complete the model.

Speaking of faffing about and taking more time than expected, there’s the Fountains. Assembly was straightforward, though a bit more fiddly than ideal due to the number of parts – but fine.

I thought I should give it some water action, so added some splashy bits to the bottom of the fountain.

And then of course I couldn’t leave well enough alone…

When it came to adding the Woodland Scenics Realistic Water, I found that the edges weren’t watertight, and had one of them drip Realistic Water resin everywhere. I had to patch them bpoth up from underneaht using Sprue Goo, which took an extra day to dry. I then added the water in small amounts over three days to get to the pointy where it now looks like this, and did bothing to discourage the bubbles, even though some are a bit out of scale – it’s still an appropriate effect. I think the cloudy water in the top dish will eventually clear up… finally, i added some more of that Dirty Down Moss Effect weathering paint…

And there we are – a dozen bits of decent-looking scatter terrain that I have no particular use for destined for a storage tub of random scenic stuff, cleaned up, assembled and painted at the expense of models I’m supposed to be working on. I’ve included Gandalf and a Primaris here for scale – as you can see, these really fit the smaller scale models much better but could still work with some of GW’s oversized models. (I really need to get a Stormcast painted!)

As far as value goes, this is just a small snippet of the three boxes worth of stuff that I gopt in the Stretch Goals. At the time of writing this post, they still have the Pledge Manager open for Late Backers, and this set (if not supplied as a freebie) is 25 Euro, which is pretty bloody good for three boxes of stuff (the sprues above are just the first box of three – I haven’t even opened the others). So while I’m happy with them, I can’t speak to you. The quality is solid – not hyper (or over)-detailed like GW’s plastic terrain, but still nicely detailed and a lot more understated, though as noted – scaled for D&D models more than Warhammer ones. Whether it’s worthwhile for you has to be a personal choice, especially given the costs of postage these days, though being a Polish company, they are shipping from Europe which may benefit some people.

I’m hoping to get at least a few mroe of the models from this Box #1 done each month so I can start onto Box #2 before too much time has expired. Though there is a lot here…