I have always wanted my own tables full of terrain, though for a long time my terrain skills lagged behind my already immature model painting skills. Today I face a different problem in that I simply do not have the space necessary for storing a full array of multiple terrain setups, or even my own dedicated table board. So a lot of stuff will have to wait.
But I do have enough space for a couple of largeish pieces and some scatter terrain, and that's what I've started to put together. Starting with a suitably grand project for a first post.
A few years ago I purchased a Castle with the aim to painting it and using it for Warhammer games in the future. Last year I resolved to paint it in the coming new year as a Summer Project.
It took me over two months, six times longer than I had originally anticipated. But by god, I did it.
Ever since I first got into Warhammer I knew I wanted to have a fully painted Warhammer Fortress set for use in games. You see, I have this sick perverted disgusting fantasy of one day playing map campaigns of Warhammer using the Mighty Empires tiles, with rules for constructing castles (again using the Mighty Empires castle markers) in territories you control, and a rule where if an army attacks a tile with a Castle on it then they play out a Siege game with the Warhammer Fortress castle on the table.
But it was a revelation last year that expedited the castle's painting and assembly. See, there are a few people in the local area who are Warhammer 6th edition curious. Some even have armies built with an eye towards using them in 6th edition. This is of course excellent news, except that due to various factors most of these other armies are tiny - only around 1500 points in size, as they're still under construction. This leaves a lot of my regular 4000-5000 point Wood Elf force unable to be brought to bear in its full glory (ironically, this is the opposite situation to Warhammer 40,000, where I am the one desperately struggling to cobble together enough models to reach small scale skirmish size against much larger and more established model collections).
However, towards the end of last year I had a realisation. You see, in 6th edition Siege games are asymmetric - the attacking army has twice as many models as the besiged army. That means that if I can get these other people playing Sieges as the defenders, I can match their 1500 point armies with 3000 points of my own and get a much larger portion of models on the table! The first step towards this is of course a Castle to besiege, so here we are.
There was a cost to this though, as several planned features of the castle were sacrificed and never made it to the finished model. In particular the towers were originally going to be pinned on the upper story, allowing for metal arrow slits to be attached and interchanged with plastic door pieces to provide options for expanding the castle with extra walls and towers. As it was I was unable to source a set of GW Arrow Slit pieces, so that feature ended up being discarded to simplify the construction process and speed up actually getting the thing painted and on the table.
The painting itself was a mixed experience. The actual painting work was simple enough, as the entire model is almost completely drybrushed, but the sheer scale of the model and volume of surface area to paint in very monotonous greys ended up dragging the process out much longer than it needed to take. The towers were particularly bad, given that they had almost twice as many faces to paint as the walls. I am very tickled by the result though, a lovely white stone effect directly based off the GW Studio castle model featured in the army book for this castle's future masters that will be moving in soon...
In the mean-time it will be under the protection of whatever armies my Wood Elves will be opposing. Eventually. I'm still not quite fully ready to play Siege games yet, as I still lack siege equipment for my own army.
That is on the way though.
