Small Farm from Dark Castle Terrain

A mate who lives near Newcastle discovered he is about five minutes away from a small Australian business called Dark Castle Terrain that produces quite a decent selection of MDF buildings and scatter.

When my mate pointed out that Dark Castle's Small Farm set was on sale for just $25 I jumped on one to support the local business and to give their kits a go.To be honest I usually like my MDF buildings to be of 2mm thickness, not 3mm, because I believe it scales better, but I am well aware of the difficulty some Australian manufacturers face acquiring the 2mm stuff locally.

The kit is a fairly bare bones affair that contains three buildings and two yard and wall sections that combine to make a small walled farm. The kit comes all loose in pieces in a pizza box without instructions. This wasn't a problem for me at all because I've built my fair share of MDF buildings but to someone new to MDF and afraid of jigsaw puzzles, this could prove a problem. This is what the kit looks like built courtesy of Dark Castle's site:

 

 

I always add to any MDF buildings I make and this was no difference. I cut out more windows in some of the buildings to give the farm some better use for Chain of Command, added a chimney to the long farmhouse and turned the gateway into a small gatehouse of sorts. This was meant to be a dilapidated farm in Normandy, so I added crumbling exposed brickwork made from texture rolled DAS clay and finished the yard in a similar way. I added simple 3D printed windowsills I designed myself  and applied some shutters I had bought years ago from Warbases. Lastly I fixed on the cardboard shingles.

All in all I am very happy with the way the small farm turned out and it is proving a very versatile piece that can be used as three small individual buildings or as a much larger terrain piece. All for a very reasonable price as well. I do think however that Dark Castle's designs need to move into incorporating greyboard into their kits, if not 2mm mdf itself. Many of the features on their other buildings are just way too chunky and out of scale for my liking.

What a Cowboy! at Cancon 2023

This post is way overdue but time has just gotten away from me.

In January me and two mates ran a table over two days of the new Too Fat Lardies game What a Cowboy! at the inaugural Lard Down Under at Cancon.

It was a great success and we all had a blast. I even got to play in a Sharp Practice Sudan game. There were so many nice tables and demos put on that I wish I could have played in many more.

The rules were well received and attracted a lot of attention. Richard Clarke even sat in and played in the last game I ran. What a Cowboy! will be available to purchase as I write this.

What follows are some pics shot over the two days along with two short and poorly shot videos.

 

 

 

 

You may be given a cactus but you don’t have to sit on it.

In preparation for running What a Cowboy! at Cancon 2023 this year I decided to remove the trees from my Wild West table and replace them with some cacti. Nothing says Wild West like a Saguaro.

These were printed for me by a good mate and they came up a real treat. They are beautiful 3D sculpts from Epic Basing.They have heaps of great detail, are well proportioned, and I'm told printed up very easily with no hassles at all.

I'm really happy with how they turned out and think they'll make all the difference on my Babel Wild West table.

 

Gladiator Arena now with Spectators

I have finally finished the spectators for my arena. The paint job on them will definitely not win any awards but the overall effect is what I had hoped for. It was quite a bit of work finishing the seventy odd figures, especially considering they are little more than a glorified backdrop to what ever is going on down on the arena floor.

My plan now is to hopefully complete some Blood on the Sands match reports. On that subject there are a couple of very noteworthy reports on the Lead Adventure Forum.

Eithriall's epic blow by blow campaign report:

https://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=51608.msg1757189#msg1757189

A summary of Muzzfish4's experiences play testing BotS:

https://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=51608.msg1757153#msg1757153

 

Building a 28mm Gladiator Arena (part II) and Shire Con

 So in a mad rush I did manage to finish the arena build in time for Shire Con. There is still a lot to do including filling the bleachers and editor's box with spectators and hanging some banners and laurels etc, but it is at a stage where you can comfortably play a match on it. Not bad for a week and a half's work.

The doors arrived with only 2 days to go, cut by a friend on his laser printer, and it took me some time to figure out how I could make them function. In the end I simply glued a kebab stick at the hinge end of the door at then anchored the stick between the floor of the editor's box and the arena sand, without gluing of course.

 The rest of the build went really smoothly after the doors. I affixed all the railings and posts in place and after a lick of paint to the arena proper, started planning the portico of the editor's box. The pantile roof construction was done using plastic fridge liner, that I have already detailed here.

 

Shire Con was pretty small compared to MOAB and appeared mostly to be a large Warhammer tournament. There were little to no traders and the Bring & Buy was a bit ordinary. Regardless I had a very successful day playing Blood on the Sands and had the help of Victor who has been play testing the rules consistently since I brought them out of deep freeze.

 

We played a total of about 8 games and had 4 players, including myself and Victor. Two of the players, Martin and Craig, had never played before but both picked the concepts up very easily and by the end of the day were a couple of pros. Both Craig and Victor won all of their matches. We also had a punter, Andrew, who came along and watched us for twenty minutes or so and was interested in playing a match. Again, it only took him a round or two before he was in full swing, developing tactics and spending dice like Maximus Decimus Meridius. 

All in all it was a really great day. I received a lot of positive feedback and some good suggestions about Blood on the Sands. Mostly it has reinforced that the game is simple to learn, albeit with some deep levels of strategy.

Victor demoing to Martin and Andrew.