FOW Terrain - Like sand in an hourglass....

Home Made Wadis!

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This entry we are taking a look at Desert Terrain for Flames of War.

With the release of "Hellfire and Back" and the upcoming release of "Burning Empires" Early War action in the desert has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity.  In fact Shifting Sands, the premier Flames of War Tournament in Arizona is themed to the Desert, with a Doubles Early and Mid War 2 day event. (More on Shifting Sands can be found here The Shifting Sands Website

The Tournament is not until February but it's never too early to start on terrain, especially at my slow pace. I wanted to be able to provide at least  one table of terrain themed for the desert and I started this project with that goal in mind.

The ground cloth. My wife found a suitable cloth at Joannes fabric store. This was an on sale piece of apposition that has a great suede like texture. With this as my base I decided to scratch build several elements for the board. First up would be a Wadi system. The new "Hellfire and Back" rulebook has rules on a Wadi, or dried river bed.  I wanted mine to be modular so I decided on several pieces that could be set up a multitude of ways.

Universal Carrier for scale

 The "Wadi System" would be made up of ten pieces  some larger than others and including a couple of corner pieces.

I used a jig saw to cut them out and then used a axle grinder to sculpt the edges. I kept the edges a little rough and didn' try to tidy up any mistakes.

I tried to create several long pieces of terrain that would act as good linear obstacles and help block line of sight.

Once I had the pieces cut out and shaped I realized they were a little too light and decided to add MDF bases to all of the pieces. I traced my pre cut pieces and then cut them out with the Jigsaw and then edged them with the axle grinder. Using wood glue I glued them all together and set them to dry in the Arizona heat.

 While the Wadi System was drying I also created some palm tree and rough ground templates.

These are simply MDF templates cut out with a jigsaw with some Woodland Scenics Palm Trees and plaster Rock casts rounded out the bases.

 Making Terrain can be a family project, here my little one is painting one of the templates with textured paint.

 Now we return to the Wadi System.

With the foam now glued to the base we cast some plaster rock faces using Woodland Scenic plaster rock kits. We just cast a bunch,broke them into small shapes and glued them randomly along the sides of the Wadi.

There is a trade-off between building hyper-realistic terrain and building terrain that is gaming friendly. While an expertly build hill is a joy to behold on the table it can be a real challenge to balance your miniatures on them. The other exterme can result in the "Cake Tier" effect, with the final result being great for placing miniatures but looks artificial on the table.

Before flocking

To round out the project we just coated the Wadi with textured paint (I just dumped sand into my paint) and coated them. A dry brush with an off white finished the effect.

flocking added

In some spots the plaster rocks didn't fit completely flush with the foam, so in that case we used railroad ballast and flocking to hide it.

I completed 10 pieces, enough to fill almost one whole side of a standard 4 x 6 table...

Or opposite corners like this....

The point of the build was to make something totally modular and able to uniquely configure each time we set up.







All in all it was fun building them and even more fun playing on them!

Enjoy!