Tanks for the scenery

Managed to finish off some terrain recently.

yeah take that space sharks

not affiliated with any raiders, at dusk or dawn

More photos of each under the cut...

Terrain: Planning

..right, let's try that again. Last post, I rambled on about how great homemade terrain was and shared a handful of examples of the sort of thing I meant. I mentioned how Star Wars: Legion and Infinity were showing up Warhammer 40K as speculative fiction wargames, by remembering that colours other than black, grey, or stained orange exist. I completely failed to mention why I was rambling about terrain.

Same photo as last time; some pieces I bodged together in 2019.

I've always wanted to have a set of terrain to match my armies. I wanted a green and verdant fantasy board for my Warhammer Empire (and when I get around to sprucing them up, I'll do just that), back in the day. These days, I don't play any fantasy games (despite having about four army projects. yeesh.), but I have managed to amass quite the pile of Mantis Warriors.  I've given them ochre desert bases, and I'd like to start accumulating a set of desert terrain to go with them.

How do I do that?

On Terrain

A hundred years ago, there was a great series of DIY terrain articles in White Dwarf. I forget the name and even the year the articles came out, but if you ask anybody who has been in the hobby since the late '90s, they'll remember them: a bunch of articles on Lizardmen jungle terrain, including a small village, a pond, some ruined temples on the edge of hills, and a giant castle to wrap the whole thing up.

The articles a smooth, easy to read, easy to follow and were at least one clear factor in my hoard of polystyrene nonsense that I collected in the last months of high school and early university, before a succession of moves meant that I scattered them to the four winds.

Now that I'm back in the hobby (and have been for about two years now!), I want to figure out how and what to build to get a similar end result...

A few pieces I finished in 2019, made from... stuff.

+ + + Border Skirmish with Outlaw Mutants! + + +

The underhive creaks, a stirring of dust trickling through seventeen layers of ancient civilization, abandoned factora, desecrated shrines to petty military-industrial divinities. Soon, this borderzone just past Dust Falls will become a scene of blood and death. For now, a three-spined rat grooms itself under the dust shower...

The cohort of scavvy muties that call themselves the Cult of the Three-Eyed King face down Dust Falls United Metalworkers on a scrappy borderlevel of Hive Primus, as a chance meeting between Herne and the Goliath Shin goes pretty much as you'd expect...

Herne, lit by the glare of some fading Solar-esque™ floodlights

Kill Team: Renegade

Kill Team: Renegade, Mantis Warriors chapter. circa 910-930.M41

Over the past couple of years, I've slowly assembled a small handful of Rogue Trader-era marine sculpts that I really liked with the intention of making a little Mantis Warriors kill team. I'd picked up the chap with the shuriken catapult and the brother in customised armour already. I knew I wanted the flamer warrior with one arm bare, and from there it was a matter of deciding to get two more to round the squad to a game-legal five.

The advent of Kill Team also means that I can use this squad as a hardcore team of veterans, where their customised colour patterns and lack of orthodox armour makes more sense. I'm hoping to expand the team, using a combination of miniatures already existing in my Mantis Warriors 'Winds of the Desert' army and converting a couple more with meta-friendly storm shields so that I can use them in the local 'scene'.

Anyway, let's go through the team and look at the inspiration behind their unorthodox armour patterns...