Scenery types

[theresponsibleone]

I seem to recall it being said that a typical Malifaux 3e board should have scenery types other than LoS blocking buildings.

What examples can people give and has anyone got any good suggestions for companies that supply that sort of scenery?

[Maniacal_cackle]

The book gives examples: barbed wire, bridge, archways, walkways, buildings, fences and walls, fog banks, hills, obstacles, staircase, water, woods.

I also want to design some like Soulstone mines (hazardous poison perhaps?), and other takes on hazardous terrain.

As a related question, does anyone have a good method for determining what terrain to face? Different crews are vulnerable to different terrain, so 'by agreement' always feels a bit funky (though we're all amiable about it, I worry I unconsciously skew it).

[Morgan Vening]

5 minutes ago, theresponsibleone said:

I seem to recall it being said that a typical Malifaux 3e board should have scenery types other than LoS blocking buildings.

What examples can people give and has anyone got any good suggestions for companies that supply that sort of scenery?

Hedges, trees, forests/groves (usually an irregular shaped template of cloth or something more solid, with a few moveable trees on it), rivers and ponds (again, either cloth or something more innate). Crates/barrels/gravestones are pretty simple to find scatter terrain.

Hills are definitely a simple one.

Doing a Google search for "28mm terrain" usually brings up a lot of useable links, and adding in the kind of terrain (ie, "28mm terrain trees", gives you more tailored stuff.). Technically Malifaux is in the 32mm range, but most stuff advertised for 28mm is more than fine, as it's often oversized to fit into the GW games which are inflated anyway.

Mantic's TerrainCrate line isn't the best stuff, and may require painting, but it's cheap, and does the job more than sufficiently.

[ezramantis]

There used to be a wiki called Pull My Finger that had an excellent page on terrain, but I can't find it now.  This is what I remember from the page and it has served me well in laying out my tables.

approx 1/3 of the table covered in terrain of some type.  1/3 of the terrain should be blocking (so that there are places for models to hide from shooters).  1/3 of the terrain should be severe/impassable (to give shooting models something to "hide" behind and slow the advance of the melee models).  And...I don't recall it's suggestion for the remaining 1/3.

I've always tried to give a good balance of these two terrain types in M2E because some abilities ignore severe terrain and if there is no severe terrain that ability is worthless.  Likewise my  brother's meta was heavy on impassable blocking terrain and the tables constantly hindered models with push abilities and helped models like Seamus with his Back Alley tactical action creating unbalanced games.

I like throwing in a few pieces of dense terrain like woods (severe,dense) or fog banks (dense) that will totally block line of sight unless one of the models is in the terrain but can still be moved through.  Open Severe terrain (like rivers, ponds, or sand/gravel pits) are neat too because they don't provide any concealment or cover but do slow movement.

 

[Ludvig]

Zeiterdes (or something like that, my german spelling sucks) makes pretty affordable trees. I mounted mine on 50mm mdf bases and we alternate between using them as independent blocking markers and putting them on forest bases to represent dense areas. They have all kinds of pre-made stuff as well. 

You can also put some gravel on a base of some kind for areas that slow movement but don't block LoS.

I made partly submerged crocodiles from greenstuff to simulate dangerous terrain. 

Water areas can be made by painting and gloss vanishing. You can then put movable tufts of tall fake grass if you want to make it into concealing terrain in some games. 

[Fingalen]

On 6/4/2019 at 6:29 PM, ezramantis said:

I like throwing in a few pieces of dense terrain like woods (severe,dense) or fog banks (dense) that will totally block line of sight unless one of the models is in the terrain but can still be moved through.

Do you have any ideas how to make good looking fog banks usable in this way?

[Morgan Vening]

4 hours ago, malyzubor said:

Do you have any ideas how to make good looking fog banks usable in this way?

I haven't done it, but if I was going to, I'd get some clear acetate sheet (thin stuff, like the boxes shirts used to come in), cut to shape, scuff it up with some sandpaper so it's got a marble-y look, paint some dirty white swirly streaks on it, and then border it with whisps of cotton wool, also painted a little dirty.

That makes the whole area relatively flat (an issue with just packing in the cotton wool, and being clear acetate, shows the ground underneath.

[ezramantis]

What morgan said. I love using clear plastic to base things. I really like the idea of using it for a fog area.

For my area terrain I use a piece of felt. It's cheap at the craft store, can be cut easily to make a variety of shapes, sticks enough to my rough table surface to prevent it from moving during play, and is flat to make play easy. I get heathered felt and do a litttle light painting on it to make it look more terrain like (but not so much that it stiffens). We then "decorate" the area with appropriate terrain that can be moved freely to accommodate model placement.

For fog banks decoration you can easily glue stretched out cotton balls to 50mm bases (i cut them out of cereal boxes but clear plastic is cooler. Just might have to use ca glue instead of pva) and use them to fill your area terrain.

I've actually been thinking of making a steam vent/pipe/chimney to set in the middle of a fog bank to visually explain it's presence. Not that weird stuff needs to be explained in Malifaux....

[ezramantis]

Oh, and if you grab a 3×3 piece of felt for your table, the felt terrain grips it nicely amd the area terrain ties together visually.

[Hagisman]

8 hours ago, malyzubor said:

Do you have any ideas how to make good looking fog banks usable in this way?

My suggestion is go the GW Tree Table Route with a base that acts as the area. This could be a cardboard cut out, piece of wood, or plastic. Then sprinkle bases with cotton smoke clouds.

Kind of like this:

Then you can move the smokeclouds to let your models move around freely, but you still have the base that acts as the area affected by the smoke cloud.

[Butch]

On 6/6/2019 at 10:37 AM, malyzubor said:

Do you have any ideas how to make good looking fog banks usable in this way?

Make some bases to have fixed edges for clarification during the game. And then put some cotten normally usedfor smoke markers uopn it.

A quick resaerch on 'smoke markers' brought this up: Tutorial from Warlord Games This is how i'd do it.