SAGA terrain and other bits

Hi all

as you are well aware (unless of course you are new to the blog, if so where have you been? we've been having a ball....) myself and my three fellow gamers from the "Nerd Herd" are recreating the classic White Dwarf article the "Tale of 4 Gamers" but using the Gripping Beast classic - SAGA instead of WFB.  The series of blog posts are covering our thoughts and painting efforts in order to get our chosen factions to the table and will be covering how they do in the early games too.  But one thing we haven't discussed and that's terrain.....

As regular readers know I do love putting together some terrain and SAGA has got my creative juices flowing.  So first thing on the agenda was a hall for my Warlord "Waelwulf the Fierce" to hang his mighty Dane Axe in.  I started looking for source material on t'internet and found a treasure trove of images of replica dark age buildings to choose from.  Dark age building materials included wood or wattle/daub walls and mostly thatched roofs, although some were plainly wood-planked, there was very little dressed stone or tiling and those buildings that had them were normally looted from old Roman tenements.  Here's what we have.

it starts with foam-board and the awesome, legendary even coffee stirrers as a frame.

I decided to go with half wattle/daub and half wooden plank walls

simple earth flooring, I will be adding rushes/hay cots in afterward

the roof frame

the thatch was from an old dog toy that I cut into lengths and piled on

The finished exterior

interior shot with some straw flooring

the Garlinge Fyrd protects the hall

I still have to model some bits for the interior, a fire pit and a dias with chair/throne, weapons racks and shields for the walls etc.  But the model is on the board now and available for our first few games.

 I also made a few hay-ricks as scatter and will probably follow this up at a later date with a hayfield and cart (the cart is in progress but it is languishing on the modelling table without wheels.)

On the Bushido front (yes I bet you thought the Bushido was drawing to a close.....nah!) I've also been looking at little bits and pieces that will make life a little easier when playing the game etc, hence the recent dice tray post.  I wanted somewhere to store my profile cards to protect them and prevent me from misplacing (losing) them...

To this end I used my origami skills (I am at least a 1st dan Origami practitioner) and made up a simple box.  I then painted it the same colour as the tiles on my Bushido buildings and the sides of my Temple board - Johnsons "Red Spice" emulsion and added some painted detail to the sides. In order to organise and catorgorise the cards into factions I added some dividers.  Here's what I came up with.

some cereal cardboard - sprayed black, drink stirrers, the inlays of the blister packs for Temple, Prefecture and multi faction minis

i painted the faction logos onto the stirrer heads

using gaffer tape fixed the stirrer onto the unpainted side of the card and then glued the sides together

added the inlays for detail

and the reverse sides

finished box

with side detail

In the background of the last photo you can also see a tube of cheap poker chips, I'm going to use these as tired, exhausted and ki tokens.  I have simply painted some kanji on the middle of each chip. The tired/exhausted are reversible and the ki are just on one side.  There are token sets out there but they cost £22 per set, this tube cost me £1 and a bit of time. I still need tokens for poison, fire, control and all that stuff but for now this will suffice.

hope you enjoy

dGG