Boring Rocks? Some New Scenery

I picked up a couple of pieces of area terrain from eBay recently. They're pretty basic - vaguely oval resin bases with a few rocks and some ground texture. The sort of thing I think I should be able to make in an afternoon with a few bits of MDF and some sand. Except I've not really been able to do it convincingly or robustly.

The two outcrop bases cost me less than £14 (eBay seller: dands-gaming) and took less than an hour to paint. I simply sprayed them with a stone colour over the undercoat, daubed some yellows and greys onto the rocks and added some washes on the ground. Everything was given a bone drybrush and then I added some tufts.

There's Nothing Worse Than a Squat With a Clipboard...

I have found it a bit tricky to get hobby time over the last couple of weeks, but I wanted to complete something to feel like I'm still actively hobbying! I figured the best option was to grab something quick and easy out of my WIP pile. The figure I selected was one I had converted in 2017 with the intention of using as a dwarf Blood Bowl coach. I never made or painted the team, but held onto the coach to repurpose as a squat storesman or similar.

Graffiti, Posters & Rust - Urban Walls

Following on from my last post a couple of weeks ago, it was apparent that if I had some gates and entrances, I would also need some blank walls.

Once again, I roped in the talents of Graham at Grimsforge to make me some basic walls that I could put in between my other buildings. There are four walls - two long and two short. I painted one side with urban graffiti and posters, and the other side more neutrally to give me some backdrop flexibility.

The Back-Alleys of Hyams Landing

The next evolution of Hyam's landing is to make sense of the spaces with dividers and connectors. No human settlement is comprised of a selection of completely separate buildings - there are walls and hedge, roads, alleys and fences. I got Graham at Grimsforge to make me a selection of structures that I can place against or inbetween my existing buildings to try and emulate that real urban feel.

The new structures are four walls with access points in them (solid walls to come at some future point. Like the rest of my Grimsforge terrain, I drew up what I hoped would look cool, and then Graham built them for me mainly from card.

Gomez & Schrodo, Private Investigators

Sometimes a syndicate boss might want to discover which of their rivals is having an affair with their closest lieutenant. Sometimes a grieving family might want a cold murder case resolved long after the official authorities have halted their enquiries. Cases such as these require an enquiring mind and delicate touch - they often fall into the hands of a private investigator.

Welcome to Hyam's Landing

At first glance it might seem odd that the settlement of Hyam's Landing was ever founded. It occupies a dusty patch of plain that is remote from any major starport or what passes for a city on backwater fringe worlds. Water is hard to come by and the gases in the local atmosphere begin to corrode any structure almost as soon as it is constructed. But Hyam's Landing is ideally placed as a staging post for the long trading caravans that wend their way deeper into the interior. Prospectors and miners from the adjacent lowhills come to town with their finds and to spend their cash. And in spite of the presence of a foreboding Imperial Blockhouse and its garrison, the facilities offered by the discrete starport are attractive to off-world traders looking to keep a low profile.

The Iron Fist - Block House #5

Illustrations of Imperial architecture are pretty rare in the Rogue Trader rulebook. Yes, there's the fantastic spread of Helsreach illustrations as well as the Emporer's Palace, but for the rest of the book we only see glimpes of background shapes, walls, ruins or ductwork.

I was delighted to see Tony Ackland's brilliant unpublished* Rogue Trader townscape when he put it up on Facebook a little while ago. The image shows a backwater frontier town complete with rickety shacks, landing pad and an imposing block house festooned with gibbet, observation cameras and spikes.

*correct me if I'm wrong.

Illustration by Tony Ackland.