In the last post I wrote a bit about the figures for the 6mm Viking Age project. Now I thought I’d cover some of the scenery. While the project is primarily aimed at doing large battles, I’ll be looking to use the figures in other games as well. One of these games will be the Viking Raid game from Peter Pig’s ‘Longships’ rules. That game is grid based and uses a lot of buildings, 12 squares’ worth. This was a good opportunity to make some Anglo-Saxon village bases, using some techniques I’d learned from making a Japanese Sengoku Jidai village a few years ago.
The benefit of 6mm is that you can put a lot of houses on a relatively small base and create something that looks more like an actual village. The resulting area can look convincing while not taking over your deployment area or central area on the table. In addition, 6mm also retains some ability to add individual details. Adding little vignettes to the building bases both creates interest and also helps to add more period specific flavour to the bases to better fix them in the historical era they’re supposed to be in.
Here’s the first base. This one is pretty simple. Two houses, a few civilians, and some other bits such as a haystack, a well and some chickens. For all the bases, the buildings are by Leven and other details are mostly by Perfect Six with some other stuff and figures from Baccus. Because 6mm is so impressionistic, this base could work across a pretty wide time period. And it’s possible to make some bases that are more generic and add bases with definite period specific details. In this way you could have a pool of general purpose medieval building bases, and then add a few other bases depending on the period you want.
The second two bases form a pair, as in the Peter Pig game, building bases are in pairs. I figured I may as well make the bases so they all fit together in case I need a bigger village later on. These bases are more specific. A Great Hall surrounded by a palisade (3D print by Sabotag3d), and some mounted warriors leaving the hall, possibly off to battle. A 3rd warrior rushes over with a shield for one of the mounted warriors. A wattle fence is another classic Early Medieval feature, and the washing line is made from plastic bristle posts and bits of paper glued over cotton for the line. These two bases fit in with the first base, but so would a Norman church with a few Norman knights, or a 15th century manor with someone carrying a typically 15th century banner.
Next up is a field with some sheep and a wattle fence. I bought too many fences, so ended up having to make some big fields.
The final two bases are another field and a base with a forge. The field has crops made from very small bits of various clump foliage. The forge is again by Leven, and a Baccus berserker has been converted into a smith (because berserkers are silly, and blacksmiths are not). Again, the customers are very ‘Saxon.’
The forge base:
All the bases together. This is about half of what I’ll eventually need, but even now it’s reasonably convincing as a representation of a village. And with a total footprint of 30cm x 20cm it’s not going to take over the table.
I should point out that I’ve used 2mm static grass (from Mininatur) throughout, and this has been put on using an applicator (an RTS Greenkeeper). If you don’t have an applicator then I think 1mm static grass, or indeed flock/scatter, might be better than using 2mm without an applicator.
I didn’t take any work-in-progress photos for these, but the general principles are the same as for my Japanese villages, for which guides are here and here.
ADC Gaming 