Making scenery for Warmaster Warmaster needs heaps of scenery. It is not enough to set down a hill or two with a wood to the side - you need lots of hills, lots of woods, and even villages. It may sound like there is a lot of effort and expense involved in arranging a good battlefield, but there need not be. Here are my cheap and easy methods - anyone can do it, with a minimum of cost, skill, and time required, and it looks good. Trees Don't bother trying to make any - just go out and buy some 3 cm tall trees from a model railway / hobby shop. They don't come with bases, just a wire rod, so get some plasticine, make a small lump from that, and shove the tree into it. Put this firmly on your table, and you have a tree which looks good and can be moved around as required. Hedges Get some of the thick foam packing used in blisters, but make sure that its the grey foam, not the red. Cut it lengthways into strips 1 cm wide. You can get 4 or 5 pieces this way, depending on how wide the foam is. This works well for Warhammer hedges too - just make the strips 2 cm wide, and put them upright on a card base. Glue two strips together at the ends. Once this has set, rip bits out of the hedge along three faces and especially along the top edges. This can be done with tweezers, and gives a better result than cutting with a knife or scissors. Once the construction of the hedge is complete, spray it black. Don't worry about flooding it, it needs a lot of paint to get into the foam, otherwise you end up coating only the outer layer. I suggest doing several of these at once - stick them on a box or something and just go at them fom all angles. When the black paint has dried (and this can take some time, because of the increased surface area of foam), liberally paint it with Emerald Green (for those not lucky enough to have some of this from the previous Citadel paint range, I would suggest snot green mixed with some putrid green - unfortunately there is no couterpart in the new paint range, which is a bit surprising really given that Emerald Green is the best shade for vert, the green of heraldry - and therefore vital to Bretonnian armies...). Don't try to drybrush it, just slap the paint on. It will in places form large splotches - don't worry, when viewed on the tabletop this looks quite good. Once that's dry, you have a nice bit of hedge for Warmaster. No base is required, because it stands by itself, and a base would just get in the way. Barricades Get some square 2 mm balsa rod. Cut some 10 - 12 mm sections, with one end flat and the other angled to around 45 degrees. Glue two of these into a cross, with the angled ends arranged so that they will allow the X to stand by itself (the angles should end up being parallel to the ground). Glue onto three of these cross-pieces a bar around 50 mm long, wash it all with Chestnut Ink, and you have a barricade section. Just be careful how you store and move them - they can be fragile, but if they break they are easy enough to re-make - and broken barricades can even fit in nicely on the table; you might like to break some especially for that battle-worn look. Houses Simplicity itself. This uses balsa wood and some sort of filler or putty. For a low farmhouse, get a block of balsa 5 cm wide, 7 or 8 cm long, and 2 cm tall. Mix the filler so that it is thick, not at all runny. Spoon it onto the balsa block, piled a little bit in the middle, and allow some of it to hang over the sides. When it has set a bit, use a knife to press lots of thin lines into it, to giev the impression of thatching (you might like to press a toothbrush into the filler before this for further texture). When this has dried, paint the roof with Bleached Bone, and then wash this with Flesh Wash. Paint the balsa white, and stab on some grey of a suitable shade (I used Fortress Grey) with a drybrush, leaving very small gaps, for a stony look. Paint the holes for a door and windows black. The impression you are looking for is the classic Scottish or Irish farmhouse, piled stone covered with thatch or turf. For a larger building, use a similar block of balsa 4 cm tall. Make some sort of pile on top of it 1 cm tall, and use this to hold the filler or putty to a peaked shape. Prepare and paint the roof in the same way as for the farmhouse. Paint the walls using pictures of old houses as a guide. Look for pictures of Tudor-era design, or rustic country houses, where the walls are made of panels with visible outer bracing. Hills These are flat hills, about as abstract as you can get without simply using a cardboard cutout. Get some masonite (or similar thin but solid wood). Cut it to the shape you want (a good sized hill should be at least 20 cm across), and then sand the edges to a smooth slope of between 45 and 60 degrees steepness. Paint this the same shade of green as your table, and there you have a hill, albeit only 5 or 6 millimetres tall. It helps if you have a jigsaw and orbital sander, because fretsaws and sandpaper are NOT fun to play with... Why use wood, and not polystyrene? Well, you could use your Warhammer hills, but inch thick slabs look out of place, and polystyrene that is any thinner is far too fragile for practical use. Rivers / Roads These are best done as part of a set of modular terrain, built into the table. When placed on top of the table in Warhammer they look silly. For a 10 mm scale setup, they would look ridiculous. If you must have them, go with some appropriately coloured strips of thin card or cloth, or perhaps even sand, coloured and sprinkled onto the table.