Friday 29 October 2010

A freebie - Battlefield Mars

Way back when I went to a Games Day or Golden Demon and I fell in love with a Chaos battlefield. This thing was bright red and the were lots of little mounds of 'difficult terrain' that were made out of massed piles of pure white skeleton warriors piled up on these red ash hillocks [that's hillocks]. Of course you could do that then because skeleton box sets were THE go to army if you wanted to game on the cheap, are there any cheap starter options anymore?

Anyway, I always wanted a red battlefield, if and when I did my own terrain but back when we were gaming as a group of mates our table was made of plywood and we had a big sheet of green felt. Cut to today and considering the large interest in Adeptus Mechanicus armies I found very few Mars/Red Planet terrain tutorials.

So my first option was to look at red felt which I was going to 'distress' a bit. This would have cost somewhere in the region of £15-£20 and although I've since looked at a couple of alternatives GW's own Realm of Battle Gameboard [too expensive], Zuzzy Miniatures awesome looking Terra-Flex System battle mats [a third the price of a gameboard, easy stowage but not as versatile], a big sheet of B&Q insulation foam carved up and ready to game [V.cheap but hard work to make and a pain to store without damage], I opted for the cheapest option available to me - a big laminated print out of aerial photography!

Of course you need access to a large scale printer and laminator for this sort of thing and if you even look at high street printers who offer such a service you're better off with the felt route, or even the B&Q foam route if you have the skills to model such a board and store it. However if you can access such things here's a copy of my red planet battlefield to print out. It'll easily cover 4'x2' at 144dpi so you could blow it up to do a 6'x3' with only a little loss in quality. It's just over 2MB if you're worried about filesizes.


You can download the full hi-res version here [using Shift+D] https://photos.app.goo.gl/wVvX3TIZ3veLDuS53

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