Shadow Wars: Armageddon! I am very excited to see GW return to campaign-skirmish games! GW’s Necromunda is one of my all-time favorite tabletop games, and I played it for many years beyond it’s supported life. I never really got into Kill Team but when SW:A was announced, I found reason to dig through storage, finally cracking open twenty years of old GW models. What I love about SW:A is that you can field a force with less than a standard 40K squad. The bits box alone yielded several teams’ worth of miniatures.
SW:A offers the perfect excuse to finish painting my Mantic Battlezone terrain that came with the Deadzone Kickstarter campaigns. I have assembled enough terrain to cover two urban 4×6 tables, or highly dense 4×4 tables. One thing I loved in Necromunda was playing at my flgs with several boxes of terrain making cloistered, chaotic battles in three dimensions. It’s the type of game that really benefits from having more places to hide.
I have two themes for the Battlezone terrain: an abandoned trade district on a settler colony world, featuring large buildings stacked in layers with wide open avenues, and an industrial table befitting a mining colony or rim-world spaceport.
So far, only the industrial district is finished. The industrial-themed table was intended to on a planet with red oxide soils, which just so happens to be one of the wonderful gaming mats from Mantic. The bright blues contrast nicely with the red and oranges. I wanted these buildings to look highly weathered and well-used, as befitting of their life as industrial buildings. I wanted the towers to look skeletal and the buildings to be small and robust.
I wanted the industrial table to have a lot of towers, walkways, and small buildings.
I’ve added a lot of little extras: the vending machines are resin casts, while the terminals and junction boxes were scratch-built. I used electrical wire quite a bit to make snaking power cables to represent the rugged, unrefined modular buildings of a remote outpost.
The walkways felt too exposed, especially since most models cannot cross the 6″ walks in a single turn. I added railings for cover and to reduce falling. The walkways also work well as ramps.
I have several types of walkways. This is the largest and provides the best cover. It was built to support large walkers and vehicles in Deadzone.
Like the smaller ones, this walkway makes a good ramp. In Deadzone, walkers and vehicles can only move to a higher level via a ramp.
One of the towers featuring searchlight and computer terminal. The wire fencing is scratch-built.
Industrial walkways and scratch-built railings.
Scatter Terrain
These containers came with the various Battlezone sets. One of the large industrial buildings is designed as a cargo loading facility, so I put the containers onto pallets as though they’re ready to be shipped offworld. I added some power cabling to the engine along with tiny shut-off valves.
These pieces have been in the bits box since 2003. The top pieces are from Games Workshop, but the rest are from plastic toy soldier sets. They will make excellent terrain and alternate loot/slag/scavenge counters.
I felt that the tops of the buildings were too open, leaving little incentive to place models on them, so I used various bits to make some terrain-topper scatter pieces. These have ridged bases that fit into the slots of the Battlezone tiles to keep them from sliding around. I made a few vent and hatch pieces to act as access points so a model can move from the roof to inside the building. These massive HVAC units were intended to block LOS and give snipers something to hide behind. These topper-tiles are 3″x3″ to fit on the towers. The larger top piece in action.
Odds and Ends
Bits from the craft store. The potted plants, statue, and benches all came from Michael’s diy store. The statue still needs a good wash and weathering.
Finally, a pair of liquid storage tanks made from old vitamin bottles. My homemade wash didn’t work very well on these pieces.
Tin Soldiers 