Pister les Adorateurs du Serpent jusqu'à leur repaire

 Après avoir interrompu une convocation de démon, Luciano le Varisien, Alarielle le Mage et O'Gral, agent de Grome étaient mal en point, mais ils avaient atteint leur objectif principal: éliminer quelques-uns de ces Adorateurs du Serpent qui avaient kidnappé de nombreuses jeunes femmes dans le quartier des quais pour les sacrifier à leur dieu corrompu. Grâce aux indices trouvés dans la grotte, ils ont pu remonter la piste jusqu'à la villa de Krama Viristani, riche marchand Vudrani qui avait dû être le grand prêtre des Adorateurs du Serpent.

Après avoir surveillé les allées et venues pendant quelques jours, ils ont mis à exécution leur plan d'infiltration un peu après minuit. Luciano est monté sur le toit d'une maison attenant à la villa et a repéré les tours de ronde de deux gardes avec des chiens tenus en laisse.

Ensuite, Luciano et Alarielle, rejoints par Eraklesias le Druide (avec son compagnon léopard) et Melodias, un chasseur de primes Varisien, ont fait le mur derrière la boutique et l'entrepôt. Sans se faire repérer par les gardes postés à l'entrée, ils ont pu s'introduire par une fenêtre du rez de chaussée de la maison principale, crochetée d'une main de maître par Luciano.

Melodias a fait preuve de sang froid en essayant de réduire au silence la vieille cuisinière, réveillée au mauvais moment, mais dans l'obscurité il a raté sa cible et les cris de la vieille ont alerté les gardes, qui accouraient en ordre dispersé.

Pendant ce temps, Alarielle a profité d'un sort d'invisibilité pour fouiller l'étage, à la recherche de la chambre du défunt prêtre démoniaque.

Eraklesias, Melodias et Luciano ont eu fort à faire pour l'emporter sur les gardes qui surgissaient de part et d'autre.

Enfin arrive un combattant aguerri, Nefi Skrulskate, capitaine des mercenaires à la solde de ce marchand corrompu. Mais à l'aide de quelques manoeuvres astucieuses, ils arrivent à le mettre en fuite, ce qui a ébranlé le reliquat de ses hommes.

Nos aventuriers sont sortis vainqueurs, et ils ont pu mettre la main sur la chambre forte du marchand, où ils ont trouvé une carte qui pourrait montrer l'emplacement d'un temple souterrain au Culte Serpent - une piste qu'ils devront poursuivre un autre jour.

Scratchbuilding a half-timbered house

This part of the project began after using a number of commercially-available 2D terrain tiles during gaming sessions (Rackham cardstock terrain boards, if memory serves), some of which show house interiors. I thought, why not build the 3D portion of the house, based on what I'd learnt from the Lake-town house and from dozens of pictures of real and model half-timbered houses gleaned from google?

This is the floorplan I began with: a 5x5 shop interior with three rooms, on a one-inch grid to facilitate combat movement. I also thought that if I used the interior printed on paper, glued into the model, I could skip the laborious paintjob on the inside of the house. That meant I also needed to print up walls. So I looked for some nice half-timbered textures, some doors & windows, and prepared that as well, sizing everything to match.

So, armed with a large bag of 3mm square basswood sticks picked up at the local craft store (Cultura) I began gluing the outer grid onto cardstock base, again from my stock of saved-up bank calendars. I tried to make the doors and windows of a size that matched the floorplan, but after looking at the finished result, I think the next house will need smaller doors & windows, if only not to dwarf the dimensions of my lovely Lake-town house kit.

After much gluing, measuring, cutting and careful size-matching, this is the result of the first-floor interior. I'm fairly pleased with the printed interior walls, and the lack of protruding interior beams is somewhat made up for by the 3D relief of the exterior. This picture shows the walls simply fitted in place, and the next step was gluing them in place, as well as cutting out the interior doors, for more visual fun during gaming use

Here, the first floor is close to completion. I've glued in all the interior walls, slapped some paint on the outside, and it's starting to look like something.

I tried to simulate wood grain, but even my thinnest brush was far too fat for the job. I kept at it though, with some burnt umber craft paint, and the wood beams started to look better.

The interior walls are very thin, but not jarringly so. The worn-out wattle and daub motif I printed on them seems a little too extreme, though. I made the decision to let it slide on this house, and see what I could do better on the next one.

I experimented in the lower left corner of one facade to do a sort of trompe-l'oeil area where the plaster has chipped off exposing the wattle and daub lattes underneath. It looked as if it might just work. I did a few more bits of that on other walls.

Then it was on to the doors and windows.

I spent an inordinate amount of time on the door, especially since it'll be barely seen under the cantelievered overhang. But that's what obsession with details will get you. The door handle is a section of spring from a ball-point pen glued behind a tiny half-section of the plastic inner pen tube itself. Notice in the second pic that it... opens! I racked my brain trying to figure out how to mount the door so that it opens, and finally hit on this: two pins. One pin is cut in half & glued to the bottom edge of the door with about 1.5mm of the pointy end sticking out. A corresponding hole was made in the floor by the door jamb. A second pin is glued to the top of the door so that its head projects some 9mm above the door - the exact thickness of the wall above the door. A thin grove was cut in the underlying card structure to hold the pin, then another card was glued across the top (as the lintel) but *not* glued around the pin itself, allowing it to turn.

In the meantime I also painted the windows, using the card sections I cut out, trimming them slightly to fit, scoring where the mullions and muntins would go, then tarting up the panes with several shades of blue, and the mullions themselves with two shades of brown. Then, after all that work, I glued the side window in... upside down! Much hair pulling ensued, but I used enough superglue that I would destroy the window trying to remove it. It will remain an object lesson in paying attention when you cut or glue!

So, on to the second floor! I decided to have the front and sides lean out just slightly, like 2cm over the 40cm height of the side walls. I was a wee bit leery of expressly building something not to be square, but it turned out all right. I first glued the beams around the edge of the floor, then used them to help position the cards used for the walls. The other beams were only glued on afterwards, each time measured in situ so as to fit. I doubt I could've calculated in advance the exact lengths or placement of any of those beams, they just fell into place around the windows I'd cut prior to assembly.

Another word about the interior: these Rackham terrain tiles were a real godsend for me when I first picked them up some years back, and they make for a very vivid interior, even without modelling furniture and interior walls. Of course I plan to do both, but they still look nice. And they only required a bit of editing to fit my project. For the walls, however, I realized I'd grown tired of the exposed wickerwork on the ground floor (a bit too extreme for a house that folks live in, especially since all it takes to repair wicker and daub walls is a bucket of mud!) and so searched the web for some other half-timbered textures. I finally found one whose plasterwork was very nearly the shade of ochre I'd chosen for the exterior, so that one it was. I planned the windows according to those shown on the Rackham tile, and just remembered in the nick of time *not* to cut out the windows in the back facade, as that's where the chimney will rise to the roof!

Speaking of the roof, I must have spent six hours perusing different methods for roof construction from various tutorials on the web. I thought about trying to recast the roof from my second Warhammer Lake-town house, but I've never done any casting and was a bit leery of jumping off that bridge just now. So I settled on the time-honored method of cutting out thin strips of shingles from some thin card (old medicine boxes I'd been saving and had already used on some scratch-built wagons) and then gluing them in layers to the underlying roof card (more bank calendars were sacrificed to this project than I would've thought!).

So, what was left? I had to add another 90mm of chimney to the roof. It was my first attempt at using a hot wire cutter. That thing melts polystyrene fast! Some of the cuts were far too deep, but I think I'm going to keep this first chimney as is, and it still needed a few layers of paint.

I'll also need to do more interior walls, doors and windows, a stairway to upstairs. Of course, I forgot to cut out the floor in advance, but that seems par for the course on this project, the furniture, and then the exterior terrain around the building's base. I kind of wish I'd planned on doing a visible stone foundation, or even a stone first floor... but my planning hadn't got that far when I started this project.

The half-timbered house is progressing nicely!

Here you can see the completed roof with a dark grey paintjob. I gave the whole roof several coats of grey wash (with a hint of blue - but I should've used a bigger hint!) then painted several shades of highlights on each individual shingle. 4 hours of work there! Now it's done, I'm convinced I should've made it a lot lighter (and bluer) to simulate slate shingles... but I'm not going to repaint it. Next time!

You can also see in this picture a shortcoming of painting the two floors at separate times. The ground floor exterior walls are much lighter that the second floor. I went back to fix that a bit, but I’m forewarned for the next project.

On the rear facade you can see a design problem. I never thought about why chimneys usually rise to an off-center position next to the roof peak. Instead, I put my chimney right up the center, and it was only when I got to the roof that I realized I had the top roof beam coming out right in the middle of the chimney. Oh well. Next time I'll get it right! Again, the hot foam cutter made for really rough work. Next chimney will need to be carved with an xacto knife, I think. But this one will do, despite its deep, deep groves between stones.

Here you can see the interior walls on the second floor. All the interior walls were printed on paper and glued to the card base, and I like this texture much better than the one I used on the first floor. I learnt my lesson about preparing the interior walls, though, and did all the painting prior to gluing those walls in place.

In this view of the second floor interior, you can see the doors open. I decided to try a different method of hinging the doors, simply using paper hinges. It won't be as durable as the pin method I used on the ground floor front door, but it was certainly easier to implement.

So, what remained to be done?
- Add another coat to all the exterior walls so the upper floor and the ground floor have the same base hue.
- Sculpt the interior fireplaces to correspond to the placement of the chimneys.
- Make a stairway from the ground floor and cut out a piece of the intervening floor to accept the rising stairs. I should've cut that gap out before assembly. Oops!
- Paint the upper floor windows and position them right side up this time. <g>
- Make all the furniture for both upstairs and downstairs.

From kitbashing to scratchbuilding a couple village houses

This is an ongoing project to build a fantasy-medieval village where all the houses have playable interiors. I started with a plastic kit, the Warhammer/Citadel Laketown House model, and then moved on to a fully scratchbuilt half-timbered house. I was inspired by several similar projects on the Lead Adventurers forum, but very few seemed to go as far as having removable roofs and stories so as to reveal fully playable interiors. My plan is to use these models in roleplaying game sessions (specifically Pathfinder, the successor to D&D 3.5) and I have to admit I’m finding it a far larger project than I first thought.
On to the Laketown house.
Here are the sprues:

Notice the two two-story building facades in the upper left corner. This was my first clue that this model wasn't intended to show off the interior. I couldn't build a detachable second story without whacking each of those pieces in half. So I did - vertically, just under the second floor overhang. It was a very fiddly cut, since I couldn't use my handy steel ruler to guide my hand. But it came out *fairly* straight:

Still, I thought, those smooth interior plastic walls with bulging sections corresponding to the outside windows and doors are not ideal to represent the interior layout, even with a lot of surface work. So I pulled out some cardstock calendars from my bank I'd been saving, measured three times and cut out some interior walls:

Also notice that the two second-story facades are double-sided, so no card was required for those walls. The two sides don't match, allowing those assembling multiple kits to add a little variety, but it does mean that the inside wall (and window) won't match the outside wall. Oh well.

So, prior to assembly, I prepared all the interior walls by scoring them and marking board ends, and also experimented on doing the inside of the second-story window (with mixed success - need to make a better effort next time). Mixing ochre, burnt umber, brown, white and black acrylics I got from a craft store (far cheaper than my usual Foundry paints), I tried to shoot for a heavily weathered interior and exterior, keeping the beams darker for contrast:

Finally, I'm quite happy with the bare interiors on both floors. Plus, as near as I can tell, I'm the first gamer to post online pics of the Lake-town house complete with interior!

I was still in a quandary about how to do the heavily weathered and water-logged wood on the docks and platforms. After my initial attempt, and comparing it to real-life pics, it was far, far too dark to really represent weathered wood. I was fairly happy with the dirty blue on most of the exterior walls, but still couldn’t decide if I should redo all the docks and platforms in pale weathered wood.

The next step was to fill the interior with furniture. I scratchbuilt eight bits of furniture to fill the interior, but decided to leave them mobile so they can be moved or removed as necessary to place figures.

The bookcase, the stairway, the trap door, the large and small beds, the table and the chair were all built out of cardstock (old bank calendars). The stove is an inverted golf tee I found in my yard. The large bed's headpiece is a plastic handle from some pool supplies packaging. The bookcase was the most fiddly, since for the books I cut out dozens of tiny (3x4mm approx.) rectangles from card, then glued them together in groups of 5 or 6 before placing them on the bookshelves. This gave a satisfactorily uneven appearance, as if the books were of different sizes, or just haphazardly shelved. In the foreground of the above picture are all the bits and bobs that were actually included with the laketown house kit. I decided to mount them in groups on standard 25mm washer bases (tarted up to look like boards) rather than glue them to the house or the docks directly - so as to keep things more modular.

Here you can see the bed inside the first-floor interior, with its nice headboard. It's funny, I had stuck that bit of plastic in my pocket meaning to toss it in the trash... was my subconscious already telling me to use it on this project? 

Here you can see the stairs a bit better. Notice the door under the stairs. Gotta have somewhere to keep annoying kids until they're ready to lean wizardry!

Here you can see the bookcase and trap door a little better. I still couldn’t decide if I should paste a flat black sheet of paper under the trap door to simulate the darkened depths below.

Here is the second stage of the house exterior, with an assortment of barrels, baskets and wicker fish traps, as well as a tavern sign cribbed from the internet and printed to the right size to be pasted in place before being doctored a bit (google = "tavern sign").

At this point, I was becoming fairly satisfied with my kitbashing efforts, though there was still so much that could be done, like adding vines on the exterior walls, moss on the roof and a nice stretch of water to place the whole thing on. But I finally decided to leave those possible additions for later, and to move on to a fully scratchbuilt half-timbered house.