Star Wars: Legion - Crates and Statues

Work on the last big piece of terrain for my Jedha-inspired mat has just begun and I finished some small bits and pieces that will be used to fill the board where necessary.

Being loosely based on Jedha, the gaming mat had to host at least one piece of terrain that somehow showed the moon's strong connection to the Force. Since I still had some of the old plastic statues from GW's Return of the King starter set for their Lord of the Rings SBG, going for some "Jedi"-statues was a no-brainer...

Next in line were some crates. Luckily, Thorin from arts-n-more sent me some of his casts. He did a great job on these. The boxes are a good example for all-purpose terrain. From an Imperial base on Endor to a smuggler's outpost on Tatooine there are hardly any surroundings they will look out of place in.

Star Wars: Legion - X-Wing Terrain Piece

Just finished a quick little project in between: A downed Cavern Angel X-Wing as seen in Rogue One. 

A picture of the downed X-Wing was one of the first little teasers I saw of this movie and it is the one that I still come to think of, whenever someone mentions the movie now (Sorry, Raddus... You're cool, but you can't compete with T-65 glory...).

The model used for this project is an Revell easykit of Luke's X-Wing. With its 218mm length it's probably a bit small for the Legion scale (ideal for WEG/Grenadier though...). It's somewhere around 1/57. Ideally we would want something around 1/48, I guess, which means this model is about 4cm short. 

Having in mind that FFG might very well use a sliding scale for its larger vehicles, I'm sure this one will look fine compared to the upcoming official releases.

I spraypainted the X-Wing with GW's Mechanicus Grey and glued it to its "base", a piece of fabric I had leftover from making my gaming mat. The crash site was roughly modelled using some pink foamboard (yet more leftovers...^^).

The whole base was covered in the same mix of paint, sand and acrylic sealant/chaulk used for the gaming mat. You don't have to worry if you get this stuff on the model itself. It's a crash site after all... I then painted the model itself in the Cavern Angels' very basic colour scheme but made sure the model got its fair share of weathering when I drybrushed the rocks and the sand.

 
And it's done.

Star Wars Legion: Simple Buildings

Having roamed the FFG forums, I found several posts of people without any wargaming experience noting that they felt intimidated by the thought of having to build terrain before being able to play the game. Of course terrain is more or less optional and you could always use cardboard markers or all kinds of stand-ins to simulate your battlefield but building your own terrain doesn't have to be difficult.

While shopping with my wife, I found some cardboard gift boxes andstyrofoam balls at a local dollar store/pound shop and immediately thought they might work as the base structure of simple Star Wars buildings.

I simply used the gift box as a frame, cut one of the styrofoam balls in two and glued it on as a dome. Then I added some styrofoam buttresses to the sides to make the whole thing look less like a box and added a door cut from cardboard. Done...

Just as the rock pillars I built earlier, the whole building (except the door) was coated in a thick layer of paint, wood glue and sand.

After the basecoat was dry I just drybrushed the whole building with a mix of white paint added to my base sandcolour and weathered it quite heavily with a buch of red and green pigments. To give it some Jedhaesk look I added two coloured stripes to the building which should make it look a bit closer to the buildings seen in Rogue One. Apart from that the whole building is pretty standard and could easily be found on Tatooine or any other desert planet.

Since I felt the whole thing still looked a bit too plain, I added some details. As a fan of the artwork in Pablo Hidalgo's book "Propaganda", some of these were a must...

The backside of the building got some piping, cut from the sprues of a Revell model kit and a spare DUM-series pit droid from an old Action Fleet toy which is perfectly in scale with Legion.

How to Store a Gaming Mat

Many people asked if the mat would crack if rolled up. Well, although it's perfectly possible that this will happen at one point in time, I don't see it happening soon. The acrylic sealant makes the mat extremely flexible and bonds the paint and sand nicely to the cloth.

The mat's first field test was pretty successful. I left it on the back porch for a whole day. The dog and the kid walked over it constantly and I even folded and bent it on purpose several times. So far I can't see any real tear. A proper gaming table would probably be wrecked right now...

For storage I use rubber foam pipe isolation. It's quite cheap, lightweight and supports the mat nicely when stored so we won't get any visible folds on the battlefield.

One Day Build: Jedha Gaming Mat

FFG’s announcement of Star Wars: Legion at GenCon got me pretty hyped and I immediately started working on some terrain I originally had intended to use with my West End/Grenadier miniatures. 

Since I love Rogue One and especially the Jedha set, I'm obviously looking forward to have some games in this setting. Moreover, I am quite confident that the desert moon provides plenty of opportunity for thrilling scenarios, even if we might have to wait for Saw Gerrera and his Partisans for quite a while before they hit the battlefields. Therefore, I started a 6’x3’ Jedha gaming mat right away. 

Although proper gaming boards might offer better opportunites to detail your scenery, I prefer gaming mats over regular gaming boards since they are inexpensive, much easier to store and really easy to build. Furthermore, my wife had some spare cloth lying around...

I went for a rather fancy approach and used a sewing machine to seam the edges of my mat. This is highly optional though...

After that, I took all the material needed outside and prepared for texturing. For a simple desert scenery like Jedha, you basically just need cheap (!) acrylic sealant, acrylic paints and sand.

Just mix the sealant, the sand and the colours of choice and spread them violently on the prepared piece of cloth.

At this point you are actually good to go. You could already use your mat after it's fully dry. Thanks to the acrylic sealant, the mat will stay flexible and can be rolled up for easy storage and transportation. (Note that there's a lot of loose sand on the mat in this picture. This will come off once it's dry.)

I decided to add just a little extra detail by giving it a light drybrush just to make the structure of the mat pop a little.

And this is the result after a couple of hours of work. I might still add some little extra detail (grass tufts etc.) once it's fully dried, but for now my first Star Wars: Legion gaming mat is finished and ready to go...