This post is more of a record of something that I have finished, than the usual waffle. In this case it’s two copies of the two part plastic hill that was supplied in the Battle of Five Armies box in 2005 or so.
The hill is the irregularly shaped grey thing in the top right of the pic, obviously enough.
About ten years ago, theottovonbismark mentioned that the BoFA hill might look decent as coastline in Man O’ War games. At the time I had no interest in doing that, but now I do, so I permanently borrowed a second hill set (thanks PB1!) and painted them yesterday.
The substantially sized hill (each piece measures 200 x 390mm approx) slots together in two ways, creating either a narrow, long spur or a broader piece. Its designed to sit on the table edge, something that I really quite like visually, so I imagine that is how the pieces will be used primarily.
I also like the idea of using the pieces to define the entrance to a harbour or a throughway in an atoll, maybe denoting where reinforcements arrive or where an escaping ship has to exit the table.
I was tempted to add some detailed elements to the pieces – settlements or the appearance of a forest – but I decided to not to for three reasons:
- Storage: delicate terrain tends to become damaged and therefore unusable, rapidly.
- Time: I have too many other hobby things to get done than to spend more time on these.
- Modularity: keeping the hill elements scale agnostic means that I can use them in other games and photos easily.
Primarily though, the hills will be used to help with composition when I get around to taking some better photos of painted Man O’ War items in the future. The painted terrain from Dreadfleet provides plenty of up-to-eleven focal points, while the new coastal bits will work well as more neutral backdrops.
Hopefully the next batch of photos will look a little better than these snaps, although I think that they get the message across anyway.
sho3box 
Oh, brilliant – they work perfectly mate, nicely done!
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Thanks Alex. theottovonbismark gets all the credit for the idea.
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Simple and effective, good job!
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Pleasing rapid progress from idea to completion too Mikko, which is a nice feeling.
Thanks!
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The hills look great! Now that we have sea elves, it’s one step closer to 28mm Dreadfleet 🙂
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I was given a gift of a Playmobil pirate ship last week, ready fer a crew o’stinkin’ 28mm pirate laaads…
… so, without wanting to put a timeframe on it, 28mm pirate shenanigans look far more likely than they once did.
Thanks for the feedback Kadmon 🙂
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They work really well
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Thanks imperialrebelork!
I don’t have the same sort of familiarity with how people approach MoW as I have with other Warhammer games, but I don’t think that I have seen that hill being used in that way before. A good idea of theottovonbismarks.
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Nice work 🙂
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Thanks Warburton. Simple plans are the best plans.
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The hills make a quite convincing island or coast. Of course now I’m fixated on battle of the five armies. Sometimes I hate my brain.
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BoFA is essentially identical to Warmaster in rules terms Sean, so as long as you have been tempted by that at some point, you can happily file this this whim under that 😉
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Those hills do look OK, don’t they? I’d completely wiped them from my memory, in spite of them historically being ubiquitous at Warhammer World for many years. I reckon you could easily throw together some little bases with houses, trees or watchtowers that could sit on top of the hills and wouldn’t interfere with the flexibility.
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As you say Axiom, those hills were all over the place for a while, but then disappeared. I suspect that they were removed from circulation around the time that the first Realm of Battle board went into manufacture, due to them being a board with integrated hills. I had completely forgotten about them myself, again, until theottovonbismark mentioned them again a couple of weeks ago.
I considered painting a few Mighty Empires pieces to sit on the hills, but maybe I will get back to it at a later date.
Thanks for the feedback.
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This is such a clever use of a very plain kit.
It’s a classic Ronnie Renton’s sales tactic to justify the expensive tooling of plastic terrain by bundling it in with a boxed game to get sales volume. Workshop are still going strong with that one to this day with Kill Team and its plastic buidling.
Knowing when to stop with modelling makes you very wise. Wouldn’t want to go … overboard. Loads of other projects to get done. “Plenty more fish in the sea” you could say.
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It was theottovonbismark’s idea to use the hill as coastline, and it was a good one. I was concerned that the hills might look odd in that context, but they don’t look out of plaice.
The issue that I have with that hill is that it’s close to impossible to balance figures on due to the gradient. Using it as negative space on a nautical table avoids that nicely. I’m perfectly happy to have visually pleasant pieces of terrain on a table that are inaccessible to miniatures, but if the terrain pieces look like they should be accessible but the figures keep falling off them, then that’s a different matter.
Thanks for the feedback Curis!
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