Thunderdome is a format I invented a few years ago to kill time before an event. The details have evolved over time, but in short: 4+ players have an army consisting entirely of three warcasters or warlocks that share a battlegroup, with no other models allowed (eg, no Derelyss, no Goreshade feat, one Coven member with no ball, etc). Each player (we’ve run up to 11 people on one board) spawns at the outside of a ring, and then they run around for an hour killing each other. It’s pretty hilarious. 🙂

We’ve always played it as a casual time-killer, but for this year’s holiday event at my local store, we ran an organized Thunderdome tournament. I’ll post the event rules in a separate post, but for now, let’s take a look at the two boards I put together to support the event, one or both of which will be at Templecon this coming February.

I forgot my camera on the first day of construction, but none of that day’s work was very complicated; I stuck flat 1/2″ styrofoam insulation sheets down onto a pair of 1/4″ MDF boards, then created a series of circular pieces with a string compass (stick an end of the string down with a pin, tie a marker onto it at a desired radius, and draw your circle), a marker, and a jigsaw and glued them together. Here I’ve got a 3ft circle cut out of 1/2″ foam, and then on top of it, a raised 12″ hill and 1″ edge border cut out of 1″ foam.

Everything is cut down the center to turn it into two easily-transported panels, and the various foam pieces are glued together with wood glue.

The board is eventually going to be divided into four walled-off deployment areas, so at this point I get out a marker and mark where they’re going to sit; I offset them from the split of the panels by a few inches to give me room to place the walls (this will probably make more sense later).

The outside of each border wall was wrapped with strips of craft foam by the abused child slave I pressed into assisting me. He glued them down with hot glue, then used tiny finishing nails to create a riveted effect at the corners.

Here’s the only real loss from me not having my camera on Day 1 of construction: this awesome house I tossed together when I was too tired to continue working standing up. I’ll try to summarize the construction:

• The basic form of the house’s walls was made from four leftover scraps of 1″ foam, all attached together with hot glue.
• The foundation was made with brick-textured plasticard cut to around a 2″-high strip.
• The upper wall was made of foamcore; this wasn’t strictly necessary, but I wanted it to stick out a bit from the foundation.
• I cut holes in the foamcore to make room for the windows, door, and clock; window frames were then cut out of craft foam and hot-glued on.
• I closed the top of the walls with a sheet of paper, then glued a pair of roofing shingle-textured plasticard panels on to cap it off.

That’s pretty much it. I think it took about two hours to assemble. I’m really sad that I didn’t get pics. 🙁

Anyway, that’s the end of Day 1. At the end of it I had two boards like the one pictured above– 4″ board with a 3″ circular play area, cut into two halves, with a hill and a border. From this basic skeleton, I intended to make two very different boards:

1. An “underground cavern” board made of black stone and lava, with an evil ritual circle in the middle and most of the terrain being large stone spikes.
2. An “artificial arena” board that stitches together four completely separate board quarters– a city quarter, a desert quarter, a forest quarter, and a winter quarter.

I built both at the same time, so the pictures will jump around between the two projects as I go (though I did my best to cluster a few from one, then a few from the other, and so on just to make it easier to follow).

The city quarter was going to take the most time, so I got to work on it immediately. Leaning yet again on textured plasticard, I found some 2ft panels of cobblestones; however, unlike the ones I used for the house above, I really hate this particular pattern. Aside from being out of scale and an ugly shape, the grooves between bricks were very shallow (making them extremely challenging to paint later on). Worst of all, the sheets weren’t built to interlock; most brands that make textured card engineer them so that you can fairly easily interlock multiple sheets together, but even when I cut the zigzags down the edges, the two just didn’t line up very well, making the seam between two panels plainly obvious. With a lot of manual work I could have made the seam better, but I didn’t have that kind of time (I started construction 3 weeks before the event, and they took two and a half weeks to build and paint), so the final product still kind of bothers me. 🙁

Gripes about the textured sheets aside, I proceeded with construction. I was going to need three 10″x24″ sheets to cover the city quarter; I placed each one over the area it was going to cover, and made marks with a pencil to indicate where it would hit the outer wall and where it would need to be split to form around the hill. I then used a spare section of outer wall I had left over to trace the circular arc on the outside that spans between the pencil marks.

Mark, cut, cut, glue, glue, repeat.

While I was working on the cobble sheets, I had a pair of mostly-unwilling Terrain Elves (Ken “CygnarWarlord” Sieffert and Kyle “X” Stratford) spend about half an hour preparing the piles upon piles of random rocks I would need to construct both boards. The process is pretty simple: break off a chunk of foam, and then use pliers to twist off the smooth outside, leaving only a rough, rocky finish.

I convinced them both to spend over half an hour tearing up foam rocks before they both got bored and wandered off. Fortunately, it was enough. 🙂

I later located and re-enslaved Mr. Sieffert, forcing him to combine rock chunks into walls. The walls are based on a 4″ length of extra-wide popscicle stick, which is slathered with wood glue and then has rocks squished on it and left to dry. This is slightly less boring than tearing up rocks, but only marginally so.

While he was doing that, I started working on the Evil Dais for the underground temple board. I’ll be using one of my very first Warmachine terrain pieces at the center of the board, with additional construction added around it: There’s a shot of the piece about six pictures down, but suffice to say that it’s a 12″ ritual circle with three spikes at the edges; here I’ve traced a 12″ circle on a sheet of foamcore and added about 4″ of extra radius around it, with additional bulges to accommodate three more giant spikes.

The idea is to create steps that lead up to the main ritual circle; the foamcore is the bottom step, and then a smaller ring of 1/2″ pink foam forms the second step. I had originally planned to do both steps in pink foam (which I find easier to cut precisely), but then discovered that 1/2″ of pink foam is actually about 5/8″ thick, making the steps too tall when stacked together; fortunately, though, two sheets of foamcore are about 3/8″ think, so by combining one pink step with one foamcore step, I get the thickness to perfectly match up with the central 1″ hill.

EDIT: Bah, the picture for the second stair got corrupted somehow. You can see it a few more pics down.

I know, I know. WORST. TERRAIN PHOTOBLOG. EVER.

>_<

Next I built the new spikes, in the same (very fast) way I built the original set five years ago. First I cut three 9″ spikes out of a sheet of 1″ pink foam…

…and then used a sharp knife to bevel and round the back edges.

I wanted to make them removable, so I opted to rig them with pegs made from square wooden dowel. First I created the slot in the board itself by pressing a fat XAacto knife into the destination point (two stabs forming a cross)…

…and then I jammed a dowel into the guiding cuts.

To attach the pegs to the spikes, I punched a hole with a smooth nail (remember to punch the hole perpendicular to the flat base– don’t follow the diagonal direction of the spike itself), then jammed the short dowel into it and attached it to the spike with glue. Once this dried, this gave me three spikes with square pegs at their bases, which fit nicely into square slots on the outside of the ritual circle.

There’s still a lot of detailing to do, but here you can see the basic construction of all of the underground board’s assembled components: 4″ rock walls dividing up 8 different deployment zones, and then two stairs leading up to a central ritual circle. The new spikes follow the overall design of the ones I made way back in the day.

Still a ways to go, but it’s nice to reach a point like this where you can finally see where the project is going. 🙂

With the foam components of the arena board set down, I let the abused child slave out of his cage and forced him to spackle the board. Spackle is amazing and serves two purposes in terraining: to smooth over seams, and to create awesome stone textures. For the latter application, the first step is to simply apply a very sloppy layer of spackle over styrofoam rocks; once it’s dry, you come back and sand down the pointy spikes, leaving only  a smooth-but-pitted rock texture that I absolutely love.

With the underground board nearing completion, I went back to the quartered board and started advancing its terrain features. I decided to make the desert next, which was going to be modeled more on a Utah-esque stony desert than a traditional featureless-sand-dunes type of desert. I’ll be doing the stone formations with spray foam, but as that substance has no structural strength, I needed to first build a framework to hold it up. As with most things, I solved this problem with pink foam. I made it as skinny as I could so that the foam wouldn’t come out too fat later, and didn’t bother with any beveling or smoothing since it would be completely covered.

Once I was happy with the framework, I started framing. Spray foam, for those who haven’t seen it before, is a sort of ad-hoc insulation material that’s used for final gap filling in awkward spots; you spray it out of a can, whereupon it emerges as a stream of (extremely) sticky goo. It spends a few minutes puffing out and expanding into nice smooth bulges, and then takes a few hours to harden (at which point it’s about twice as strong and rigid as pink foam).

The downside of spray foam is that it is just insanely messy. Once it’s sprayed, take every possible precaution to avoid touching it until it’s completely set a few hours later– I’ve gotten it on several different pieces of clothing, and I’ve never managed to get it out of any of them.

So, yeah. Nice stuff, but definitely put on some crappy clothes if you’re going to use it.

Being so sticky, the foam has no problem sticking to the sides and even the bottom of the foam arch. As I spray I’m trying to avoid putting excess foam on the inside of the arch, as I want even relatively large models to be able to pass through it.

Here’s what the desert section looks like once the foam has fully expanded, smoothed out, and set. It definitely came out fatter than I was hoping, which made some of the passages a big narrower than I had planned, but I think it’s still mostly a playable board in the end.

I made many trips to the craft store while working on this project, and during one of those trips, I located something amazing: electric streetlights. I was building this in December, and so the craft store had a huge stock of “tiny Christmas village” crap, all of which happened to be 60% off the day I was there (!). As such, I picked up this battery-powered four-lamp set for something like six dollars. I gleefully purchased it and set about figuring out how to embed it into the city quarter of the board.

I’d already glued the three cobble sheets down, so I tore the middle one up to give me space to run wires across the “plaza”. The four lights are arranged in a string with about a foot between each one, so I figured that I could just barely put one at the end of each city wall and have enough slack in the wire to hide it in inconspicuous locations.

I tried to figure out a way to make the lampposts removable, but since they were hard-wired together and the wires needed to be buried, I ultimately decided to glue them down and simply ask my players to take care not to bash them over. Not ideal, but it was all I could come up with. :/

The three posts pictured here were measured to fit at the end of their respective walls. Once they were all in, I re-glued the panel I had ripped up, cutting a slot into it to allow the center lamppost to fit through it.

Here’s the final arrangement. The fourth lamppost is set slightly inside the winter quarter because I wanted the various quarters to be “bleeding into” each other a bit. The battery pack sticks out like a sore thumb, but this won’t be a problem for long, as the house will sit right on top of it.

I build up a small frame using matchsticks to ensure the house sits exactly where it’s supposed to.

Ta-da. 🙂

The walls for the city section are different from the rest– instead of being rubble piles, they’re nice rectangular walls with plasticard bricks providing texture, and a foamcore cap on the top because that’s what stereotypical brick walls always look like.

(Walls were once again ably assisted by Ken. Thanks Ken! 🙂 )

Here’s the “moment of clarity” for the second board– desert rocks and city structures are mostly done. The forest and winter quarters will mainly be flocking and model foliage projects, so there’s little to build on either of them at this point beyond their deployment walls.

The city seems a bit empty, so I decide to whip up a small obstacle: a well. I first cut out a little pink foam cylinder, and then wrap more of that wonderful brick plasticard around it.

I then use matchsticks and blue foam (pretty much the same as pink foam, but denser) to make the roof’s structure.

Finally, I cut Starbuck’s stir sticks in half lengthwise and use them to make roofing slats.

Ta-da: A WELL!

Next on the construction docket was the series of removable trees for the forest section. The trees are intended for model railroads; I inherited about 30 of these a very long time ago, but struggled to put them to actual use, because:

1. They don’t come with bases (the idea is that you permanently plant them into foam with those little spikes)
2. They’re incredibly brittle. You basically can’t ever touch the branches, because they snap right off.

So they’re beautiful, but really impractical for gaming use. I decided to give them a whirl anyway, with the idea that I would make them removeable, and thus anyone who was worried about touching one inappropriately (*snort*) could pull it out at the base and put it aside. To do this, I used the same wooden pegs as I used for the stone spikes; that said, it was a bit more complicated to attach these to the trees.

Step 1: CAAAAAAAAAREFULLY drill into the end of each peg. The tape indicates the desired drilling depth.

Step 2: Apply wood glue to a kebab skewer and put it in the hole. Clip it off to a length of about 1/2″.

Step 3: CAAAAAAAAAREFULLY drill into the end of each tree. The trunks were a bit too narrow and brittle for this, so a few of them split apart during the drilling process (though, this wasn’t anything we couldn’t glue back together).

Ta-da!

And here they are in their slots.

What a happy little forest. 🙂

At this point the construction was almost entirely finished, so the abused child slave and I spackled the crap out of it. Once again, spackle provided both smoothing on any foam seams and texture on the rocky areas.

I love watching pink spackle dry. 🙂

While he was working on that, I decided that the new spikes on the underground board needed a bit more work. First up, I cut a circular hole in the foamcore base just a bit wider than the widest part of each spike…

…then filled it with a shallow spackle puddle, which I textured into a vaguely lava-like pattern. I had to be careful not to cover up the peg slot.

While that was drying, I made some repairs to the central terrain piece. The ritual circles were my first mass-produced wargame terrain (made way before my blogging career), and I decided at the time that the best way to replicate them was to sculpt one circle out of dollar store plasticine, make a silicone mould, and then cast six copies out of plaster. This worked out pretty well at the time, but almost immediately I discovered that not all plaster is created equal, and that the kind of hardware store plaster I had bought is incredibly brittle. Four of the six ritual circles were destroyed inside of a year; by the time I started my Thunderdome arenas, I had completely forgotten that any of them survived. However, the child slave is more familiar with our store’s terrain storage area than me, and he informed me that somehow, one of the six had survived in almost perfect shape– it had a slightly cracked spike, and some minor damage to the outer edge of the plaster ring (seen above), but otherwise, in totally serviceable shape. This was fantastic news, as it saved me probably 3-5 hours of construction on a new circle. 🙂

HOORAY FOR CHILD SLAVES!

…

…wait, that came out wrong…

I filled in most of the hole in the plaster with matchsticks, and then covered them with green stuff, which I sculpted into an approximation of the original edge detail. Fortunately, the original sculpting was very rough (on purpose), so this didn’t need to be very clean, and was finished very quickly. 🙂

The spikes were a bit too plain, so I used a knife to carve shallow cracks into them (hold the knife in at 45-degrees and drag a crack pattern, then turn it the other way and re-trace the crack line from the other side. When you’re done, the strip inside the foam trench pops out and you have a nice stone crack. 🙂

I forced the child slave to go over both boards with a foam sanding block, and then they were ready for paint. 🙂

Before spraying them, I had an assistant hold the boards up sideways, and then I used a large paintbrush to sweep any excess spackle dust off. Spraypaint doesn’t stick well to dust, so you need to get the surface cleaned up as much as possible.

Spraypainting outside in the cold. We couldn’t come in and warm up midway, as it was the end of the day and if we let it get any colder, the spraypaint wouldn’t spray properly. And so we stuck with it, and after 20 minutes or so, the boards were sprayed and we couldn’t feel or move our fingers.

Ow. 🙁

I’ll cover the painting process for each board separately. First, let’s look at the underground board, since it’s really quick.

Here it is after the spray has dried. It took two cans of matt black to cover it. I always like how it looks at this stage; the pre-painted board is a hodgepodge of pink, white, marker scribbles, yellow glue, and whatever else, which makes it hard to get a sense of the actual forms on the board. Spraypaint eliminates the illusions created by colour differences, and lets you know what you’ve actually built.

(If that makes any sense.)

I’ve probably made 100+ pieces of underground black stone terrain over the years, so I can paint the stuff in my sleep.

First you prime black, then you apply dark grey by smashing the end of a frayed paintbrush into it over and over.

Then you do the same thing with a much thinner stippling of light grey, and you’re pretty much done.

Seriously, there’s a reason I do so much black stone. The paint takes requires about four brain cells at this point. 😛

A new terrain elf, George I’venevercaughthislastname, ably assisted me in the painting duties on the cavern board. He did the grey stippling on the central dais (while I handled the flat “floor”), and he did all the new lava and the paint repairs to the old terrain piece.

And that’s pretty much it for this one. I think it looks pretty badass. 🙂

This one had a lot more work still to go.

I wasn’t looking forward to trying to paint the way-too-shallow-for-drybrushing cobbles, so I instead started with something more fun: the Utah Quarter, as I had decided to call it. I wanted this to represent the Bloodstone Marches, so I basecoated it in an extremely bright Brick Red and highlighted from there.

We then did basecoats on the other quarters, starting with medium brown on the winter and forest quarters (and then we just finished the last highlight stippling because we had the paints out already).

The cobbles came out pretty blech. George used a flat foam paintbrush to drybrush them, but given how lightly he had to press to avoid getting paint in the cracks, you could barely make out the grey paint. I needed more time to puzzle this out, so we went back to Utah.

I gave the brick red two coats, and then started highlighting up into “sort of Vermin Brown-ish Orange” (I was using crappy craft paints). That looked pretty good, so I finished up with a drybrush of “slightly yellower orange”.

Seriously, I don’t bother to learn the names of the craft paints. They haven’t earned that privilege.

This is a better shot of the colours in Utah. Seriously, that quarter came out absolutely beautiful. 😀

Everything’s looking pretty good at this point except the cobbles, which are a sloppy mess. We have an hour before the store closes, so in bewilderment, I throw my hands up and say, “FINE! WE’LL JUST FREAKING WASH IT!”

So we applied a thick coat of grey…

…and then washed it with a mix of Whatever GW’s Black Wash Is Called and Whatever GW’s Replacement For Devlan Mud Is Called.

(I haven’t bothered to learn the name of Citadel’s reboot paint colours, because GRRRR why did they even do that in the first place?!)

I don’t remember what this was a shot of, but it’s pretty, so… whatever.

Once I was happy-ish with all of the paint, I had the child slave Mod Podge the entire thing. Mod Podge is extremely important for any terrain project (as it’s an incredible protective barrier to stop your paint from chipping with use), but especially so when your terrain involves spackle, which is guaranteed to chip without a protective shell. So, yeah– I Podge the entire bloody thing.

ZOMG WE’RE ALMOST DONE

The last thing to do is to apply the “natural textures” to the last two quarters. The forest section gets a mix of seven random flocks and static grasses I dug out of my terrain bin; the intention was to create a mottled greenery look, but it still came out pretty “plain green”. I think I need to get some darker greens and some browns to mix in next time.

Still, it looks okay, so I move on.

The last thing to add is snow. My snow texture is stolen from blog buddy The Artisan’s Edge: mix equal parts Weld Bond glue and water, add Baking Powder until it settles in roughly the consistency shown here (and if you add too much and it gets too crumbly, just add more water and glue), and then add a bit of white paint to prevent yellowing. I used to do snow the same way I did grass– paint down some watered-down glue, then sprinkle “snow powder” of whatever sort on top– but this always results in the powder coming off and annoyingly coating models played on it. Mixing the particles into the glue (and Mod Podging them afterward) keeps them firmly in place.

So, yeah. Mix mix mix, then pour/spoon onto your terrain.

It took about three times the above-pictured quantity of snow goop to cover the entire quadrant. This is definitely the biggest thing I’ve ever covered in snow. @_@

The last piece of painting was the house, which I generously forced Ken Sieffert to paint. He did a beautiful job, and with that, my boards were ready for prime time.

Here, without comment, are some amazing pictures of what involuntary teamwork can do. 🙂

And here is the chaos that ensued when 16 people showed up to play Wanton Warcaster Murder Spree on them.

And on that day, the world was a slightly happier place.

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If Thunderdome sounds like something you’d like to try, and you’re sad that you won’t be able to play on these remarkable masterpieces (*cough*), DRY THOSE TEARS, FRIEND! Because one or both of these boards (travel arrangements are still somewhat in flux) will be coming with me to Templecon this coming February, where you’ll be able to gather up groups of oblivious strangers and force them to have fun against their will in the greatest Warmachine multiplayer format ever conceived. (*cough*)

So fear not, Spuderians: if Rhode Island is anywhere within your Feasible Transportation Range, you may have a unique privilege that is off-limits to so many others: you, personally, can accidentally destroy Spud’s unbelievably brittle scenic trees while performing a victory dance after killing THE FOURTH GODDAMN KARCHEV THIS BLOODY GAME AAAAARRGH I HATE HIM SO MUCH

…

…sorry, where was I?

Oh, right.

Arena boards. Open Thunderdoming. February 6th through whenever. Rhode Island.

Be there, or be somewhere else.

Peace.

-Spud