Well, I’m close to being done with my Charasiab terrain layout, very close. It’s been a long time coming, having worked on all the elements of this set-up for more than 3 years now (?!?!?!), and of course the highlight is the trio of villages, each with their own watermill(s) and accompanying canal system made for me by the incredibly talented Chris The Model Maker.
All that’s left for me to do now is replace about 20′ of my old 4″ wide craft foam road sections with new 3″ wide latex caulk ones, which I will start and hope to finish this coming weekend, and to pour several layers of resin into the Khairabad Swamp, Logar River and Kabul River, which I hope to finish up within the next month or so, say by end of July.
It looks like a few good gaming buddies of mine will manage to visit LA around that same time, for the purpose of playing a bunch of play-tests of the Charasiab scenario which I built — or in the case of the villages, bought — all this stuff for. Of course I made it all as seperate, interchangeable features, which did add a lot of time to the building process, but will give me some nice versatility for future scenario design and allow the pieces to be more useful for gaming in general.
Here’s some pics:
Sang-i-Nawishta (“Carved in Stone”) monument to mark entrance to the gorge it gave its name to, through which the Logar River runs…
Closer look at reeds that fill the Khairabad Swamp…
The view from the East, looking West across the Logar River…
Looking South frm the North-East corner of the table…
(NOTE: later below I add a pair of extra-large pieces of cork
bark to this area, which in reality is filled with high mountains)
Khairabad Swamp…
Looking down across the Kabul River and the village of Hinduki
(AKA: Hindiki or Indiki) from the North-West corner of the battlefield…
Looking West across the Logar River and Khairabad Swamp…
Mad Mullah preaching Jihad against the Infidel invaders from atop karez (irrigation canal) bridge…
Pair of giant cork bark pieces representing towering mountains on the far side of the Logar River…
(I still hope to turn them into a workable terrain piece for that purpose but haven’t got a chance yet)
Lush crops of the Logar Valley, courtesy of a combo of latex caulk and carpet remnent fields…
Plus a smattering of red poppies to add a hint of color…
(still need to finish some white and pink poppy fields as well)
Needless to say, it’s also time to clean up my office in general and under the table in particular — but truth is I’m not sure I’ll manage that until after the very last aspect of this set-up is 100% done… which shouldn’t be too long now.
I still have one other thing to do before the roads and resin: hot-glue some Medium Green “Field Grass” into place here and there along the banks of the 6′ long Kabul River. I already did a post on the same process for my pair of Logar River boards, so I won’t go into painful detail, just show a few WIP pics and the final results.
If I’m lucky the next post after that should display the finished road network, maybe with a simple tutorial (it’s nothing special and has been shown many times all across the web, but that never stopped me before!), and then it will FINALLY be resin mixing, tinting and pouring time.
In the meantime I will try to lay out the Afghan forces and see how their units fit into the various terrain features they’ll be occupying at the start of the battle. Before I’d built anything but the very first “Red Ridge” rocky wood-chip hill that sits in front of village of Charasiab at the South edge of the table, I played the first few turns of the battle using roughly the same forces and it worked pretty well, so I’m not worried. Of course if I manage to do that I’ll take and post some pics. Been a while since I had a substantial number of troops laid out on the table, so I’m looking forward to it!
