Thursday, December 16, 2010

Terrain Tutorial: Field Grass Area Terrain

Historical wargamers have used coconut fiber mats for field grass and crops on their battlefields for over 30 years...and it's still a useful way to model fields.  I incorporated the easily usable material into area terrain for my Warmachine battlefields.  Tall grass makes a great +2 DEF cover terrain- not strong enough to stop a bullet and act as cover, but thick enough to obscure the target(especially a Rhulic Dwarf of course!).
Above you can see a "winter" version of the field grass being used in a game.

The individual based 'clumps' can be removed from the area base to make way for figures or they can be used separately on a terrain board without a larger base.
As you can see, even without the area base the smaller pieces can be used as nice "concealment" terrain.

The picture above shows a standard spring/summer version of the field grass.

And above you see some trenchers advancing through that version(sorry the pic is a bit bright). 

For a complete "how to" make the terrain elements and to see how I use them in a WM battle take a look at the vids below...

4 comments:

  1. Where did you come across a plain mat, I've been looking around but have not had any luck.

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  2. @Kev
    I found my latest one at TrueValue hardware. From my experience hardware stores or WalMart are your best bet(in the USA).

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  3. Thanks for yet another great tutorial! One of the things that I really appreciate about your tutorials is the basic knowledge about materials. I'd always wondered what was used to make tall grass like that but never knew it was from those mats. I went out today and found one at an OSH store and now I'm cooking up some tall grass clumps of my own.

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  4. Idea stolen.... I love it. Thats one of the better and original ideas I have seen for simple effective terrain in a long time.

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