Along with ships and sea battles, Blood & Plunder allows for land battles like I originally played in and “amphibious” battles that combine land and sea rules. Before I can do any of those, I need to up my land terrain game.
I started off by picking up an MDF terrain kit from Empires at War. This is not my first kit from them and I liked the Dropzone Commander 10mm buildings I picked up in the past.
This kit came “pre-painted” but I think things got messed up as I specified the white “Italian” style but got a mix of tan “Roman” pieces. It isn’t a big deal because I was going to add texture but if this was supposed to be left as is, it would have been an issue. There was some damage to the fragile paper window sashes but I figured I’d make due.
Even the color of the Roman paint scheme was a bit of a mismatch so maybe the pre-painted versions aren’t worth going for. It is nice not having to prime anything though so I guess weigh that in your decision.
To quickly assemble and set everything, I used a combination of white glue for the main fastening and super glue to lock in the pieces and not need any clamping or rubber banding.
Roofs are thin formed plastic and I used the white glue/super glue combo again. Aside from the weird corner color mismatching, this could be considered finished if I didn’t already want the buildings white. Since I did though, I left out a few of the “exposed brick” pieces as I was going to sloppily apply paint to everything.
I wanted to achieve a rough plaster feel but didn’t want to mess with mixing in powders or other technicals into my paint. Instead, I just used a lot of white (ivory) craft paint to make a thick stippling technique. Basically dab a ton of white paint (undiluted) on an already splayed out and destroyed brush and stab the terrain with glorious purpose.
The results will be thick and uneven and won’t even completely cover the undercoat sometimes but all of this is desired. It is even better if you let the paint sit a little bit to dry out so that it doesn’t try to self-level so much.
When the thick stippling is done, I added in the exposed brick details and finished off any remaining sub-assemblies. Windows and door/etc went on next and were the only other thing beyond the roof tiles that I left in the pre-painted batch.
The Villa is slightly small for the minis. Like it is designed for 25mm and Firelock uses 28mm for their Blood & Plunder kit. Being a scale snob, this annoys me but I’ll have to deal. Other than the slight scale miscalculation, the kit looks great and has some flexibility with the detached walls.
Overall, the kit works well and is a good start to building out a land-based game table. For the rest of my setup, I’ll use 3D printed items. Usually, I don’t like mixing 3D printed elements with MDF but I have high hopes it will still all work together.