Getting ready for the Driving Charge campaign

Embarking on a new campaign is always the perfect excuse to add new terrain and figures (well, in so far as we ever really need an excuse). It’s been a while since I’ve used my jungle terrain, so planning to play A Driving Charge, set in Malaya in 1941, gave me a chance to refresh what I had and make a few new pieces. 

Rivers, creeks and paddy fields feature prominently in this campaign and they are all projects that I’ve been wanting to tackle for some time. I did make two lengths of river a few years ago. They were based on MDF with the banks sculpted from insulating foam. The problem was, I'd made only two straight sections and just enough to stretch four feet across a gaming table. Useful, but limited in so many other ways.

For the rivers and creeks in this campaign I've used painted plastic sheet and dressed the sides with off-cuts of teddy fur and other pieces of scatter terrain. I think it's a very versatile solution.

I like the idea of creating seamless waterways with no visible joins and painted plastic sheet is a simple solution (not to mention cheap!). As the first scenario in the campaign calls for a large river winding across the table this worked well. 

Another terrain pieces I’ve been meaning to add is a substantial bridge and this campaign calls for a couple. Model railways were the obvious place to start looking. Tri-ang produced a very sturdy version that looked ideal and I managed to find one on eBay. Assembly was quick and simple as there are few parts. The road surface is a solid piece of wood into which the girder sides are screwed, making for a very solid game piece. The main effort required on my part was painting and weathering.

This was perfect for two of the games in the campaign and really looked the part.

I made a few paddy fields several years ago and while I was very happy with the result they were not going to cover the sort of areas required for this campaign. 

As you can see from the two maps below they call for a large area of the table to be covered. That's considerably more than my current collection can meet. 

Not only that, if I was to make more paddy fields in a similar style I would find myself with significant storage issues. It called for an alternative solution and I think I found one. 

While this campaign features flooded paddy fields there will also be times when games are set in different seasons. At times the paddy fields are fallow and dry, but they remain divided by the bunds. 

I needed a solution where I could have modular bunds and then a method for overlaying them on either dry or flooded fields. The bunds themselves, while not particularly high, are very distinctive and clear to see.

Teddy fur had been an ideal material to dress the sides of the rivers and creeks and I thought a similar concept could work for the bunds. However I needed to find a way to represent the earth banks and give them more height. They also needed to have a bit of extra weight to help them sit in place.

My first thought was to base them on narrow strips of MDF, but in my experience they have a tendency to warp once they extend beyond about 200mm. After experimenting with a few options I think I've found a solution that meets my need and is easy to work with - pieces of carpet. I’d been using carpet tile to make ploughed fields and that would give me the extra height I wanted. Equally important, the rubber base had sufficient weight to hold them flat and in place. From there it was simply a matter of cutting them into suitably sized lengths and gluing the strips of teddy fur on top. 

The final touch was to glue sand to the sides to add texture to the banks.

The sides were then painted in earth colours that match my existing terrain. That worked well, although I found they look a bit too angular when laid out in place. So I made pieces for the joins that gave the corners a more naturalistic look. It was a bit more extra effort but I liked the way it broke up the sharper angles. Lastly I thought about how to represent the rice plants themselves.

While those above have the rice plants almost filling the entire field it is also common to see them bordered by water like these below.

Once again pieces of teddy fur supplied the solution.

These bunds can work for wet or dry paddy fields, it’s simply a matter of choosing the most appropriate underlay for the season you're representing. I'm happy with this as a concept although I can see where there's room for a few small tweaks and improvements. Best of all this gives me a way to create extensive paddy field coverage that is endlessly adaptable but can all be packed away taking very little storage space. Not often a terrain project ticks so many boxes.

Rubber plantations are another prominent feature of the campaign but I couldn't find an easy solution for these that didn't involve creating a lot of new terrain pieces that might not have many other uses. In the end I decided to compromise. As I have done for other games set in Malaya I've used palm plantations as a substitute as I have made up a lot of these already. Admittedly they look nothing like rubber trees, but at least they fit the tropical theme of the tables.

Jungle fringe is a new terrain type in the Far East Handbook and represents the thick foliage and undergrowth that grows along the edges of secondary jungle. It's treated as a 2" wide obstacle while also providing cover for units that occupy it. I needed to find a way to make it look like a dense barrier but at the same time be able to accomodate figures. I’ve found the best way to recreate it was to make use of several existing terrain pieces and then add more terrain elements to them. 

My solution has been built around my palm plantations. These are based like my orchards with two trees evenly spaced on a 50mm x 150mm (2”x6”) piece of MDF. As it happens that's rather convenient given the width of jungle fringe is also 2".

I thought if I also base a number of the trees I use for my jungle trees on similar bases they could also work in the same way and add variety to the types of trees along the jungle fringe. These are cheap models from a seller on eBay but have more of a look of tropical trees than many of the more symmetrical shapes available, in fact I've seen them sold as Banyan trees even though they don't look that much like them. 

While I was putting them together it did cross my mind that when evenly spaced like the palm trees they could pass off as rubber trees. 

Perhaps I do have suitable trees for rubber plantations after all....

In fact the more I've thought about it the more I can see enough versatility with these that it might yet be a very viable option. The justification being their multiples uses - not only would they work in jungle fringe and when placed at random angles within jungle itself, but they could also serve as rubber trees. In fact I could see them working well in European settings on tree lined roads, or even for my 28mm games in the American War of Independence.

Anyhow before I tumble down that particular rabbit hole I should get back to the task in hand - jungle fringe. The idea being I space these palm and jungle tree bases along the edge of the jungle to define the area of the fringe, but then for playability I fill the gaps in between the trees with various scatter pieces and lichen that can be moved easily. 

That gives me the density of vegetation I’m after from a visual perspective, but it also allows those pieces to be moved out of the way when it comes to figure placement during a game. The idea is to ensure enough of a mix to give the impression of thick undergrowth.

I think the visual effect comes as much from the variety of plant types as it does from their density.

During the course of making these I had extra aquarium plants and teddy fur off-cuts lying around the work bench. I experimented with making holes in the fur and gluing the plants into it without resorting to a base of any kind. The glue certainly held the plants in place and the lack of a rigid base allowed me to arrange these pieces over other terrain. This worked better than I imagined and made for effective looking pieces that have the potential for multiple uses. They can work as scatter pieces in their own right but also help fill the gaps in the jungle fringe. It's given me a number of ideas that I want to explore further.

I can certainly see them working well to line the river edges when I want to create tropical jungle creeks and rivers in places like New Guinea. 

Another new terrain type is barrier growth. In terms of game rules they are very similar to a European farm hedge and serve a similar purpose dividing homes and fields in the Far East. A short stretch of one of those is needed for one of the scenarios and once again I've tried to make this as versatile as possible. It will work as a length of barrier growth but could serve equally well as jungle fringe or simply as extra scatter within jungle.

I liked the idea of having a marker on the table as a reminder of when the effects of a Zero attack are in play, so what better than an actual model of a Zero? Fortunately I had one of those I had made many years ago and was able to adapt it and add a suitable base.

The model is not permanently attached to the base which will allow me to swap in other aircraft like a Stuka for France 1940 or a British Hurribomber for Burma in 1944.

While working on another project I had a bit of left over Milliput so tried my hand at sculpting a few pieces of scatter terrain in the form of household objects that I could add to my villages houses. Certainly not essential for playing this campaign but like all scatter terrain it helps add more character to the table.

I've chosen basic things like food and water containers. I can't say they are the finest sculpts but they work well enough in situ.

It was also an excuse to put some paint on a figure of a rice farmer and his buffalo. This is from a set of South East Asian civilians from 172 Scale Miniatures. Judging by the clothing I suspect these were created with rural Vietnamese civilians in mind but with this farmer stripped to his waist I think he could work in many settings.

I've painted the base in the same colours as the paddy fields and coated it with gloss varnish to help make it blend in. 

Although I may well rebase them on a thinner piece of plastic as the base supplied with the figures is a bit on the thick side.

I've posted about this recently but one final addition was a marker for when a red dice is lost by a force and when they are required to move a unit back to a jump-off-point. They are painted wooden blocks from a craft shop but conveniently sized to fit comfortably in my force morale trackers.

As I'll be playing this campaign against a friend who I've been teaching Chain of Command I won't be blogging about the individual games in anywhere near as much detail as usual, instead it will be an abbreviated version that I hope will still provide a flavour of the campaign and show how some of these new additions work in a game context.

The first game reports of the campaign can be found here.