The Swamp!

 

With the game day fast approaching, I needed to turn my attention to terrain.  The scenario I was working on called for our intrepid explorers to try to escape the attentions of the Forest Tribes and make it safely back to their paddle steamer; to do this they would have to pass through the swamp!  

Congo has various different terrain classifications, one of the most exciting being the Dangerous Terrain.  When a group enters this terrain it most 'explore' the area which can throw up all manner of twists and turns.  I wanted to create some pieces of large terrain that our explorers had to pass through in order to reach the river, but also wanted to make the distinction that this was now a swamp area as opposed to the dense jungle previously encountered.  The results of that earlier build can be seen here:

Dangerous Jungle Terrain

Having thrown down a couple of printed mats to get a feel for the lay out, I was able to see how many pieces I would need, essentially three large areas to pass through and some blocking terrain to make the swim to the boats a little more tortuous.  I was fortunate in that I had some MDF terrain bases left over from the jungle build, I believe from East Riding Miniatures, but can highly recommend 'Wargames Tournaments' and 'Charlie Foxtrot Models' who also do similar packs and have excellent customer service.

I had a vision in my mind's eye of a dense, overhanging, verdant swamp but wasn't sure how to achieve it until I spied some bog wood, long abandoned, lying in our garden.  Bog wood, when immersed in water becomes incredibly heavy and forms an amazing, natural aquascape for the aquarium.  The twisted contorted shapes were just what I was looking for, but it is expensive.  This piece had formed the centrepiece of our aquarium, but the Saintly Mrs. Awdry's fishy friends kept growing and so had to be removed to allow more space for them.  Given its initial cost, I couldn't bring myself to throw it away and so it had been placed outside from where I was happy to recycle it for the build.

I cut the decoration down into three smaller sections, apportioning each piece to one of the irregular shaped bases I had chosen. Using off cut foam, I decided where I would have a way through the swamp and then braced the bog wood trunks in place with chopped down toffee apple sticks. This was a 'Eureka!' moment for me as I knew then exactly how I was going to realise my ideas!

The toffee apple stick braces had two purposes, structural integrity and to sell the mangrove swamp aesthetic.  Balance was key and I needed to consider carefully where the bog wood branches hung in relation to base profile, the sticks were key to support this.  They also allowed me to form the mangrove swamp roots that I was hoping to achieve.  Initially the stick itself was covered in milliput and given some simple texture before I added lengths of milliput rolled into tapered coils to represent the probing tendrils.  The joins were smoothed into the existing branches and allowed to set before given a quick blast of colour with the airbrush. 

Whilst absolutely thrilled with the progress so far, I felt that two of the larger bases needed some more branches in order to add more depth.  To achieve this, I took some thin willow branches cut to lengths and pinned them to the trunk before applying milliput to conceal the join and added additional tendrils.  Once everything was in place and set it was just a case of adding colour with a dry brush, the natural texture of the bog wood creating some wonderful effects. 

With the main structures completed, I just needed to add the hanging moss.  This is essentially teddy bear filling soaked in PVA glue and coloured ink with some basing turf sprinked in for good measure.  A ridiculously messy process, but one I had had some success with before in another swamp build.  See here: Through the Swamp

To complete the bases, self adhesive tufts, flock and some leave litter were all added.

The three main swamp bases were now complete and I just needed to fashion the remaining two blocking islands.  These were designed to form obstacles for our hapless adventurers to swim around and so were not to be considered explorable.  I had a couple of smaller MDF bases to hand and just added some foam as a base, using up the last of the milliput to smoothen the edges.  

Added to this were some aquarium plants that I had left over from the jungle build, but I wanted to achieve something more akin to the dense reeds that we see Charlie Allnut try to navigate the hapless African Queen through.  For this I sourced Long Reed lengths from the incredibly helpful 'War Paint Figures' and simply pressed them into the foam having first dipped the ends into some PVA glue.  I had hoped to give these stems some paper leaves, but time got the better of me and so had to make do with loading the base with various basing materials to finish the illusion. 

A fun and rewarding build, I was genuinely stoked at how well they had turned out using mostly found materials at my disposal.  I now had treacherous swamp terrain that my adventures would have to pass through in order to make it safely back to their boats.  That should have been everything completed for the game, but of course there was just one more thing I felt I needed!