Dystopian Wars Arctic Naval Terrain

2024-03-23 Dystopian Wars / terrain / hobby /

The LGS and my own friend group don't have any blue water naval terrain. This is a problem, because the new Dystopian Wars is not designed for open ocean, as we figured out. Being in a terrain kinda mood, I broke out the styrofoam and craft paints and set to making a set of arctic table dressing.

Icebergs

The simple iceberg. A hacked up chunk of XPS. I did a number of approximately 1, 2, and 3 inch diameter chunks, though below are mostly the 1 inchers.

Painting through a few iterations until I got it looking like the pictures of ant/arctic bergs I was using as a reference. It's a teal base coat and then drybrushed with extremely light blue, and then further drybrushed up to almost pure white.

The waves also iteratively improved, starting with weird wavy concentric lines to broken perpendicular lines to wider ragged deep ocean swells. At least that's the idead

The clear plastic bases around them aren't just for the waves, they're also a specific size to remind us that being within about an inch of terrain is considered 'hazardous navigation', which we kept forgetting. This will hopefully keep us more mindful.

I was concerned the plastic would be too shiny for table use, and I'm still not sure what the right call is here. It's got some bad angles, but most of the time it seems perfectly fine. I sprayed one piece with a matte varnish, which makes the hazardous radius more pronounced but I just don't know which one I like better. Truly, I haven't been able to decide.

Islands

We needed some larger land masses as well, for objectives, and just bigger pieces that aren't icebergs. Yes, I know you can just have that massive of bergs, and I'll probably do some eventually.

They're jigsawed 1/8" hardboard shapes with some terrain paste smeared on with larger mounds here and there. Then craft paint brown for the dirt and drybrushed grey for the stone.

Snow effect I'm very happy with. It's a mix of baking soda, PVA, water, and acrylic paint (about the lightest blue layer as the icebergs). It's just smeared into the terrain patchy, again using IRL pics for reference.

I was aware that baking soda could yellow, but I thought I had the right mix of ingredients. What actually seems to have happened is it partly reactivated some of the underlying paint that I didn't give time to fully cure enough, which leaked through in some places. So I had to do some touch ups later. We'll see how it holds up over time.

Wrecks

I also needed some wrecks for objective markers. The plastic bases here are their interactive range. The models are old Spartan Games era Prussians I had in the bits box.

The first one is meant to look like it's leaking oil after an under-the-water hit to the hull, and starting to tip over.

The rest of them I used a technique for waves I read about from model train guys. Plain ol' toilet paper makes for good wave forms. Basically set it out in torn up sheets, and then work it with a brush loaded with thin paint/pva/water.

I wanted to do one more that nods to the super science of the setting, so I modeled it with one smokestack slagged from a beam weapon. It came out a little fresher than I meant it too, so I went back and applied some brown filters over it after these shots.

Further Work

I need to do a couple platforms, but I only have one piece I like for that job. And I need to make more icebergs. The game really wants a lot of terrain on the table.

More thoughts on the game itself later.