Trinity Gate - Trench Crusade for the Finnish Museum of Games

The Finnish Museum of Games is renovating and renewing its premises this fall and Trench Crusade, a notable Finnish gaming success story, will be inducted to the museum as an independent display of its own! We were lucky to be approached by Factory Fortress and the museum in order to produce two warbands of quintessential Trench Crusade models to fight over a custom-made display board.

To explore an alternative angle to the expanding Trench Crusade universe, ancient Byzantine ruins were chosen as the subject. The minions of hell had been extending their trench networks a bit too far, and the holy forces had to descend on their adversaries before another sacred circle would be breached. The Trench Pilgrims and Heretic Legion were chosen because of their iconic status within the game's background. 

All miniatures were printed, assembled, painted and based in-house by us, using a wide range of accessories as well as acrylics from Army Painter and AK Interactive (to name a couple).

We scratch-built the terrain and based the models to match this specific environment - similar techniques and materials were used both in the models' stands as well as the terrain they're fighting on. The terrain itself includes a lot of subject-appropriate symbolism in the detailing and design, these elements should be fun for fans to spot! Each model was designed to fit in a specific location in the terrain, introducing conflict and narrative in relation to the scenery and other models around them.

The museum in Tampere is re-opening for public on October 10th with the Trench Crusade display part of the exhibition. 

The mighty Shrine Anchorite is the centerpiece of the display.

The sinister leadership of the Heretic Legion.

Holy warriors in their elevated gun positions.

The tree of life extends over the troops hurrying to cover.

A lone Heretic infiltrator aims a shot at the unsuspecting Pilgrims.

Over the battlefield a fearsome War Wolf Assault Beast faces off with a living bomb.

Determined villains leave their trenches to slow down the Pilgrim onslaught.

The infamous Artillery Witch conjures a new barrage.

The Death Commando hunts down Pilgrim officers.

Hellish overseers conduct the Heretic combat operations from the back.

On the Lodestone River

To accompany our newly-finished, oldschool Fantasy Battle armies we produced an entirely new wargaming theatre to deploy the regiments in. This would tie the campaign visuals together and partly inspire the armies' basing themes as well. We had been waiting for an opportunity to reuse some old Citadel plastic terrain parts and to make a mundane and "naturalistic" terrain set fitting for several game systems. Loosely basing the idea on the Border Princes countryside and adding a spice of ruined Arnor vibes - we now had a subject to approach.

In the centre of our entire build were the retro corner ruins, familiar from the Battleforces and Starter Boxes of Warhammer 40,000 third edition - everyone has seen these or the plastic jungle trees on the battlefields at some point! Back then terrain elements were modest, the line of sight blocking was not the most important aspect of a scenery piece, and any feature put together with care was enough to elevate the battles to another level of wargaming atmosphere.

In our heads our scenery was an ancient culture that had deteriorated into overgrown, mossy ruins over time. We used some of the corner ruins as they were, but some were elevated by assembling extra "floors". We also replicated sections of the plastic ruins with foam, while imitating the style of the architecture on these parts. This was a way to build a bit larger ruins that still resembled the classic designs, also adding scenic variety.

We intentionally built many ruins with smaller footprints, as this reminded us of our childhood terrain, and they're also more versatile to use between many game systems. Although the intended use for the new terrain was our Warhammer Fantasy campaign, we assembled all of our classic corner ruins - way too much for a standard WHFB battlefield but handy for other systems with bigger terrain requirements. This way we can get more use out of the scenery, for example as a feudal world setting in the coming Heresy events. 

The ruined chapel is the centerpiece feature for our Border Princes board, something solid to explore and fight over. Our smaller ruins use the classic 40K corner ruins but here the structure is mostly foam shaped to resemble the plastic terrain - our aim was to imitate the architectural style but build something larger and effective with gameplay in mind. Small details like the crypt can add massively to the narrative - we could see a treasure hunt or a last stand developing here!

The farmstead crops on the other hand are not particularly effective terrain, but really neat to have in the background for pictures! With these we combined the old Fantasy Battle wall sections with foam and natural pebbles to frame a piece of doormat on a plasticard base. The doormat is removable, so technically we could make an alternative version (burnt, with a path or with patches to place models in...) with specific scenarios in mind.

Thanks for taking a look! We're eagerly waiting for more Border Princes action already.

Outcrop Errands

Amidst army painting and No Retreat event preparations we took a brief venture into the world of scenery building, producing a scratch-built terrain set for our customer's casual Age of Sigmar and WH40K gaming. The specs and recipes were clear after the customer specified they had liked one of our older terrain sets and we could base the style and colours on that established design. This way we got to get to work right away!

As usual the terrain needs were for chunky blocks of line of sight blocking terrain, but they were not intended for competitive play, so we had a lot of freedom with the size and shape of the individual pieces. The client already had forests as well as scatter terrain accessories in their collection, so we put all our efforts in rock formations and crags of varying sizes. The one exception was the ancient pillar formations that could offer a narrative centerpiece for the board and technically count as ruins.

The used materials here were Finnfoam insulation sheets, tile grout combined with water and PVA glue, orchid soil chunks, weathering powders, Green Stuff World XXL tufts, and Tree Bush Foliage blended into a "moss paste" with PVA and thinned down AK Interactive and Vallejo acrylics.

Unearth the Betrayal

It was once again our collective hobby inspiration that sparked the idea for our latest gaming day - Ollie had created the insane Night Lords Apothecary some time ago and we knew the model deserved a proper story arch. Unfortunately the Chief Medicae Consul is quite a rare unit choice and Ollie's scratchbuild is a bit too epic to be run as a regular Apothecary - sadly he hadn't seen any gameplay. Therefore we wrote him a secret narrative of his own, incorporating the villain into Thracian Insurgency as a non-player character.

Since the early days of our gaming table build we'd been toying with the idea of creating some underground features for the terrain. These ambitions were boosted as the final construction took shape and we decided to use Ikea Kallax grid shelves as the legs for the table. These have been holding some of our studio armies and literature, but the shelves would also be perfect for some terrain integration - this way the underground terrain pieces would actually be stored underneath the streets and could be used in gameplay as a separate, modular scenery setup.

Our idea was to write a classic "mad scientist" story for the Night Lords Chief Medicae (now called Dr. Norman Bramm) and have this renegade character lead a clandestine operation from his makeshift underground laboratory. His hideous creations (inspired by both Horus Heresy Raven Guard tragedies as well as Fabius Bile's Enhanced Warriors project) would be too imposing for the Loyalist alliance to ignore and this would result in a subterranean manhunt. At first we discussed with Scott that it would be cool to build a simple dungeon corridor to surprise the other players with, but as per usual, we couldn't stop there...

Check out the entire subterranean terrain build and story arch via War Head Instagram or Facebook Gallery below!

+++ Thracia Rex Underground: Unearth the Betrayal +++