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"Don't fence me in!" - Games Workshop's fences and walls
Games Workshop have released a box of walls and fences aimed at their Warhammer fantasy gaming market. Fusilier Roly Hermans checks out this set, and describes how to convert them for use in historical games as well.
Admission time - although I'm a dyed-in-the-wool historical gamer, I do enjoy looking at the fantasy section of my local wargames shop. I envy fantasy gamers for the wonderful range of highly imaginative and well-crafted products that are available to them. And I'm always looking for fantasy products that will cross over to the world of historical gaming.
And it was such a cross-over product that I found during a visit to my local wargames shop a few weeks ago: Games Workshop's box of walls and fences. This set consists of a number of stone walls, wooden railing and wattle fences, and even a fence repaired with an old wagon wheel. Dotted amongst the fences are some dead trees. The set is completed by a couple of signs.
This picture from the Games Workshop website shows all the pieces
you get in the box - though they come unpainted, of course.
My first thoughts were that the set had too many fantasy features to make it useful for historical wargames. But the more I looked at it, the more I realised that converting this set would not be too difficult at all.
There's only a few things that you have to do to convert the walls and fences to make them suitable for historical games. And as they're moulded in hard plastic, these conversions can be done in a few minutes with no more than a sharp modelling knife:
- There's a couple of skull images that have to be shaved off. And some skulls on the ground can be easily turned into rocks.
- There's a sun standard on top of one of the fenceposts, which can be snipped off.
- A medieval weapon hanging from one of the dead trees can be cut off too - unless you play medieval games, of course!
- One of the signs has a shield leaning against it. This can be trimmed away - unless you're an ancient player!
- Many of the fenceposts have large ringbolts. I left some in place as I like the character they give the models, but I shaved off quite a few of them to prevent too much repetition.
- The only fantasy feature I left entirely untouched on my models was a gravestone leaning against one of the stone walls. But if you feel this needs to go, the easiest thing would be to cover that part of the wall with a bit of model tree foliage to make a bush.
The GW fences are great for giving atmosphere to posed photographs,
such as this Hellblaster and crew. Also, here you can clearly see the
ring-bolt on the fence post, which I shaved off quite a few of my other
fences and walls.
The existing fences and walls in my scenery box, gathered over many years from various manufacturers, now looked completely character-less beside these wonderful GW creations. So I sold all my old fences on TradeMe, and used the money to finance yet another box of GW fences and walls.
Having two sets, I decided that I had to do something to make them look a little different from each other. So I glued some model foliage to the stumps in the second set, which gave the fences a whole new look.
I used some model tree foliage to bring a couple of the dead trees
'back to life' . The figures are from my old Empire army that were the
very first figures I painted when I returned to the hobby of wargaming
late last century - so excuses for the quality of painting.
Painting was a cinch. First I spray painted everything matt black (I used the same automotive primer I use on my metal figures).
For the walls, I drybrushed them first with ochre, then with bright yellow, and finally with white. I then picked out the cracks with black ink. Admittedly, this colour combination is quite different from the normal grey you would expect of a stone wall, but I wanted something vaguely Mediterranean-looking to match my Peninsular War game setting.
The Empire's master gunner poses against the walls.
The wooden fences were first drybrushed in grey, then white. I then coated them with GW chestnut ink. Finally, I gave them the lightest drybrushing of bright yellow. Again, this is a rather different combination from the grey fences shown in the GW picture - I felt brown fences looked better (even though real wooden fences are actually more grey than brown).
Here are some of my painted fences and walls. The bird sitting on
top of the dead tree (left) is a conversion - in the box, the bird sits
on a small sign-post (click on the photo to get a much clearer view).
So, how do these walls and fences work in a historical setting? I think they'll go well for anything set in Europe, and maybe even parts of America, so long as you're not a stickler for accuracy (they're not really representative of real fences from any particular era or place). But if you're a stickler for character ... well, these walls and fences are awash with it!
And just to show how well these walls fit into a historical setting,
here's one of the Kapiti Fusiliers marching to Moscow.
