'Nickname' O'Shea's Zone Mortalis Odyssey

'Nickname' O'Shea

'Nickname' O'Shea

Gang Hero
Honored Tribesman
Sep 28, 2014
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Hello All! It's been too long - 9 years or so! - since I posted on this site. I don't quite know why, I always enjoyed my time here.
Quite a turbulent 9 years for me with a lot of changes to my life circumstances: Necromunda fell by the wayside for a while, was briefly replaced by 40k, then a long hobby drought, house move and many other things.
I wanted to share with you a project that has been in the works for 5 or 6 years that is just now reaching completion.
In many ways it's the culmination of a terrain building journey that started right here, and has been inspired and informed by the marvellous Yaktribe Hivemind.
In other ways it is a cautionary tale, a story about how I wasted many hundreds of pounds and hours through a lack of project focus, poor planning and ironically, haha, a desire to save money...

So strap in, this will be a bit of a saga.
 
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Like many of us here of a certain age, I was always fascinated by the famous Necromunda Tower featured in White Dwarf back in the day.
What if, I thought, I could make a similar tower, that was modular, easy to store, that could also serve as a 2D-ish tiled Zone mortalis setup? The idea of modularity and ease of storage has been key to the whole project the whole way through despite lots of changes to the brief. The other aspect to this was to use up any and all terrain bitz, parts and accessories I had accumulated over the years in one project, thus freeing up a load of storage space.

One of my first steps was to design a set of 16 tiles, using the FW ZM tiles as inspiration. I cut out 16 4cm sq pices of paper and glued foamboard walls to them, to visualise how they would look and work. For the walls, I was going to use a mixture of OG bulkheads, Cities of Death tiles, Mantic Deadzone tiles, and Sector Imperialis walls, using a single type of wall on each tile to maintain a consistent height, at least for each individual tile.

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The first big decision was what to make the tiles from - I settled on MDF as this seemed like the best value option, and went to a timber yard where they were able to cut a large sheet of 5mm MDF into 16x 12" squares.

One of the big problems I consistently ran into was one of cost and scale - with 16 tiles, anything I needed to do to each tile had to be done 16 times. Any cost incurred, x 16. Say each tile cost £50 in bits, that would be £800.
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I decided to magnetise the edges of the tiles so that they would hold together and not slip about when in use gaming, this meant - as I wanted them to also be able to sit halfway alongside each other if needed - 256 holes drilled into the edges of the boards (16 on each tile) and 256 neodymium magnets glued in, polarities going N S N S on each side. I then finished each tile edge with a thin strip of 'grip plate' pattern plasticard
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To make them stackable, I took them to work and drilled four holes in each tile. I then bought some lengths of copper pipe and pipe cutter and cut 64 Short lengths. These, in conjunction with a bundle of plastic till rolls, would serve as pillars that would slot into each other, making the tiles stackable for storage and gaming.

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The next stage was where things started to falter - what was I going to do about the floor? This wasn't just a creative issue (although it was a big one), but also one of cost. As mentioned earlier, everything I did to a tile had to be bought and replicated 16 times. This meant that even relatively inexpensive solutions like aluminium mesh or grip plate plasticard would mount up significantly over the whole project.
The project was shelved (or indeed Floored, as there was no shelf big enough) for a while while I thought this through.

In short order we ended up in an international pandemic, and while I did get a lot of hobby stuff done during this time, the terrain project languished. During and after the pandemic, my living conditions had become pretty unbearable due to my flatmates general horribleness, and the decision was made to move out.
As I would have a lot less space at my new home, some tough calls needed to be made.

The MDF tiles and the trolley needed to go.

At this point the project had been without progress for at least 18 months to 2 years, and I just couldn't physically take it all with me. I salvaged all of my bitz and waved goodbye to several months of work and planning, and not a few pound notes.

Just a few pictures of what could have been...

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REDUX

Another year to 18 months passed at my new home before I gave some more thought to the project.
At this point I had terrain for days - I could set up martian desert, tropical plains with jungle and rock formations, and I still had enough techno-industrial stuff that I could fill a 6x4 table with more towers, gantries and walkways than would ever be necessary for a game of Necromunda, never mind 40k.

So did I really need this absurdly bulky tower concept? I suppose the answer was No. And yet, I still had a plastic crate full of terrain parts, bits and gubbins that had to be used one way or another. I cast my mind back to the secondary purpose of the tiles, which was to be a modular Zone Mortalis style board, and decided that this was going to be the new focus of the project.

First thoughts: obviously with space constraints, a set of 16 fixed Forgeworld-style ZM tiles was out of the question. What I needed was a set of walls and pillars that could be arranged in a modular fashion, and be able to be packed away flat in a plastic crate when not in use.

However first I needed to revisit the creative/financial issue of the floor.

I went through quite a few ideas for this - my first thought was a neoprene gaming mat, which would have been the most cost effective option, but I didn't see any with the particular aesthetic i wanted; Most were 'generic scifi' or the wrong colour, or too busy. I also wasn't keen on putting all of this effort into detailed, three dimensional walls while having a glorified mousemat for the floor.

The next idea was to again buy a sheet of MDF and have it cut into squares, and detail the tiles. However not only had the cost of MDF risen considerably in the intervening years, but I was still faced with the cost and labour of detailing the tiles. Plus I wasn't sure that they would ultimately be durable enough to be thrown into a plastic crate without the edges fraying and chipping.
Not to mention the depressing aspect of re-buying something I had thrown away just a couple of years previously...

At this point I was very much out of the loop with GW releases, but when having a browse on their website I came across the new plastic Zone Mortalis tiles. Now this looked the business. Unfortunately at £50 for 4 tiles I was looking at £200 to get the full coverage I needed. Nevertheless I picked up a set, with a few ideas in mind so even if they didn't work out, I at least had 1/4 of the floor sorted.

Now I had the tiles, which were perfect, I tried to think of ways in which I could replicate them. I had the bright idea of trying to mould and cast them, trying first reinforced dental plaster, and then two part resin.
This was an unmitigated disaster. The plaster was too brittle. The two part resin leaked from the mould and got everywhere, and then stuck like shit to a blanket to the mould so that even after four attempts, I was unable to remove a single tile without it shattering.

All told I was down at least another £100.

I bit the bullet, spent two weeks stalking ebay like a lion on the Serengeti, and obtained another twelve ZM tiles.

Now we're cooking.
 
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Bilbostomper said:
This reminds me of a gaming table I made many, many years ago that just got progressively heavier and more unwieldy for each decision made to improve it. I wonder what became of that.
Click to expand...
My original idea would have been fantastic if I was a millionaire with a dedicated Warhammer Room, but it was not particularly suited to someone who lived in a small flat above a kebab shop.
 
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At this point I had everything I needed to really get going and was all out of excuses, and I set myself a deadline of the end of August (the one just gone) to get properly started.

My first step was to figure out the construction of the walls. I had just over 100 of the OG Necromunda Bulkheads. I had given away my Cities of Death tiles, built a ruined cathedral with my Sector Imperialis bits and decided that the Mantic deadzone tiles didn't suit the aesthetic I was going for. I had some 3D printed ZM pillars bought from Etsy to use as junction pillars.

A single bulkhead didn't sit well on the heavily textured ZM tiles and didn't look very 'realistic', so I decided to double them up, using 19mm wide strips of 1mm thick plasticard as a spacer. In between the bulkheads, where they were open, I added pipes, cables and machinery. At bulkhead doors I added terminals and keypads. This was the point where I could really go to town with the huge bitz box I had accumulated over the last decade. I added tiny CCTV cameras, air conditioning units, greenstuff cables and guitar wire, MDF girders and balsa wood rods.

The walls were made in various lengths - 1, 2 3 and 4 bulkheads long for maximum flexibility.

Conceptually and practically, the walls were pretty much sorted.

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From the top down it looked really promising. But I wonder if it would have been practical while stacked up? Like, is there enough room for clumsy gamer hands to move minis around between levels?
 
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Now onto the pillars. The 3D printed pillars I had (from Etsy seller '3DFreshPritz') were fine, but there was a slight height discrepancy between them and the bulkheads. I had at one point - when it was still a stackable, fixed tile concept - had plans to light up each board, and even long after that when I'd chosen to make fully modular walls, I'd had intentions of making the pillars light up in some way.

However given my complete lack of knowledge about things electrical and in the interest of getting this project complete this century, I'd dismissed this idea entirely.

Serendipity struck however, when an old friend came to visit. I was showing him my project and off-handedly mentioned about the lighting idea and he said he'd have a go at it. He is a skilled propmaker and whizz at electronic and mechanical special effects, and in just a few days he had an awesome concept that would resolve the height discrepancy and give me lighting at the pillars. We had one or two revisions and then he set his 3D printer to work...


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Punktaku said:
From the top down it looked really promising. But I wonder if it would have been practical while stacked up? Like, is there enough room for clumsy gamer hands to move minis around between levels?
Click to expand...

This is a very good point and something I did consider deep into the project. As poorly as the original plan turned out perhaps it was for the best.
 
With 99% of everything now assembled, it was time to get dirty

After everything I had been through, I really could not wait to get to painting. Over the years I've gotten pretty good (if I say so myself) at batch painting. It's pretty normal for me to accumulate a 2000/3000 pt army and then build and paint it in a month or less.
I wanted to get all this done, and done fast, so rattlecans, drybrushing and washes applied with a 1 1/2" brush were the order of the day. I did take the time to do some Salt Weathering which is so easy to do and so effective I couldn't afford not to do it.
For the general colour pallette, I wanted it cool and mostly drab. The pillars would be mid green, and the bulkhead walls what I like to call 'nuthouse green' (actually Gauss Blaster Green). Things like the MDF blast doors,I did in Industrial yellow. I'd picked up some Boarding Actions walls, and did these in Wraithbone (good god if these Boarding Actions walls had existed a few years ago I would have just bought 3 or 4 boxes and would have been done in a month).

I made a large tub of my own custom wash (like hell was I going to use 10 pots of agrax earthshade) using black and sepia ink and Pledge floor wax (the last remaining from my stash)

Order of operations for pretty much all of these parts was as follows:
Basecoat of Leadbelcher.
All over wash with custom dirty brown wash.
Sponge on brown and orange acrylics for the rusty parts.
Hit those rusty parts with some matt varnish.
Spray the rusty parts with hairspray and sprinkle with salt.
Spray with my base colour.
Wash with dirty wash again.
Wash under water and rub away the salt with fingers and a toothbrush.
Paint details like skulls, buttons etc. (including adding more rust using Dirty Down Rust)

If you want to try and follow the above, it is absolutely IMPERATIVE that you allow the piece(s) to fully dry in between each step.

Here's everything pretty much so far, details not shown on the bulkhead walls, I'll take a picture in the morning light tomorrow:

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Some quick test shots. This was before I painted the details on the bulkhead walls and the tiles - looking pretty good though!

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Our first games on this board will be played on sunday - we're planning a quick fire series of 500 pt 40k games.
I will for sure be taking many, many photos, which I hope you will enjoy as much as I'm going to be enjoying playing on this board after half a decade of blood, sweat, tears, heartbreak and absolute financal ruination....

Thanks for reading, please fire away if you have any questions :)
 
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