Saturday 29 January 2011

Cities of Death Closeups #1: The Broadcast Station

Ok so in the previous post you will have seen some shots of my new City of Death in action. This was probably the single biggest terrain project I've ever undertaken, and I'm really only half way through - so far it's taken about three months, with several weeks of holiday consumed by working on it pretty much round the clock. Thankfully the first 'phase' is pretty much done so I'm taking a break and enjoying what I've finished so far before moving onto phase 2.

Phase 1 was all about getting the ruins built and the street sections finished. Phase 2 will be about building a rubble version of each ruin (so that the ruins can be destroyed by siege shells etc), and sorting out some scatter terrain.

 I thought it might be nice to look at some of the ruin pieces in more detail over a series of posts, and maybe look at ways they could be used to spice up games by introducing a few house rules.

First up, the Broadcast station.


 The idea behind this piece was to come up with something that had a lot of height and was also largely an intact building. I wanted it to be useable as an objective in its own right, and a huge fricken radio mast seemed like as good an objective as any. Below you can see a wide shot of it fully painted, with nearly the whole mast in frame.

The mast itself is not climable, meaning that most of the height is merely decorative, but it does serve to give the board a 'skyline' which looks pretty nice.

Game-wise, there are numerous ways you can use such a piece. Obviously it could be used to represent a COD stratagem, such as the command centre, but beyond that it can be used to create a characterful scenario - for example recapturing a broadcast tower that is being used by the enemy for their own ends. In an apocalypse game it could be used to represent a vital objective (being worth two or three regular objectives) and it may be fun to introduce some unusual benefits for those posessing the tower - for example, if one player is holding the tower uncontested at the end of his turn, then he could be allowed to reroll any leadership tests his men have to take in his following turn. Or he may be allowed to force his opponent to reroll his leadership tests. Or both. A titanic battle over a vital objective such as this broadcast tower could serve to create a very characterful game...

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