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Monday, April 27, 2020

Test Marsh and/or Swamp Terrain

 On glaring gap in my terrain inventory is marshes / swamps.  I've always found the concept of building decent "marshy" terrain a bit daunting.  But with a little time on my hands in between conference calls (and sometimes during...) I decided to give it a try and made two test pieces.  The first one had a small tree and the other did not.

Here's a close up of the first one.  I think it came out "OK". I've set several goals for this project:

- These need to be usable for scales ranging from 6mm to 28mm
- I can only use materials on hand (that's not as limiting as it sounds
- it's easy to store so vertical feature (like trees) need to be removable and I'll need to make different sized trees for the different scales

I grew up in the bayous of southern Alabama, so have some pretty direct experience with swampy terrain.  Thats a plus and a minus as I'll also have a certain level of bias.

 My second test piece has no vertical aspect.  It kind of looks like a pond with bad landscape management.

Please ignore the 6mm Russian troops - I'm running another Russo-Japanese war game over Zoom tonight.  The are useful as a scale reference.  The bases of 40mm squares.

I know, I know, the paper tracks are crap - I need to get something better.  My apologies for those of you who are offended by these lame tracks
Here's another picture of the first test on the table.  I would appreciate any comment, especially suggestions on what might be improved.

The bases are 1/8 inch (3mm) thick black PVC sheet.  PVC has become my terrain material of choice.  It's cheap, durable, easy to cut and DOES NOT WARP.
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4 comments:

  1. IanApril 27, 2020 at 12:46 PM

    I think the one with the tree looks the best. The extra light green foliage seems to give better idea of swamp. Only suggestions would be possibly have some wood or such floating in the water and possibly bits of water as spall pools on the edges if you do larger pieces?

    Ian

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  2. Peter DouglasApril 27, 2020 at 2:14 PM

    Lovely looking swamps but do something about those tracks will you?

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  3. BertalucciApril 27, 2020 at 2:18 PM

    On this side of the pond marshes tend to be a series of small ponds of stagnant water. If you adopted this approach your marsh would be less lake like and even better/obviously a marsh than it already is, which is mighty good.

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  4. CodstickerApril 27, 2020 at 8:50 PM

    I have to agree with the others. As ponds I think they look excellent, as swamps maybe small areas of water around the edge would give a better impression of swampy area. I've made a couple of swamp sections myself and was never quite satisfied; it seemed I couldn't get the right combination of open water and soft ground.

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