Desert Terrain

This week's project is to make some 'patches' of desert terrain to go on top of my terrain cloth.  I'm getting remarkably sensible in my old age too - on Saturday I bought a 'Really Useful Box' and I'm going to make the terrain bases so they actually fit in it!

So, what to make?  I'm going to start off with three irregularly roundish shaped bits of 4mm thick MDF and turn one into  an area of 'rough' ground - mainly boulders, with a bit of scrub; another will be mostly scrub; an area of soft sand.  The latter is making me scratch my head a bit.  I'm really not sure how to depict it.  A smooth area with none of my usual large grit or vegetation seems like the obvious thing to do, but that's a bit boring.  I could try to do some small, ripply, sand-dunes to give it texture - but I'm not sure how to 'sculpt' those.

Any other ideas - either for how to depict soft sand, or for different areas of terrain - gratefully received!

On the rules front, Col and I have been discussing the combat system.  I had designed it to be a sort of cross between WAB and Black Powder, 'attackers' getting to roll a number of dice and then 'defending' units getting an 'armour saving throw' (though both sides were doing both simultaneously, which could get confusing).  But it was getting increasingly complex and slow - two rolls for each side per round, each with at least half a dozen modifiers.  So I did a spot of 'number-crunching' to calculate the probabilities for units with particular values of 'CA' (the statistic which indicates how good at fighting a unit is) actually causing casualties to units with particular levels of protection (armour and shields), which gave me a table of probabilities.  It's fairly easy to convert that into a simple attack table - cross-reference 'CA' against armour to find a target number, modify the target number depending on circumstances (flank or rear attack, whether either unit is disordered or shaken, etc) and then roll the appropriate number of dice (typically two or three), depending on unit size to generate the casualties.  D20s seem to be needed to get the required degree of 'granularity' in the results.

Copyright © Dr. P.C. Hendry, 2010