Liquid Hot Magma.... Lava Mat - Now with Magma flows!

Couldn't resist the blog title.  As any of my friends know, I was obsessed with the Austin Powers movies from the 90's.  Liquid Hot Magma... ok, I will stop, I promise.

So I took the pics from the earlier post a bit early.  Technically I was only half done with the mat when I posted those shots.  Sue me, I was excited to post about a new shiny thing.  I added a black wash to the mat, and it added that much needed flow to the mat.  putting in the curvy hill/obsidian hills puts some movement on the otherwise static color.  The best thing though is it really makes the yellows and oranges pop way out of the red.  I did a LOT of painting today, and while I had these hills reserved for an arctic set I am building, they looked WAY better cracked and black.  So I decided to flesh these out for the lava mat instead.  Gotta say, these look REALLY good.

Speaking of Crystals... More Crystals anyone? Now in BLUE!

I have a buddy that plays Dark Eldar.  Haven't played him in a while, so I thought...it worked in Field of Dreams, why not here... so I built it, and... well I figured I had to show it off at least before getting to play a game with it.

Now that the set is done, I can see I really need more line of sight blocking material, so a set of hills will be in the works shortly for this set.  But here it is.  The idea behind this was to show the corruptible power that the Dark Eldar inflicts on the very earth they reside in.  I started with a rigid, much more natural looking set of crystals and go through the corruption process to really see the warping effects on the more complex pieces.  Made from blue foam mounted on CD bases.  I went with the dark crystal with a blue glow highlight to match my friends paint scheme.

Expansion plans for this set are pretty exciting too.  This set goes perfectly on the Ashen/Stone mat as you can see, and as this set is mostly small/medium pieces, a few centerpiece structures would be good.  I imagine a web-way portal, a very spiky landing platform, and some tall spiky towers to go with the current pieces seamlessly.  

Battlemats - Change up your battlefield!

Tired of an inter-galactic scale war that is fought on the same planet with the same look battle after battle?  Me Too!!!

I kinda teased about the post topic earlier, but I thought I would showcase the mats I have made thus far.  Mostly I got sick of playing game after game on that boring field of generic green turf, and I disliked the seam in the middle of my table.  As the table is modular and divides in half, mats were a simple solution to seamlessly change that up.

I can't believe how easy these were to make, and I highly recommend them.  For ~$22 per mat, you can make some really interesting boards that will go with you very easily.  When you are done, I simply roll them up around a cardboard tube, or PVC pipe.