AHPC Dark Age Ring Fort

 

Advance and be recognized

 

If all goes to plan, this should be the first of two posts from me this week.  Having been thrown way off schedule by my bout of COVID at the start of my teaching semester, I've decided to bin the challenge locations and focus on the stuff I've got ready to paint on the workbench.  

All of the pieces lined up.  Four straight sections, three curved sections, two gates and two end caps.

Backside view of the whole array.

I had two largish modular terrain projects planned for this year's challenge, the modular ruins posted a few weeks back and this Dark Age Ring Fort.  It's a set of 28mm pdf kits by Sarissa Precision. As with all the Sarissa Kits I've worked with it was a joy to put together, an easy hour of punching out, applying glue and clicking the bits together.  And yes there are two camps regarding terrain, those of us who enjoy making scenics and those of us with irrational phobias towards terrain brought on by extreme emotional trauma while in uteri.

My Gripping beast warriors on the ramparts.

This sort of works would protect villages, towns and manors all over Western Europe from the early days of the Roman Empire into the middle ages.  it's inhabitants might be Celts, Saxons Franks, Danes or Scots-Irish, but the basic plan remained constant.  Sloped earthen ramparts topped with a fence or palisade and flattened off on top to make a fighting platform. 

 

Close up in better light to show the kit details.  The wood work was painted with washes of raw or burnt umber over a parchment base.  The ramparts were painted dark earth tones with ground cover applied and bushes to hide major flaws.

Most Sarissa kits come with doors, but oddly the gate houses did not come with gates.  I bodged some together using left over doors from other kits.  I did one gate open and one gate closed.

The roadway and fighting platform are done with fine railway ballast firmly cemented in place (thanks for the tips Curt) and overpaid in earth tones

The pair of gates in the open position are to narrow to full close of the entrance, but modeller's license and forced perspective means that can be ignored.

The kits are marketed as 28mm but the walls and gates seem low compared to my GB figures.    As with most war-games terrain it's a matter of balancing the differing vertical and horizontal scales and looks ok on table.  Anyway, I'm not sending it back!   

I see a ton of uses for this on table.  First off for my Beowulf RPG when we go on TT.  Also it will fit my El Cid armies nicely and can be morphed into other eras easily.  I now have a pretty good tied collection of terrain to cover Dark Age Britain, and so I think that I need to build Sub-Roman armies and enemies to fight over it!

Points wise the ramparts measure 36" long, 3" wide and 2" tall.  That's a perfect terrain cube for 20 points.