A look inside Secrets of Shandisholm- part 10: Modelling

We're into the final week of looking through the pages of Secrets of Shandisholm, but it includes some of the most exciting stuff for me, the modelling articles and narratives. We're keeping the pre-order prices up on the website for the first week in August to give people who are waiting to get paid a chance to join in. Heard from the printers last week that all's going well, the books should be arriving from them any time in the next fortnight.

Modelling pages! That's great to see, not much attention paid to that in many game rulebooks.
Tell me about it, but I think it's what the hobby's all about. Creating these amazing worlds not just in your head but in 3 dimensions in front of you. The glorious feeling of knowing you made all of it!

Assuming you can make glorious terrain of course, some of us just don't have the time, patience, skill or budget for that.
Terrain-making doesn't have to be hard, expensive or that time-consuming, that's part of the purpose of these pages. Most of the materials we've used are cheap and easily available, and the techniques are quite easy to get good results with.

Or you could just go and buy ready-made terrain.
You could, but where's the fun in that I say! And it almost certainly isn't cheaper...

What's in the modelling section then, is it just terrain?
No, there is quite a bit of terrain stuff- modelling round houses, realistic trees, cheap solutions for nice-looking hedges and walls, and a look at the modular terrain we made to test and play The Woods on. If you were at Attack! Devizes last weekend you probably saw our board going through its paces. The modelling pages explain how to make everything on there. We've also got a section on how I go about sculpting miniatures, with a step-by-step look at sculpting Harri Howl, Toisech of Shandisholm, and some pages looking at the diverse array of miniatures available to choose from. I'm especially excited about the painting tutorial which the amazing David Stafford (aka Mr Saturday's Mumblings) has put together. Mr Saturday's Mumblings really inspired me to begin blogging almost 5 years ago, and without that there would almost certainly be no Oakbound Studio now.

You mentioned the miniatures ranges available, does that just cover Oakbound?
It's never been my intention for Oakbound to try and compete with all the other brilliant small miniature companies around. I'm far more interested in working in harmony, so if there's a miniature out there which fits the world/creature/theme I'm working on with Oakbound I like to point people to it. If nothing else it saves me having to sculpt another one! Warlord Games and Gripping Beast have been brilliant about allowing me to use their Dark Age/Celtic miniatures in this publication. Dark Sword, Troll Outpost, Wargames Foundry and Krakon Games also have excellent and compatible miniatures in their ranges.

So we've explored the world, learnt the rules, found some miniatures to use and built a nice gaming board, now do we play some games?
Absolutely! High time we looked at some scenarios...!