What scale? Any scale?

That is a most interesting question to answer with this product. The simple answer is that it works with any scale. On the surface this may seem like an odd answer, but the simple fact is that one of the core design goals of this product is to make sure any scale, not just the ones supported by Spartan Games, are catered for. So what does any scale actually mean? The floor plates and uprights (which are the standardised components of the Modular Terrain) are going to be designed to be scale-less and genre-less. Over time we’ll bring out themed uprights, but right now the prototypes you can see have a more industrial/sci-fi feel to them. What determines the scale is the artwork and detailing level applied to the card, wood, acrylic or resin that is used in the product. Let’s take the idea of a 1 square by 2 square simple rectangle of product, which is 90mm x 180mm in size. Add the uprights and slide in some 10mm scale artwork and you have a factory unit. Slide in some 28mm scale metal work and you have a shipping container. Change the artwork again and you have a 15mm scale sci-fi airlock. You get the idea…

Let’s take it a step further. Let’s imagine you’ve pledged a Bronze Pack and chosen the initial 28mm scale Sci-Fi artwork. Out of the box you have enough components to make a great multi-room bunker complex, or a cool set of corridors on a spaceship or space station. If you like the idea of ‘dungeon crawling’ – or sci-fi crawling as is more pertinent in this example – then you can have a squad of troopers working their way through a complex, pieces being laid down randomly or as determined by a pre-plotted map.

But let’s imagine that sci-fi is just one of your hobby loves (and let’s face it, we’re wargamers so we love choice!) and your other passion is Zombie Apocalypse! Roll out the Gore artwork pack and add it to the SAME tiles and uprights. Suddenly you’ve now got a shopping centre or some other blood splattered setting.

But now it is time to go to your local gaming club and the guys are playing a Firestorm Planetfall campaign and the scenario you’ve selected is an Urban Assault – you’re going to need a bunch of buildings to fight over and capture. Roll out the 10mm Firestorm Planetfall artwork pack, and it is bye, bye Gore & Blood and hello New Proxima, a Terran Alliance city on the planet in the Tilsen System.

Okay, one final example. We’re working on an artwork set for what we call The Temple of Hades. In it you get a Bronze Level of plastic components, some stunningly detailed 40mm scale miniatures (come back soon and check out the photos of our cool skeletons!), 40mm scale artwork, a bunch of tokens and a set of Death or Glory skirmish rules. Suddenly the generic components easily rise to the challenge of supporting 40mm scale miniatures simply by adding new artwork.

So that’s it on scale. Our goal is to create a library of artwork that will allow a plethora of terrain solutions to be created; 10mm scale Sci-Fi, 6mm WWII, 28mm Scale Sci-Fi, 15mm Scale Sci-F-i, 28mm scale Victorian Super Science Fiction, 28mm scale Zombie Horror, 28mm Tunnels & Sewers, 28mm alien infested corridors, 15mm scale Victorian Super Science Fiction, 28mm scale WWII and the list goes on and on. But the core building blocks remain the same…

Uprights

A quick update just to focus on the vertical uprights you can see in our images. As you know, this is a prototype system and our Kickstarter is all about developing the product for release. The uprights you see in the images are not plastic. They are instead made from resin while we test the concept and experiment with various design ideas we have. The vertical supports you are seeing are fatter and more prominent than the final uprights will be. The final design will greatly benefit from the more elegant looking snap-together solution plastic will allow.

The fully developed product will lean more towards a nice, crisp, push-fit application with a cleaner, more simplified slot system. This will continue to allow it to work generically with different artwork. By doing this the runner system (for adding such things as acrylic, wood or resin) can be masked by the card artwork that is added. Over time, themed uprights will also be designed which can be seamlessly integrated into the system alongside the standard upright.

How big a gaming table can I make?

This is an interesting question and one of those ‘how long is a piece of string’ answers. If you spread the rooms and corridors out you can easily make a very large playing area, whereas if you compress into a smaller space, you can still have the intensity of layout, but take up a much smaller area. And of course you can go upwards as well.

If we think about a Platinum Pledge you get 60 tiles. So let’s lay some tiles out virtually, remembering that the base floor tile is 90mm x 90mm:

This image shows how a bunch of tiles can be spread out with interconnecting corridors to take up a good chunk of a 6’ x 4’ gaming table – 160cm by 120cm in size. We’ve coloured some base tiles to just highlight them, maybe they could be rooms in your layout, but as you can see there is huge amounts of potential. Perfect for a dungeon or spaceship interior.

Now let’s compress the 60 tiles into a tighter playing area:

This style of layout is tighter on the tabletop, and would be ideal as an interior of a bunker or house. Just drop the walls in place and away you go.

As you can see from these simple images the flexibility of the system is immense, and by varying the artwork the layout gains major momentum. If you look at our first image any of the 2 tiles x 2 tile rooms (180mm x 180mm) work well for 28mm scales, but with 15mm scale artwork that becomes a significant sized room.

One more image for you. This time we have taken our Platinum set, added the WWII artwork and also built up. What a fantastic free standing gaming aid – you can just imagine your troops fighting a valiant action to capture the buildings!

10mm Firestorm Planetfall Terrain

Check back to see our exciting expansion of our terrain Kickstarter as we show you how our modular scenery can be used to create fantastic buildings for your 10mm scale science fiction games. In fact, our update will go as far as to show how the scenery sets will help you make entire gaming surfaces.

Temple of the Ancients

As promised, we’ve made available a host of exciting add ons with a Greek mythology theme.

Temple of the Ancients Pack (please add £30 to your pledge level) – 15 stunning 40mm miniatures, MDF tokens and a PDF of the Death or Glory Rulebook. Shield transfers not included. Skeleton poses vary and are supplied with a random assortment of shields.

Trio of Heroes (please add £15 to your pledge level)

Trio of Monsters (please add £18 to your pledge level)

2 Scorpions (please add £30 to your pledge level) – approx 125mm long and almost as high, these giant scorpions are not to be messes with!

We’ve also made a new artwork option available. Whatever pledge level you opt for, you may now choose Temple of Hades artwork instead of Fantasy, Sci-Fi or WWII. If you want one of the original themes in addition to Temple of Hades artwork, you can opt for the Bronze Artwork Pack add on and choose Temple of Hades artwork. Remember you don’t need to specify which options you require now – we will get that information from you in a survey after the Kickstarter has ended.

What is Death or Glory?

The idea behind Death or Glory, or DoG for short, is fairly simple: create a set of skirmish rules that are quick to play, fun, colourful, different and provide a gaming experience that allows Legends and Heroes to be just that! We wanted to play games featuring mythical warriors such as Perseus, Hercules, Achilles and other Greek Heroes, but beyond that the game engine had to embrace many, many genres. One engine to learn – a myriad of tabletop options. Achilles one week, Robin Hood the next or maybe an Elven Warrior the next.

The focus of development was therefore to create rules that favoured the heroes and legends of past centuries at the expense of the common warrior. To make such heroes and legends quite literally deadly on the tabletop. BUT – and this is a big BUT – they are not unbeatable. If you charge a hero into a unit of enemy warriors on his own, with no support or strategy, it’s going to hurt – or could even be fatal! But use him as he should be – a heroic fighter – and he will carve his away around a battlefield, just as these inspiring characters do in the movies.

The idea is to use DoG to re-enact scenes from a movie, book or graphic novel, or make up your own encounters using lots of models. Whether you have Leonidas cutting a path through Persian Immortals to save an injured companion, or Jason trying to fight his way through skeletons to the safety of his ship, DoG is perfect for recreating such encounters.

Our first set of rules and statistics fit in the Greek world, where we start with the mythological world of heroes and monsters like Perseus, Herakles, Cyclops, Minotaur, Aeetes, Medusa and so on. Names of characters that invoke exciting ideas of recreating those pivotal moments in movies as the hero (or villain!?) wins the day. We look forward to seeing your adventures and hearing about your heroic adventures in the world of Death or Glory!