Forstgrave – Grimmleigh's Lab

Rangers of Shadow Deep is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a new game. The table top skirmish game was released about a year ago by Joseph McCullough, and shares a ton of the DNA of one of his other games, Frostgrave. As a matter of fact, if you have played Frostgrave (you should), you’ll be able to pick up on Rangers of Shadow Deep in a jiff.

Shadow Deep has a few really cool aspects that set it apart from Frostgrave, though. Rangers is a co-op game, so you don’t face your fellow players in combat. You work together to solve riddles, battle monsters, and find clues about the encroaching darkness that has been wiping kingdoms off the map.

And you can play it solo. It’s pretty amazing. The game has a simple AI baked into it, but it still proves to be plenty challenging.

I’m getting ready to play my first game of Rangers, but I figure I might as well go bonkers with the project. I have set a few rules into play for myself, which I will outline here:

1- All the minis I will be playing with will be printed on my Elegoo Mars.

2- The terrain for each scenario will be scratch built, of printed here in the lab.

3- Everything used in game will need to be fully painted.

4- I will present write-ups of each game, as well as behind the scenes looks at the processes that I will be using to bring the game to the table. I’m really freaking bored, and this might be the only thing that keeps me from going kookoobananas.

5: This guy needs to be in the Ranger’s band of heroes:

The first thing I needed to do was settle on a Ranger. In Shadow Deep, your Ranger can be just about anything; Spellcasters, classic barbarian types, sword-and-board twinks, dump-truck babies in bear suits, you name it.

I have always been partial to half-elf Rangers, especially the classic, archetypal bow wielding bad-ass. I would also like to play with a female Ranger character, because I’m tired of beefcake.

I’m also pretty burned out on cheesecake, so finding the right Ranger proved more challenging than I thought!

(I don’t have a problem with cheesecake mins. If you want a little T&A in your games, have at it! There are some great sculpts out there! It’s just not what I want right now!)

But I want a mini that looks fierce, and has the sense to go adventuring with something covering her vital organs.

My usual go-to STL model files have been from Titan Forge Miniatures, Artisan Guild, and Lion Tower Miniatures. They all have some great figs, and I came really close to going with this awesome Ranger from Lion Tower:

But, I kept looking. I also found Lila from The Dragon Trapper’s Lodge, and a few minutes later found another set of files that had Lila with an amazing mount. So, she’s in the queue, as is the earlier Ranger from Dan Kelly at Lion Tower Miniatures.

You can’t have enough Rangers, after all!

Next up: a big batch of zombies for the first scenario!

Confession time– I just invested in a new FDM printer and a pretty amazing series of files for terrain building, so it’s hard to say how much of this kind of building I will be doing in the future. That being said, I love a good scratch build, so I’m almost certain I’ll keep at it to some capacity.

Plus, western civilization collapsed a few years back. It’s hard to say how long we’ll be able to pick up spools of plastic for printing. You can decide whether I am joking or not, because I sure the hell don’t know anymore.

With the base of the building established, it was time to get to work on some components for the rest of the structure. I am using really cheap foamcore that I picked up at Dollar Tree, because the paper peels off super easy, leaving a dense, easy to carve foam ready to play. For the shingles on the roof sections, I just carved my shapes with a ballpoint pen, then went at it with a blade to get the slopes and shaping.

This technique allows me to do some pretty cool effects, like this dormer that I put in on the lower floor of the tower:

All of the detail is just carved directly into the foam, either with a balloint pen or a good pencil. The ballpoint gives crisper detail, and I think it might be my favorite technique. This is also the first time I assembled a building like this with hot glue, which sped up the whole process incredibly.

It was time to add the next floor up. I opted to go with a full interior at first, but changed my mind as I went along.

I decided to go ahead and do the support beams in foamcore, too, since everything will get a couple of coats of wood glue to seal up the foam and strengthen the sculpt. Wood glue has a bit of resin in it, so it will help toughen stuff up quite a bit.

The whole build took about four hours, and ended up being pretty cool!

I put in a balcony for snipers in a skirmish style game, and plenty of exposed brick and timber to go with the stucco.

The chimney was easier than any that I have ever done before. I used Gorilla Glue to bind to pieces of foamcore together, which is easier to carve into than traditional glue. Plus, the foaming action of the glue really binds the foamcore together. A little hot glue to add the top, and it’s pretty spiffy!

My other favorite detail of this piece is the curved slant in the roof, which throws the “safe” feeling of the building completely out the window. It’s something that I was never able to to with traditional foamcore building, but without the paper holding things in place, the foam form was easy to bend into place. Hot glue just made it stay there once it got there!

Next up, the whole thing gets sealed in a mix of black paint and wood glue, then it’s time to paint!

Tag: Forstgrave

Winding Up for”Rangers of Shadow Deep”

Scratch-Build Fantasy Village, Part 2