So last week I unexpectedly found myself with a free afternoon/evening with nothing to do. My better half was otherwise occupied and real life wasn't being particularly pushy so I realised I had the best part of 12 hours hobby time - a rare luxury indeed!
For whatever reason I didn't really fancy painting any figures so decided to embark on a scenery project I had been planning for some time.
I spent most of 2012 painting Rohan and Isengard figures with the aim of playing out a Huge Helm's Deep scenario last Christmas. That we did, using the GW kit and my old Warhammer fortress and it went really well, but I still wanted more, I still wanted a complete version of Helm's Deep done in the style of PJ's films.
So, I dug out my TTT DVDs, my laptop, BGIME 28-30, TTT Journey Book, a pad and pencil, tape measure and 5 A1 sheets of 5mm foam board I'd bought in the Hobbycraft sale a while back and got to work.
The Raw materials:
I decided to base my model on a combination of the one in The Two Towers Journey book and Battle Games in Middle Earth issues 28-30. I would assemble it like in the Journey book (hollow modular sections made out of foamboard) but take some design inspiration from BGIME (notably the corner towers).
My ultimate plan was to create a modular fortress that would resemble Helm's Deep but could also be put together in other combinations to play generic seige games around.
I also needed the fortress to fit in with the GW Helm's Deep model as that would save me having to build the curved walls and Gatehouse.
So, I stuck the movies on (hardly a chore) and started screenshotting my life away. It's hard to know exactly how long the next stage took due to dinner/tea breaks etc. but, 10 hours later or so, 4 of the A1 boards had been transformed into the plans you see below:
All in all, this should give me:
3 long wall sections (12" long)
1 long wall section with a culvert
2 short wall sections (6" long)
2 pieces of breached wall
4 large corner towers
1 small Deeping Wall Tower (you can see it to the far right of the Deeping Wall in the film)
1 Ascending wall section (this is the diagonal wall section that joins the Deeping Wall to the Hornburg)
2 Movable sets of stairs
This should give me a lot of choice when it comes to assembling the fortress. I'm not attempting to accurately recreate the Hornburg at this stage as I simply don't have the storage space that the larger walls/mountains/Keep would need. Instead I will have a long Deeping wall and a fair few other wall sections to create a Hornburg stand-in at the same height as the Deeping Wall - more than good enough for my needs! Perhaps at some point in the future I'll add a more accurate version of the Hornburg but for now that will have to wait.
Pretty pleased with myself I crawled off to bed. The next day I spent about 3 hours cutting the boards up and temporarily assembling a few pieces just to check my measurements had all been correct which they thankfully had.
So that's where I am so far, hopefully I'll be assembling the various sections over the next week or so, I honestly have no idea how long this project will take to complete but I hope by creating a WIP thread it'll at least encourage me to keep going with it!
Total project time so far: Approx 13 hours.
