Vagabondy - Vagabond's Viking Village

Some time ago I decided that my Viking Hordes needed some where to either live and/or raid, and so I built a small Dark Ages/Northern European village.

I decided to make this post because of a comment I read recently about skirmish war gaming only needing a small number of figures but a large investment in scenery, which may well be true but it can be done on a very tight budget.

I don't think what I did was outstanding, but I do think it is serviceable war gaming scenery, I made some mistakes as well as having some successes but it was not as difficult as I thought it might be, I achieved it in about 6 weeks which is more than my normal attention span and it was very cheap.
Maybe this will help anyone who is contemplating a similar project to get started. I think my village is a little too neat and tidy and if anyone has suggestions to improve or add to it I would really like to hear them. I don't particularly want to add buildings but its the ancillary stuff that I like best, I was very pleased with the dung heaps for example.

Again this is something I posted originally on LAF and have extracted the body of the post to put up here. The full thread starts here http://www.lead-adventure.de/index.php?topic=95869.0 and I would say I got a lot of encouragement and advise from the guys there. Coincidentally the thread has been resurrected by someone a few days ago, just after I wrote this post but before posting - spooky.

My original intention with the Blog was to just post my games but I might change my mind on that, anyway sorry for the waffle - on with the post.

For some obscure reason, but is typical of me I decided to do the Chieftains long house first, obviously as it is the biggest most complex build it should have been last, once I had some practice in what I was doing. Ho Hum as they say.

So this was the start, I didn't think the roof shingles worked too well, they were on the big side, spread out too much and with no texture having been cut from a smooth cardboard. Basically I was being lazy and had tried to cover too large an area with as little effort as possible. As Viv in Australia says - Rubbish in Rubbish out.

I tried to compensate for the lack of texture by downward strokes of the brush in the painting process and the transition of colour didn't work for me either. I started with a black undercoat and then mixed black and white getting lighter as I went along. Probably 5 shades done and then a final green wash to simulate moss. Of course it's a big area to cover and I'm not good at painting buildings but I expected a better result. I suspect my problem is using shades of grey mixed from black and white and that I should be doing something else, any thoughts or advice?

The wall texture I liked but it is not very authentic, the daub was traditionally pushed on by hand and so I should have a 'puddled' look, sort of soft dimples. I used grout mixed with paint for the daub but felt it was a bit soft, however my grout was quite old so that might have been the problem.
I always mix paint in with the texture because I've damaged bits in the past and there's nothing worse than white chips showing on a building or base.

I used 5mm foam board for walls and roof and it gives a strong light build, nothing revolutionary here.

The bed is just cardboard and kitchen roll for pillows and bedding, the boxes are a square section of balsa and the oven you can just see in the bottom right hand corner is an acorn cup, upside down of course. I did put strips of thin card along the edges of the foam board to cover the foam.

These were the next two houses I did, they are the same construction, but I went with thatched roofs. Mrs Vagabond had donated an old towel to the cause, this has a fine nap and no loops. I glued it down with PVA and then when dry liberally coated it with diluted PVA in situ and combed it so the strands were fairly even. 1st pic before PVA and combing, 2nd one after the process.

 If you look carefully I pasted watercolour paper on the foam board trying to get the puddled look I was after, but when I painted it there wasn't enough texture for my childish dry brush technique so I went back to the grout but applied it with a small oil painters trowel.

This is how I cut the towel it so that it wrapped around the edges of the foam board to get a neat corner joint.

Hopefully you can see the end result here. It required pressing around and then holding and re pressing but I got a good glued result in the end.

I then painted it with black undercoat. There are a number of alternatives, you could soak the towel in PVA and black paint before putting it on, I've done this once and it is a right mess, black paint gets every where. Don't do it.
You could spray undercoat but my work has always been in winter and spraying out doors in the cold is not much fun. Probably the best way is to get black towel but we don't have black towels and I wasn't going to buy a new one to cut up. Eeh I cum from Yarkshire by eck and we don't cut up new towels here lad, tharl be truble at mill, as Mrs Vagabond so quaintly says when she's taking the piss, she comes from Bristol!!
It is difficult to get an all over cover of paint and I must have gone over it 3 or 4 times before getting it right because of the degree of undercut. Probably also because I was working in the evening and could see the gaps in daylight.

This is how it looks after the undercoat.

And this is after dry brushing the thatch, it looks a bit like it's snowed and this is after I knocked it back with a couple of brown and green washes, the green hasn't come out on the pic, and I'm still contemplating putting some moss (flock) on the roof.

The washes I put on the walls just soaked in to the grout and I ended up putting a coat of diluted PVA on the walls to size them and then the wash puddled as it's supposed to, you can see the green wash at the base of the walls.

The one thing I wanted to try and ensure for the village was that there was plenty of scatter terrain, I wanted fields and crops but 1st decided to have a go at middens or dung heaps if we're being polite.

It's all fairly obvious, bamboo skewers glued into offcuts of foam board wound round with string and garden wire.
I had this brilliant idea that if I smothered the string in pva glue and wound it round the sticks I would have free wattle fencing. Free is good - right.

If you have never held up a bit of string and dipped your fingers in glue to smooth it on to the string, then your life is not complete. DON'T do it, buy the damn things. Rendra do some good flexible ones.
As you can see the string ran out about halfway round the one on the left, it was a nightmare.
The green one is garden wire for holding up plants.

PVA and dried tea from tea bags for the texture, it's as cheap as it gets. You may find cheap is a re-occurring theme here.

Again I think I overdid the dry brushing and then PVA and flock as well as some more tea and a twig or two from the garden plus a bit of lichen from Scotland, but you can pick it up anywhere there is no pollution.

This is the one with the garden wire, the green stuff in an earlier picture. I think it probably looks the best.

I did 2 fields. The 1st one is using the green wire I used for the dung heap. You can see the green wash on this.

This one I used some raffia type stuff from Mrs Vagabonds straw hat, she doesn't know it's gone yet, and I think this one looks best but it is quite fragile.

The vegetation is a variety of things, paper roses from Hobbycraft for cabbages, you'll see these reoccur time and again in my games because I was really chuffed with them. Artificial grass, cut down short, coconut mat, and some aquarium plastic plants, dry brushed.
Originally I was going to plant the greenery into the field but decided to go for a more variable approach by doing them on separate bases, probably not as pretty but more versatile.

Here they are with the houses I made earlier.

The synthetic grass representing the short green shoots were hot glued to pieces of hardboard and the only advise is - don't trim them to size until after you've glued them down and flocked them. I cut them to the height I wanted first and then had nothing to hold on to and so got hot glue on my fingers - nasty.

You will see the obvious mistake - no gate to keep animals in or out!!

 I decided I didn't really like the tiles so replaced them with thatch on the long house.

Which I am much happier with.

This is a granary on stone pilings to keep it off the floor and rodent out.

I'm not so sure I like the brown wood colour I've used. I like it on the daub and wattle builds probably because the colour complements the rest of the build but it looks a bit wrong on this. I didn't want to do the wood grey because it would be too close to the roof colour, what do you think?

This is the 1st time I've used styrene to do stone effect, it's not the best I've seen but I was surprised how easy it was to do. I used the packaging base from a pitza, it's about 3mm thick and stuck on to a central column of wood so you can see the joins at the corners but it's not too bad. Again free and remember free is good.
The stone work wouldn't win any prizes in real life - indeed I doubt it would stand up because it's not laid right but it was to try out the technique, it will be better next time and you have to be a bit picky to see it.

No steps or ladder to get into the store because I didn't want to put the building on a base and I couldn't think how to secure them to get a big glued surface area. My terrain all goes loose in big boxes and bits get knocked off easily and for me it's wargaming terrain not model standard that I'm after. Of course that's my excuse for cutting corners as well.

OK - here are the bee hives I made, quite pleased how realistic they turned out.

Only joking These are in the Viking open air museum in Ribe Denmark and if you can get there - go to the Viking fair I think it was in May when I went 2015 - it is brilliant. If you have the slightest interest in history from that period there is all sorts of stuff going on, lots of smiths working with small portable furnaces, people dying wool with natural dyes, so you know how to paint your figures, woodworkers using treadle lathes. You may have guessed I was bowled over by the place.

These are mine, not quite as realistic.

The hives as you can probably see are acorn cups, upside down and not even painted. They look a bit like loaves of bread but size wise are OK and give the right impression, especially if you tell folk what they are before they have the chance to ask..

 This is my forge/workshop, it needs some stuff inside but I've still not got round to doing it yet.

I would have preferred to do the forge as an open fronted build with a low wattle wall so that there would be maximum light and ventilation when they were working as this is more authentic but decided that for constructional strength to go with this solid section.

The final build is a Grubbenhause, probably not spelt like that. These are dug into the earth and so have lower roofs than a normal build. I saw quite a lot like this in Denmark and Northern Germany but there is quite a lot of dispute about these buildings. Some think they were dug out but the hole was backfilled with insulation - straw or something like that and had floorboards over the top so they would be the same height as a normal house. Some think they were workshops and not lived in.
The ones I saw had earth steps going down into them about 3' deep and so when it rains I could quite easily see that the water would run down the steps and into that natural well you had dug.
There is also an argument whether the thatch reached the ground or not, my layman view is that it would rot if it was in contact with the ground and rodents would have no trouble getting in to your roof.
Whatever the truth is my house is a bit tall for a traditional view of a grubbenhause and a bit short for a formal house so wrong either way.

One thing I did find with all the builds was that because I used PVA to glue sand to the interior floors and then painted it, after a couple of days there is some distortion, they all have a slight bow to the base, obviously more pronounced on the bigger builds - the bases are all 5mm foam board.

This is slightly worse on the fields they are 1/8" (3mm) hardboard and, even though with them I painted glue on the bottom of the base to counteract this and used a weight to straighten it. When built the base was flat but later it bowed.

Anyone any thoughts on how to overcome this?

It's not significant but just a bit annoying, maybe I need to get some MDF but I would be surprised if coated with PVA that didn't distort a little, maybe a different glue? Or don't glue and sand the interiors.

I just thought I would post up a couple of pics to show how the village finally looked.

All of this is scratch built except the carts and the obvious plastic wattle sections around one of  the fields, the wood piles are twigs from the garden. the rocks are rocks and the long grass in clumps is sisal string.

I would be very interested in your thoughts on what I could add either as scatter terrain or small buildings to improve this.

I do plan at some stage to add a stone church with both a thatched and slate roof so it is more versatile but that will be for a Saxon village because I prefer my North Folk to be pagans.

All the buildings have lift off roofs and all have the same sand/mud floor as the longhouse I just don't have any photos.
The sad thing is that I laid out the village for a round up photo and then played a game. Everything went into a box and has been there undisturbed for over a year now, I'm assuming it hasn't come apart in the meantime or everything I've said here would be invalid.

If there's anybody out there please let me know and if you're still here - thanks for reading.