I have been slowing my surely working on Star Wars Legion miniatures and the requisite terrain for the game. I noticed that Gale Force None has restocked their old Battlefield in a Box Badlands terrain sets. I decided that these would make a nice terrain board for SW Legion and would not be a bad look for the occasional pulp game. With that in mind, I ordered all the sets from my FLGS. This included two sets each of the pillars and tors and one set each of the plateaus. After a couple of weeks, the sets came in and I took them home an unpacked them.
The sets come packed in the usual cardboard box. GF9 has gone away from the old styrofoam packaging and moved to bubble wrapping the individual parts. As with all the sets, everything is repainted and ready to play (in theory).
While unpacking the sets, I found that a number of my pillar and tor models arrived with broken bases. I am not sure if this is do to how they were packed or hard shipping. Well, that was disappointing, so I wrote to GF9 showing the broken parts and much to my surprise, they sent me full new sets (I was just expecting the broken replacements). These showed up in about a week, so I was golden (you cannot complain about GF9 customer service!).
I find GF9 terrain normally priced quite reasonably, even when compared to unpainted terrain from other companies. As such, I have no problem picking it up when they release a set that I like. With that said, I have always felt that their terrain needed a little pimping up to make it look a little better on the tabletop (it is normally just black with a heavy wet brush of colors). Well, I did not think that on this set. Each piece came in base back, but had what best could be described as a dry brush of brown. Well, I guess that works if you are doing a volcano planet, but not a badlands or desert location.
It was clear that these sets were going to take more than a little pimping…. First, I did what I could to fix the broken pieces (no reason to through them away!), with some blueing and carving. Now it was time to transform the color. So, I drove to Michaels and bought some cheap craft paints to do a repaint. Since I was going to do a heavy repaint, I decided to go more tan to make these more flexible on desert terrain boards.
I basically went with three shades of tan. The first layer was a wet brush application to mostly cover the rocks. I then dry brushed this up with some light tan and finished with some ivory. I was happy with the rocks, but the sand bases looked terrible (all that back was showing through on the base). So, off to my cabinet and I found some Woodland Scenics tan terrain wash. I applied this on all the bases. Once this dried, I hit the areas again with an ivory dry brush. This looked much better and will blend better on my terrain boards!
So, a little more work than I was expecting, but considering the price of these sets, it is still competitive. So, if you like these sets, don’t hesitate to buy them, you can easily paint them up to give the look you like!
- Manteuffel