Not that old chestnut (or Jadeberry)

Eric

Administrator
Okay so apologies in advance if nothing ever comes of this, but as ever post event I'm twitching to build things. A combination of seeing lovely old games being played at Bootleg and the large dioramas and gaming tables at Warhammer World have me feeling like at least doing some more thinking on a board I've been wondering about for a while.

So I've often wanted to make a good board for the Jadeberry Hill scenario - more correctly called Skirmish on Rynn's World from White Dwarf 94. I've seen some good boards, but as ever I both want to have a go and think I could do something well better feels a bit pompous, but you know what I mean I hope!

Scalene was running that scenario along with another (of his own I believe) at Bootleg and it reminded me that I'd mentioned a desire to do the board to a few people at BOYL 2025. Now Seeing Scalene's board and chatting to Drew at Bootleg reminded me of this old thread in which Drew did some lovely sketches for possible tile layouts for the scenario: https://forum.oldhammer.org/threads/jadeberry-hill.15667/

I'm thinking to take that a little and tweak things and I think if I were to make six or seven tiles I could have them work for both Jadeberry Hill and Battle at the Farm. That would be a nice little set of classic Rogue Trader tiles and maybe I could find kind people who might like to store them on and off and they could happily "tour" the oldhammer circuit so to speak... I know both games have been done to death (well Battle at has at least), but they are still good fun. I'll avoid putting in too many spoilers for those that have not played the games.

So this thread is going to be my place for dumping thoughts and stealing gathering ideas from you all. In particular from those who have run the games such as @Scalene, but I'd appreciate anyone's thoughts and musings. It may materialise into a finished product, or it may fizzle out like so many of my post event fancies or moments when I think "yeah sure I can knock out a quick such and such army"... we'll see, so please don't expect wonders!

So let's start with some pre-existing maps. Skirmish on Rynn's World provides the following map:

jadeberry.jpg

And Battle at the Farm has:

battle-at-the-farm.png

In both cases the actual layout and deployments I've seen vary fairly wildly and the games are known to be somewhat unbalanced out of the box book. Some of which can be addressed with terrain or tweaking forces.

Anyhow next we'll do my proposed boards in the next post, when I've done some nicer drawings! However broadly speaking I am thinking (and to get you thinking):

boards.png

So we stretch out Jadeberry Hill over three boards, two of which can also form Bultha's Rise. The orchard for Battle at the Farm can have the trees swapped out to create a more open burnt out stumps board as desired. The Farm Ruin is the one I wonder a bit more about - buildings that can be removed to a degree so like the Orchard it's multirole or just do another board that is more craters and suitable for a larger Jadeberry game, rather than dump a large structure in the corner!

Individual boards would be 2' square (or more strictly 600mm since that's what XPS comes as).
 
I think it was thinking I might be able to do both "scenarios" out of it that started to appeal. Since @Scalene did the two scenarios (granted with a cloth board) at Bootleg BOYL it just nudged my thoughts that way. Then thinking they might get use at various games (someone always wants to play these!) if I could ship them off somehow! Finally I have a load of not so nice model trees that need a home and they would I think be well suited to an orchard or two.

So at present I'm thinking 3mm MDF 600x600mm tiles with 20mm XPS on top as the foundation. Possibly edge the boards in 3mm MDF to make them a bit more hardwearing and provide some solid mounting for some magnets to lightly couple everything. Might have to seek out some MDF cutting skills here for the edging if I come up with some hill profiles... Have things like the wind generator and other bits magnetised so we keep the height of the boards down for storage and you can play with/without them in place. Add in some scatter pieces to keep things a bit different each time and it'd be a nice set.

I must admit I'm curious about the second game you were playing with @Scalene - the farmhouse / orchard one. How did that tie into the Rynn's world setup? Was it just a farm variation or a distinct scenario in itself?
 
I'm hoping that by having the orchard extend onto the hill ie the two orchards somewhat mix that will provide quite a lot of cover for the Orks on that side of the board to let them get closer. I was also thinking of doing a small quarry in the hill in front of the wind turbine and blocks from that would also provide some additional cover. Generally in Battle at the Farm the Orks do seem to get cut down. Zhu did a blog post about rebalancing the sides which is worth a read.
 
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