(Slightly) Cheaper Zone Mortalis, Part one.

Apologies for my absence. Mortal concerns and all that.

Mortalis is my luxury. Considering how much I scrimp and cost-cut through Ebay and budgeting and scratch building, it’s a welcome relief to just go ‘Yep’ That’ll do for something pretty and easy.

A single tile is £27, a set of four is £90. I could have bought another 5 or so tanks, or a Super heavy for the price of my 2 x 3 section that I'm starting with. There will be cost-saving, and this should give you an idea of where savings will be made. OPEN SPACE!

Before that though, I need some tiles, I don’t need to cover an entire floor with it yet so instead of asking family for vouchers for Games Workshop, I ask them for a Mortalis tile instead.

I think Mortalis sells the atmosphere of 40k much better than most home-made terrain can.

As much as I love my terrain and my board. I’d much rather enjoy the gritty close-confines of a ship-assault, you can do it with smaller forces, you can actually use an army of under 1000 points and not feel like you should have a huge force of D-weapon toting Super heavies.

Mostly though, is because it’s so focussed on infantry. Considering the amount of time I lavish on each of my men you can see why I would prefer to play something that focusses on them, rather than the tank that barely has any conversion work applied to it. With this you can see them creeping down corridors, or dying in droves on the floor.

How to explain the deep snow on a space ship though? No idea. One day I’ll dissolve all the snow on their bases and change them to Mortalis I'm sure.

As I’m only starting with a small section of 6 tiles total, I needed something to unify them, and to simply increase the space temporarily. Enter this. Fibreboard? Pressed Laminate? Dense cardboard? No idea.

It is cheap, and so 6 sections later. I had the start of what would be a landing bay/industrial area/walkways/open space.  Using odds and ends around the house, some leftover bits of laser-cut MDF and lots of polystyrene Pizza Express pizza bases couple with Straws. I had these. I sprayed with 4 coats of a polystyrene primer (which didn't work) and then sprayed Chaos Black. Hopefully I used enough glue so that I can actually paint the thing without everything lifting clear.

Onto cleaning the Mortalis tiles. Removing the release liquid that Forgeworld use is a pain. Although the tiles arrive looking lovely and black as if under coated they really do need a clean.

Items: A Really Useful storage box. A bottle of Lemon Fairy washing up liquid. An old Ikea Scrubbing brush. Immerse, scrub. Drain. Work magic. Success!

The good thing here is that the Really useful box is water tight, and so can lob a load of bucketful’s of water in. I did try just scrubbing the tile but the test section came up still bedded with the resin and not holding paint.

After a dry, they looked good. Sprayed with Chaos black. Then onto first stages of painting. Dry-brushing. Initially, wanting to protect my investment I used an inch wide dry-brush and tried to paint a single section. An hour later and I was only moderately happy with the result.

Note the areas around the square panelling are inconsistent.

So onto a bigger brush, an old house brush which I chopped down by about an inch.

Far better, across the tiles it gave a really nice uniform, almost airbrushed effect, and could still be touched up by the smaller brush later on. Now it’s time to simply pick the remaining colour scheme for the rest of the terrain.

This came out basically like this, loads more painting to do but drybrush completed and first stages fine to start with.