Been some time since I've posted anything here and whilst I have done some more painting in these times of enforced inactivity I've not got around to trying to photograph them yet.
However I have been spending time reading through my collection of old issues of White Dwarf. I don't have an enormous collection, the first issue I ever bought was issue 140 (August 1991), although I do have a few earlier issue I've acquired subsequently.
Reading these has brought back some nostalgia for the old White Dwarf battle reports with their little graphic maps of what was happening turn by turn. Which reminded me about a project I worked on a little while ago which involved trying to recreate the graphics used in those battle reports using my aging copy of Adobe Illustrator.
I recreated many of the individual unit icons and some of the terrain pieces. The ultimate result (as a sad, boring individual with nothing better to do with his time even before being locked down) was recreating the maps for the very first battle report I ever read, which was in my second issue of White Dwarf, 141 (September 1991).
This was clash between Alaitoc Eldar and Blood Angels commanded by Jervis Johnson and Andy Chambers (and was my introduction to the long tradition of Andy beating Jervis in print...). It had no specific backstory or scenario unlike many later reports.
The original graphics used were a bit basic with different coloured silhouettes of an Eldar or Space Marine being used to represent different units, vehicles being black rectangles with a tiny white silhouette in the middle, and the various characters didn't appear on the map at all!
Thinking back on it the silhouettes used were actually the ones off the epic army cards!
So I set about recreating the individual maps using unit icons (including top down views of vehicles) based on those used in later battle reports. I had some issues, not having a branching tree icon available in Illustrator I had to improvise with offset concentric green rings for undergrowth. Below are my recreations of the deployment map and the first turn.
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| My recreation of the deployment map |
Whilst most of the graphics were based on those used later the Landspeeder and Thudd Gun are my creations based on the Rogue Trader models actually used.
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| Eldar Turn 1 |
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| Blood Angel Turn 1 |
Till next time...
Cap'n Smyrk
Ohhhhh! I miss these maps so much! What a wonderful work you did here! Oh, please, do some battle reports using this!
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately I don't really have the space for gaming these days, nor the models to do a battle the size of this. Although I do have the rest of the maps I made for this battle report if you want to see them.
ReplyDelete