Wanderer999's Customs

[Wanderer999]

First things first, I would like to put it out there that I am a newbie in Heroscape with less than half a year under my belt as compared to the veterans of this community who have clocked an average of 4 to 5 years.

I played the game after my wife bought the SotM master set for me on my birthday, and I never looked back since. The unfortunate thing was that like other newbies in HS, we do not enjoy the luck of our seniors, and I only managed to get 4 more sets of Fortresses and a few boosters before the game got discontinued and everything literally became jacked up to at least 10 times their original prices. I was an extremely hardcore fan and eventually found myself spending over four thousand dollars just to get almost everything in the collection. (I had to pay even more since I don't live within the US, and I had to ship all my purchases internationally into Singapore)

I now proudly own just about multiple sets of everything, with the exception of Aquilla and Thalenk and the flagbearers (Oh, and the elusive templar cavalry)

I have scoured this community for cheap customs and I was deeply impressed by Grishnakh, Gidian and Ormus to name afew. I realized that Heroscape is a way of life, not a mere game that ends when its company announces so. This game uses a genius concept that allows for maximum customization and fan participation. In the coding world, we call this Open Source system, and this type of system is usually the most successful. (Think Apple and its iphone apps, think Warcraft and the famous dota that grew from its editor)

AS LONG AS WE ARE HERE, HEROSCAPE IS FOREVER!

I will now contribute my share to the spirit of Heroscape, and to the community here, however small this contribution is. And may we all continue to do so for the next 10 years~


This is my space specially dedicated for customizing.

When I was in the States during Dec, I visited the legendary Michaels (which was paradise for all customizers but it simply didn't exist outside of USA) and I bought some palm trees as well as a roll of bendable wires. When I came back to Singapore, I bought some clay made in Japan. I dunno what the equivalent of this clay is in the States, but the only words that were not Jap are 'paper clay'. It comes out in a wet state from its vacuum pack, and it hardens after half a day when all the moisture leaves the clay.


Trees and Basic Rocks

What I did with the wires was I used the wire twisting method to thicken itself by twisting several lengths together, then bending it into a tree shape with branches. This served as the skeleton of the tree, which I would then wrap clay around it to create the actual tree while using the skeleton as a foundation. If it was too thin at certain areas, I would stack more clay onto that portion. Finally, I took some fake plants bought from an aquarium and used them for leaves of the tree.

Edited: Found my picture of the unpainted trees


The last step is to simply paint the tree. Important note: I'm not sure what clay is available in the States and how different it is (I have heard of Sculpting Clay) but the one I used (paper clay) absorbed liquid like a camel and I used ALOT of paint for mine. This is the finished product:

The trunks were deliberately FAT so that they could be used for cover by melee units against those eternally irritating ranged dudes.

Here are some pictures of the completed trees in actual gameplay usage, alongside the palm trees I bought from Michael's.



Yup, that's an iPad in the last picture. Been whipping it out with my gang everytime ever since good ol' Deadmaxx introduced the dice application to us. Thanks bro for the great recommendation, already +rep u in your post.

Using the same method of the trees, I produced a rock with plants growing out of it.

This one was of a simpler shape and didn't require any wire skeleton inside.


This is a beautiful aquarium plant I managed to snatch off the shelf that I have been using in like 4 of 5 games.

Ice Crystals

For a poor man like me, the Thalenk is STILL out of reach for now. And I have used the crystal decorations from Michaels and transformed them into a custom feature in my maps. Simply get some thick cardstock and cut hexes out of them, then stick the clear crystals onto them, and stack up according to personal preference. What do they do? They allow your units that require snow/ice to make full use of their powers to finally be worth their points.

For every adjacent space to the ice crystals, the spaces are considered to be snow/ice for special power purposes, but are still treated normally when units walk over them (no slipping and falling etc).

Mr. Ice Troll here ecstatic that he can finally use his Snow Strength and Cold Regeneration even though his master owns less than 10 snow hexes!

The Ugly Markers

My greatest creation, and my ugliest ones at that.

My gang is so big we often play 3v3 battles, and there are too many times when we hesitate in between turns to recall who was next in the initiative roll. These order markers were painted over to show values of 1 to 6 on both sides, and even on their bases. As soon as we completed the initiative rolls, we immediately issued out these markers accordingly, and our games became 'smoothly ever after' After 1 went his turn, 2 immediately picked off from there, and 3 would soon follow after. No more need to waste memory space on turn sequence, so that also means more memory space for thinking new strats to dice your foes up!



That's all I have for now, I will soon post up a simple bridge that anyone can do, as well as a few other simple stuff that any Tom Dick or Harry can do to upgrade their Scape experience. Sometimes the things that other custom veterans do are simply the stuff of legend, and certainly things that are way out of reach of common scapers like me. We can only admire and ogle our eyes out, but not use them in our games *jealousy is a virtue...* (becoz i said so)

My gang also plays VERY regularly with 1 - 2 times on a weekly basis without fail. We have come up with many custom units as well, all of which were playtested to death and we all agreed were very balanced (at least to our humble opinions) and I will also share these units in time to come, but that is another story, for another time to be posted.

The unit below is called the Kat. But he failed to make it into our 'unofficial official units' at the final playtest rounds due to him seeming to have a mind of his own, and often trying to move around the map even when its not his turn, and more irritatingly, he likes to sit on the other figures with his fat butt, killing them via suffocation without rolling a single skull...


P.S: Heroscape never dies, because WE are heroscape, and we are still here.

P.S.S: In case some of u were wondering, the maps shown in the picture were built using my own 1:2 Elevation rule which states that every 2 height differences is considered as only 1 during gameplay. (which explains why they are all so tall and 3D) So a unit with height 5 is actually considered still adjacent to a hilltop space even though the hill has 8 tiles stacked in height.

[Yodaking]

The trees turned out great!

[winonavampire]

I like your turn order idea. We too had to come up with a solution for keeping track of turn order because we never play 1v1. It is always 2v2 or more.

What I did was print each players name out on a 3x5 index card and pinned them to a cork board bulletin board in order. That way, you always know whos turn it is and when the game/initiative order changes, you just re-arrange the cards. Similar to your idea, just a slightly different application.

We also have paper clay here as well. I am not too found of it though. Basically it is just paper mulch. For the trees you made, I am sure it worked very well, but the problem comes from fine detail. The paper fibers become very noticeable when you try to do fine detail work.

[Kaemon Awa 123]

Wow, great job on those trees and your collection!, +rep

Unfortunately, whenever I see someone from a foreign country that speaks english so well, I feel as if I should be studying french harder *sigh*

[DeathByUtgar]

nice stuff, keep up the good work