Pukka Pavilions & the Wali's Walls

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!!!!!!

It's been a while since I've posted here, but I have been pretty busy on the hobby front in the interim.  Now that I've got through a blizzard of work, I hope to put up a few more posts in the near future.  Since this past Summer, most of my hobby activity has involved the ongoing "Never Trust Anyone on the Frontier" NWF campaign over on the Lead Adventure Forum (CLICK HERE FOR A HANDY LINK TO THE CAMPAIGN THREAD).  My "MESSAGE FROM DARGAI" post this past November (CLICK HERE TO VISIT THAT POST FROM NOVEMBER) briefly summarized the results of the first major battle my forces -- in this case Anglo-Indian ones -- were involved in, which resulted in a British victory.  However, in the aftermath of the battle, my brilliantly devious opponent (located in El Paso, Texas) chose to mount a disinformation campaign in an effort to turn his defeat into victory, even using PhotoShop to manufacture visual evidence to support his false narrative!

This put me in a difficult situation... should I point out the LIES in public to the many followers of the campaign (well, okay, maybe not SO many, but still!) and in doing so call into question the entire premise of the campaign itself -- to-wit, the idea that all the many participants (well... 6 of us) scattered far and wide around the globe (well... 2 in Italy and 4 here in the USA -- including the evil dude in Texas) share the same consistent and uniform reality, or... should I grit my teeth, let it slide, and find some other path to justice?

Well... as you shall read below (at least if you choose to keep reading), when this fellow posted the FAKE NEWS of his triumph, complete with his counterfeit photographic evidence from the battle... he included information on the next step of his operational plan.  So... rather than tear the fabric of the campaign's reality asunder in public, I decided I would use that vital information he shared against him!  All of which led me to start setting up the battlefield for our next conflagration, which was now fated to occur in the valley of the SHAKHOT PASS in the Swat district of modern-day Pakistan...

The objective of my Anglo-Indian forces in this pending operation would be to recapture HVT prisoners who had escaped captivity during Gul Akbar Khan's otherwise unsuccessful attack on the Dargai Cantonments on August 18th, 1890 (in the campaign's timeline).

In the aftermath of his attack, Gul Akbar instructed the various component parts of his Lashkar (war party) to rendezvous and regroup, "...at the Fortress Tower near Shakhot Pass."  So... I was going to need an ENCAMPMENT suitable for a small army of Pathan Tribal warriors.

I have a good supply of late c.19th military tents of various sorts and sizes, which came in handy for the Dargai Cantonment, but no native tents or shelters -- other than some merchant stalls, which didn't quite fit the bill.

The first thing I did was look online for commercially made Afghan, Arab, and/or Bedouin tents, in hopes of finding someplace or places to order 4 to 6 from.  My search yielded some results, but in my humble opinion they ranged from overpriced to insanely overpriced.

So I pulled out my book on Afghan Nomads that has some photos of tents, including this one...

Then I Googled around, collecting more visual reference...

I even found some LEGO versions that looked pretty good to me...

Finally I found a photo that suddenly made me think: I can make a 28mm scale version of that tent (Yes, I know 28mm is NOT really a scale, but hopefully you get my meaning!)... without too much time and effort... it might look okay... and I might be able to do it with just... a piece of paper.

Here's that "lightbulb" photo:

Shortly after finding the above photo I was off to the Afghan/Arab/Bedouin tent races, starting with a prototype...

The overall dimensions of the above tent were 8" long x 3" wide (but you'll see below that when I got further into the "fabrication" process I realized I wanted to add a 1/4" hanging flap along both long ends, and added an additional 1/2", making the final dimension 3.5" wide).

I mixed things up a little by making one of the five tents in the above pic only 2.5" wide, but its length stayed the same as the rest -- 8" with 1" steeply-angled walls and 3" lesser angled rooftops, gently curving up to the apex.

Then I made a set of flaps for the long side of one tent.  If it turned out well I planned to use it for Gul Akbar Khan's personal tent...

To strengthen the tents and help them withstand the rigors of game-play, I decided to seal them with MATTE MOD PODGE -- the handy water-based glue/sealer/finish which is versatile and easy to use...

I'm a packrat and a dog-owner, so... I have a bunch of little cardboard rollers that used to hold rolls of dog-poop bags.  I figured their gently-curved shape might make them useful as beams to hold my prototype tent up along its 3 folds... 

Then I cut tent-poles from a very small dowel, 2" TALL for the center poles and 3/4" for the short end poles, which I super-glued to the cardboard beams...

I wasn't that happy with the curved doggie poop bag rollers as tent roof beams.  Their curves were too wide and had too prominent an effect on the the tent's silhouette.  This effect which only worsened when -- in an attempt to further insulate the tent against wear-and-tear damage from merciless gamer fingers during game play -- I coated its underside with more Mod Podge, which made it heavier, which made its 2 roof sections droop even worse -- to the point of SAGGING badly -- as seen below...

I learned from my mistakes by making two changes:

(1) DON'T COAT THE UNDERSIDES OF ANY MORE TENTS with Mod Podge; and...

(2) set aside the curved cardboard beams and try using wood beams instead, which I glued to their poles with wood glue...

Mod Podge for the OUTSIDE of the tent BUT NOT THE INSIDE...

After looking at the second tent up on its poles, I decided it would benefit from short hanging flaps along the long ends and cut some out to add.  The hanging length was 1/4".  I cut them approx. every 1/2" so they would follow the gentle CURVE of the roofline, which IMHO was key to it giving the impression of a real Arab/Afghan/Bedouin tent...

I decided to try adding a big more "body" and irregularity to the tents with cut sheets of paper towel, which I glued on using more Mod Podge...

With fabrication complete, I pray-primed the prototype tent in FLAT BLACK...

Then gave it a coat of reddish brown...

The added texture definitely gave the tent a "rougher" look, and would have been great if I was making tents for Haradrim from Lord of the Rings, or Hyrkanians from Conan, it would be perfect, but for more historical residents, I felt it had too much texture for its size and decided to skip this step for the rest of the tents.

I wanted to rehabilitate my original prototype tent, which started out with a handicap when I built it using the more prominent curved cardboard beams and then got much worse when I coated its underside with Mod Podge.  What to do, what to do...???

Add 2 more beam-&-posts supports to hold up its roof, give it better lines and make it less "droopy"...

Then I added a rolled-up wall to the front, made with paper towel and Mod Podge...

Seems even the Brom sisters -- Christine and Lorelai -- are intrigued by this luxury model tent AKA: "Pukka Pavilion"...

And then a pair of fully extended flaps/walls for the rear of the tent...

With all 5 tents looking pretty good and feeling pretty sturdy AKA: able to withstand the rigors of gaming, I had a rethink of the color scheme, which after looking through lots more online images of Arab, Afghan, and Bedouin tents, I got the impression that goat hair tents are often very dark with a hint of purple, so I decided to try a darker shade of brown with -- you guessed it -- just a hint of purple in it.  I bought a bottle of Craft Smart "WINE," mixed a little black with it...

...and was pretty happy with the results:

With even the Raisuli and Mrs. Pedicaris arguing over who would get first dibs on the Pukka Pavilion, I couldn't stop thinking that the "Fancy Pants" tent, AKA the "Redeemed Tent" (since it was rescued from the aesthetic damage it previously suffered), AKA Gul Akbar Khan's command tent... should have a slightly more decorative look, so...

Making the above tents checked off the last box on my "Terrain To Do List" for the upcoming battle!

But before I even started making them, I had built some other -- even simpler -- terrain pieces for the game, which I share with you now...

If you've visited this blog in the past you've probably seen pics of my homemade versions of the lush green fields that fill many valleys in Afghanistan and the North West Frontier, as seen in these photos:

Those last 2 pics above are actually from the Logar Valley, where the 1879 Battle of Charasiab was fought.  I started making lots of crop-fields for Afghan/NWF tabletops back in 2015 when I was prepping my refight game of that battle.  Here's a pic of the nearly-complete layout for that game which I think shows off those fields to good effect...

And here's a closer view...

They looked pretty good, but one thing was missing: the walls that always surround all each the fields.  I actually came up with a simple and inexpensive method of making those walls -- stylized versions that were much lower than they would have been if they were in scale with my 28mm figures, more appropriate to the "tactical battle" level games I like to play, as opposed to skirmish games.  But at the time, during the run-up to the 2015 Colonial Barracks convention, I had so much other terrain to build in so little time that in the end I dropped the entire idea of making walls for all the fields.

Still, I had built a couple of prototypes, which of course I never threw out, and in the years since then I've always wanted to go back and turn my "Field Wall" plan into reality.  Funny enough, while preparing this post I came come across a photo from my first Charasiab play-test game back in 2015, which shows off those two original prototype wall sections.  They're both 12" long  x 1/4" wide and can be seen separating a few fields and forming an off-center "T" in the pic below:

Well, for the location of the upcoming "Battle of Shakhot Valley" game, one corner of said valley is described as "filled with crop-fields," so... it seemed like good time to try and dip my toe back in the "Afghan/NWF crop-field walls" waters.  So I did.  It wasn't on the vast scale that would've been required for the Charasiab game, which made it very feasible.  For this layout I started with just five fields, and added one more, for a grand total of six.

Building them was about as simple as it gets.  They're made from lengths of balsa or bass wood from my local hobby store (which sadly closed forever a couple of months ago).  Most are 1/4" x 3/8" and a few are 1/4" sq.

After cutting down and "roughening up" (with a file) the upper edges of the pieces needed to surround the fields I had laid out, I thought it would be good to turn five pairs of walls into permanent corners.  I fastened each pair with wood glue and a very small wood tack.  I used small corner clamps to ensure they would dry at the right angle.  Without the clamps they probably would have been fine, I would have just used a wood block, or a stack of legos, or a cardboard box with clean corners, and some masking tape to help the corner pieces dried at the right angle.

After the corners were solidly dry I covered the top and sides of each section with ELMER'S WOOD FILLER, to give them a rougher texture, more like the rendered mud-brick the real things are made of.  Elmer's Wood Filler is one of my all-time favorite products for DIY terrain building.  Water-based, which makes for easy clean-up, easy to use, and when applied to wood, styrofoam, and many other materials, dries to a sturdy and resilient finish.

Here's some pics of the very simple build and painting process, starting with a CLOSE-UP of one of the prototypes from 2015 that sat in my hobby storage closet for the past 6 years... 

And that brings me to the last three new terrain pieces I needed for the upcoming "Battle of Shakhot Pass" game -- all of which I tracked down and bought online.  One had to be painted from scratch... one needed a tiny bit of "after-market" touch-up... and one was ready to rock-&-roll straight out of the box -- and a tasty terrain piece it is.

My next blog post should cover all of them, hopefully in the near future..........