Here's what I came up with. Still have to do the painting and flocking. With these bases, and the trees I did at the beginning of the year, I should have enough to do one pretty packed 4x4 table or 2 less densely packed ones when we do our Muskets & Tomahawks weekend at the end of April.
Of course this will be great for forest encounters, but I want some more various settings than that for my battles!
So I've been busy collecting buildings and materials for scratch building. As always, I've got ambitious plans but who knows how much I will actually get around to.
My hope is to do enough terrain to have the following table setups:
1. Some type of fort. I am thinking to stay realistic in 28mm scale I would probably be leaning toward Fort Bull or Fort Necessity if I model it on a real one, or could be a generic stockade fort but small like these two. I would like to do a block house and palisade, and can use the Pegasus cabins as the barracks and store houses of the fort. Might do a stone powder magazine too.
2. A bare bones frontier settlement. I got the Bachmann Plasticville cabin for this, as it looks more "rough" than the Pegasus ones. Many of the Indian raids in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and New York were on small settlements of just 1-3 families living in cabins in clearings in the woods, rather than full-fledged frontier towns. A table like this should be easy to do, because it's mostly just forest but contains a clearing with the cabin(s).
3. A built up area including houses and farms - but more a more established town than option (2) above. This would have larger fields, nicer houses, a church, etc. I'd like to base this on the skirmishing that took place on the outskirts of Quebec during the 1759 campaign. Many of the small villages around the city were raided and burned during the summer prior to the main battle. This painting called "New France" by Lewis Parker gives a great example of the look I'd be going for:
The pattern of settlement in Canada was for the villages to extend in a continuous line along the banks of the St. Lawrence, so it would be nice if I could include the river bank in the setup. Of course this limits the usefulness of the table though, so I might make the river separate and modular...
4. A river! I actually have a couple of 4x4 tables already, one with a 4-5" river carved into it, and the other with a 2-3" stream running down a hillside. So I would like to do a larger river - but I'm not sure if I want to do a modular river that can be placed on any flat table or a really big setup where pretty much the whole table is taken up by the river, it's banks, and islands in the middle (or a bend in a river).
5. A dock scene. Not sure how I want to do this or incorporate it. I definitely want to have some docks and some boats, of which I've already collected quite a few! But again, I'm not sure if I want to dedicate a whole table to this or just do some modular pieces. If it's modular I can add it to the Town or Fort tables. From all the reading I've been doing, it seems like the capture or destruction of enemy boats was a major objective during raids, so I think this would be a great addition for raid scenarios, to change it up from the standard goal of destroying houses.
6. An indian settlement. Why should all the raiding take place in the provincial towns? There were raids on the native settlements too! This could also double up and be useful for King Philip's War scenarios, where it was more common.
I've got some other ideas too, especially for specific locations like the lighthouse at Louisbourg or the saw mills in the woods on the outskirts of Ticonderoga. These probably fall into the realm of "never going to be executed in real life" though!
