Last year I got really hooked on The Barons’ War and Saga – particularly the Outremer and Age of Crusades supplements. I painted two massive warbands, one the Order of St Lazarus and another based around the life of Usama Ibn Minqidh. Both have hit the table in 2025 already, but on a disappointingly standard-for-me set of test games on my kitchen table. While the games are great fun – both Footsore and Studio Tomahawk variants – the setting leaves something to be desired. It gets a bit boring playing against yourself to test games and fighting over copies of relevant pop histories. If I’m going to deliver on my plan of “play more actual games with people in the most convenient setting for me, my house” then I need terrain. Welcome then to A Village in the East, my terrain building project – and only thing on my hobby to do list for 2025.
The plan is to make a single village/town set somewhere on the borders of the Crusader and Islamic states, a village that will work for a number of periods from the 11th century to the 14th and beyond. I want it to be a “real” feeling place, where changing circumstances and the march of time are reflected in the terrain being used. It would be nice to make it more than just a Crusades board – with appropriate and explicable changes making it usable for Napoleonics, weird Napoleonics in Silver Bayonet, WW1 and even (shifted a couple of hundred miles west) WW2. If at all possible it would also double as a Trench Crusade board, if I can somehow strike a balance between historical and ultra grimdark. The idea is to make it a single setting that works for all my major 28mm projects, and one where the battles fought in the Crusades could affect the town layout and plan right up until the modern day.
Constraints
I have a couple of constraints that form the boundaries I have to work with. First off, I don’t have a massive table, just my rather narrow dinner table. I also dont have a huge amount of storage space, so this all ideally needs to fit in a single box. To top that off, I want the terrain to be nice and dense, with a “real” feel to this place we’re building.
If this is a single place with a single (albeit weird, what with the Silver Bayonet and Trench Crusade elements), there needs to be a single layout that shows this is a place, not just a bunch of themed terrain. That’s a lot to think about, and I’m not at all sure that they’re all compatible.
Finding a Place
The Levant has been long fought over (and continues to be, sadly), and it’s possible to situate just about any wargaming you wanted into the area from the earliest periods to ultra-moderns. We could simply overlay maps of campaigns and wars in the area and find the one that overlaps the most – but that is essentially Gaza, and as much as I’d like to make this board explicitly a political statement about the bravery and courage of Palestinian resistance over time, I can’t address the particular horror unfolding there in 28mm. Given the modern conflict engulfing Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese communities, it’s very difficult to countenance making something so insignificant as a tabletop miniature board. Instead, I’ll take the board elsewhere, but commit to matching every spend I make on this project with a donation to Medicine San Frontiers for their lifesaving medical work in Gaza and the West Bank.
As a result then, we’re heading further east to Egypt, specifically the Matrouh Governorate, Egypt’s westernmost province. Part of the Abbasid, Fatmid and Ayyubid Caliphates before being taken over by the Mamluks, it charts the history of Islamic governments from the initial Conquests all the way through the Colonialism and Independence. The area is particularly well known for the site of the Battle(s) of El Alamein, was part of the Ancient Egyptian Empire, includes Hellenic and Roman sites, was invaded by Napoleon (and the British) and would have been on the very edge of the periodic Crusader presence in Egypt. If we site our village near to the coast, one of the great mysteries of the First Crusade – the early fleets that just kind of turned up off Egypt – allows us to bring in 11th century battles too. It’s never been a particularly rich area, but is close enough to Alexandria to open up the possibility of land and sea based trading routes with North West Africa, Libya and the Mediterranean.
With the sole exception of WW1 – but we could stretch the truth a little there, couldn’t we? – every conflict I want to be playing this year at 28mm could be sited somewhere in the Matrouh area. In the modern day, if we look at the map above, it’s a very arid area, but it hasn’t always been so. Increasing urbanisation and population growth, alongside the loss of what little tree cover there was, has turned a fairly variable area into more of a desert. If we look back at climate records into the tenth century, we can see a very variable expansion and contraction of desert, alternating wet and dry periods and a general arid-but-not-desert condition. Siting our village to the east of the Matrouh Governorate makes it wetter and greener, so we’ll be somewhere in the slightly more arable lands of the east, along the coastal trans-Saharan trade routes.
Materials
Christmas furnished me with the quite literal base of the whole project – a very nice scrubland mat from Deep Cut Studios. It’s brown and green, which fits in with the “Egypt isn’t all desert” level of quasi-accuracy I’m going for here.
I’ve also picked up the classic Warhammer Hills, mainly because teen me really wanted them back in the day. They’ll do for elevation, for now.
To round off the very meagre collection of what I’ve got so far, I have two basic tree armatures from a set of plastic Dinosaurs my son got me for christmas (the best of my presents by far), the Mantic Dungeon Debris terrain crate and some slightly beaten up vaguely middle eastern MDF houses.
As it is, it’s not a particularly inspiring sight, but we can at least get started!
Layout
As there’s so little to go on the board as yet, I’m going to round this off entirely talking about geology. Egypt is very interesting geologically, but the basic assumption is going to be “some black sand” and “the same Cenozoic sedimentary rocks as everywhere else on earth”. The Village won’t be anywhere geologically fascinating, but it will be subject to the same shearing pressures from small faults in the Levant basin as everywhere in Egypt – earthquakes will be fairly rare. All of that basically means my hills are going to be painted brown, with some green and yellow flock and form the flanks of the village nestled between two large rocky outcrops.
We should finish with a Name. In the grand tradition of fictional places with real inspirations, I’m going to name the village Erehwon – but since this is Egypt, let’s make it a little more suitable. The arabic for “Anywhere” is, according to Google translate, fi ‘ayi makan – so Nakam Iya’if it is. That’s not far off naqam ‘iia – What do we do? – which is a good question for next time.
Tracking:
Terrain pieces finished: 0
Terrain bought: Hills
Donation to MSF: £26.00
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