SHOWCASE! A Doom With a View: My Crone World Board
Ever since I got into Craftworld Iybraesil, I have wanted to build a Crone World board. There has been less than half a page of fluff officially published about Iybraesil, but among what little we do know is that they are a matriarchal society obsessed with retrieving lost artifacts from the ruins of the old Aeldari empire. In order to accomplish this, they send frequent expeditions to the Crone Worlds, demon haunted planets in the Eye of Terror that were once the nexus of eldar civilization. Here, amidst ruins where nightmares become reality, the Iybraesili face horrors from the warp and other rivals in order to obtain secrets they hope will lead to their salvation. I am so proud that this nightmare is finally a reality.
I started this project over a year ago, and although I have also been working models for my armies during that time, I suspect that this table represents close to 200 hours of work, despite the fact that the buildings are 3D printed and the trees are easily recognizable GW products. The board itself and the hills are all scratch built from pink foam and embellished with a box of skulls and old Warhammer fantasy skeleton models that I had kicking around the ‘extra models’ drawer. Those weird barnacles you see in some of the pictures below are just made of Crayola air clay; those, and some of the other random vegetation were contributed by my wife. Later in the post, I will provide a little more information about the component parts, but also don’t hesitate to get in touch via the “contact” tab at the top of the page if you have specific questions.
When I make a board, I like for it to tell a story. While making my Crone World, I became infatuated with the idea that the eldar who once occupied this particular city had premonitions of what was coming in dreams and visions, which seems credible as we know that all aeldari are psykers to some degree, and that the building of the Craftworlds and the departure of the exodites were both motivated by similar premonitions. The eldar of my ruined world, however, misunderstood their dreams and visions and imagined that they were on the edge not of a cataclysm, but of the beginning of some new epoch. Some began turning from the old gods and seeking visionary experiences of this new age by worshipping that which they should not, while others subconsciously inserted images of what was to come into their art. To represent this, I painted a statue imbued with the energy of Slaanesh, (as reflect by the pink ooze bursting from it,) and a number of bronze statues slaaneshy daemons and corrupted aeldari heroes. Only two of the statues are pictured here, as I am still tinkering with the others, but I may add them to this post at some point.
I am especially pleased that the 9th edition rules not only call for more terrain than 8th edition, but are customizable. My one concern about this board from a tactical perspective when I started building it, was that the buildings would not block line of sight sufficiently, but thanks to the “obscuring” key word, that’s no longer a problem. I plan to use the forests as area terrain, so the trees are not fixed to their bases in order to make it easier to move models in and out of the coverts. The hills are all individual stackable pieces, which makes for lots of possible configurations, but it has turned out to be necessary to stack them and assign whatever additional terrain pieces to them before players take turns placing terrain for matched play according to 9th edition rules.
When I teased some initial images of the hills in the harlequins post, I got some inquiries from readers who wanted to know how they are made. Although I am not going to try and add a DYI section here, I can tell you the process is very easy. The board itself and the hills are crafted from squares of pink insulation foam. I put a layer of modge-podge on top to protect the foam from being eaten by the spray paint, let it dry, added sand, then painted the surface. The jagged rock effect on the hillsides was created by pushing a knife into the foam at a 45 degree angle and then turning it sideways to pop out a triangular chunk. It’s easy to get the hang of and very inexpensive.
As for the buildings, you can purchase some of the 3D prints and/or STL files from Warlock Models, and the rest from GrymForge.com. Both are small businesses run by people who are helpful, easy to deal with, and enthusiastic about the hobby.
If you are interested in creating your own crone world board, I recommend reading Gav Thorpe’s “Path of the Outcast” for inspiration. It features a terrifying visit to one of the best imagined demon worlds the Black Library has to offer.
So there it is. My Crone World is finally finished and my Iybraesili are ready to mount some expeditions into the demon haunted darkness of their own corrupted past. Once I have some images of a game against a well-painted Slaanesh army, I will add them to this post but it might be a while. Until then, feel free to get in touch via the contact tab if you have a question, a comment, or a photo you want to share.
