Belsbeth's Desert

Belsbeth is the name of the planet wherein my fall Planetary Empires campaign will be taking place. I haven't come up with a whole lot about the planet as of yet, but the name hails back to the first nation my good friend Josh and I built in our seventh grade D&D game. We were really proud of it then, and it has always kind of hung around.

The campaign kicks off in just three short weeks. A business trip and jam packed weekends before then mean time is running out. I stepped up the number of tiles I was doing per night from two to seven. The impetus for this being that if I just gave five nights over the next three weeks I would be able to get everything done except the structures. I have more time for the structures as every player in the campaign is responsible for their initial four structures, and other structures will be added over the course of the campaign rounds.

I wanted a large portion of Belsbeth to be a desert, or at least arid, as that tends to be the way I see a lot of 40k bases done. Also, the nation's initial setting was Dark Sun, a desert world. There will be fourteen of forty-eight tiles on Belsbeth that will be done in this desert scheme and here are the two sides of the first seven.

From Stuff I Have Painted

From Stuff I Have Painted

For the sake of unity along the map I used the same colors for the majority of these tiles I have for my others. The basecoat is VGC Beast Brown, washed generously with CW Devlan Mud, dry-brushed up with VGC Desert Yellow and then again with VGC Bone White. The few patches of green I have are also done to match the other tiles, using CFC Knarloc Green, CW Thraka Green, then a dry-brush of VGC Goblin Green and another of VGC Dead Fleah. I co-opted the wife's hair dryer for a lot of this as the washes and thin paint I was using were not drying in a timely fashion.

I attempted to make the tiles look more "deserty" with easily identifiable elements. All of the water for these tiles is green to illustrate it being very shallow or chemicaly poisonous, as is the case in my campaign. I did all the mountains in red-orange browns to make them look more like the rocks I have seen in New Mexico and Utah, using VGC Dark Fleshtone, then dry-brushing VGC Terracotta, then VGC Bronze Fleshtone. For the next set of seven tiles I am working on tonight I will go a little slower on this step as there are few tiles that that were not quite dry yet when I started dry-brushing. The mountains got a little splotchy. Lastly, for the ruins, I used lighter colors, VGC Plague Brown basecoat, CW Gryphonne Sepia, then dry-brushed with VGC Bone White followed by VGC Off White. I wanted them to look like they were made of sandstone, or just that they had been sun faded and weathered. The city ruins here needed to look older than the city ruins on the rest of the map, since this desert is Belsbeth's cradle of civilization.

In all I am happy with the way they turned out and will be eager to get the other seven done tonight. After that I will just have to do the eight or so "scorched tiles" including Hive City Bloodholm, and fourteen more of my usual tiles, then the surface of Belsbeth is done, at least for this campaign.

Lastly, I said I would post my house rules for the Planetary Empire campaign today. I don't want to be lair so enjoy.

Thanks for reading,
T