Roots of the Earth

Roots of the Earth is a great spell. I intend using eBaldur soon and I want an easy way to mark what his signature spell effects. To that end I started making some tokens. I have never bought tokens for my Hordes faction and I don't intend to. The Gale Force Nine Warmachine tokens set a realy high bar when it came to quality and until I can get Hordes tokens of the same quality I won't be buying any. So that leaves me with the need to make some tokens. I use glass beads for the most part but that isn't brilliant either. So when I saw that I would need a fair few Roots of the Earth tokens I sat down and made them myself.

These are really simple to make. I use a little piece of cork as a rock. This also supports the roots and provides some contrast for them as otherwise they would blend into the similarly coloured earth underneath. I greeenstuffed the roots. To do this really easily just roll out a piece of greenstuff. Then with a knife start spliting the end. keep splitting the ends with the knife until you are happy and then your roots are done. I attached them to the base and allowed them to cure. Wwhen splitting the green stuff it will adhere to the blade unless you wet it somehow. I usually use a little bit of cooking oil but water will also do the trick. The finer you do the roots the more important this becomes.


I then just flocked the bases and thats that. Some paint and basing materials and they match the army. I vanished them a little over zealously and they are a little shinier than I would have liked! However I guess they will have to stand up to a lot of punishment so thats fine.

However I couldn't just stop there and while I have shown this before I think it is worthwhile showing here again! Epic Baldur can also summon a rockwall unto the battlefield. This is also a really important ability and as such it needs some attention too. I couldn't just use a card or paper template so instead I made one using some cork.

I cut a coaster up and glued the pieces together. I made the two outside pieces a little lower so the magical wall looked a little more natural. The next step is to rip the cork up in such a way to make it look like stone and having the two outside pieces a little lower allowed me to make the piece a little less monolithic. I also added a smaller broken piece at the end to aid the effect. I should probably have done this at both ends as I think it would have looked better.

The final step it break the flat sides up and disguising as best as possible the joins in the cork. I guess using a thicker piece would have been better as I then wouldn't have had to disguise the line quite as much. I only had the thin piece to hand however. Breaking the cork is simple and I use a sculpting tool. Digging that in not too deep allows me to pull the flat surface away in little chunks giving a very rough texture. I did this all over the model. I then glued it to the proper sized base for some stability and flocked the piece. That's it complete. Baldur can now benefit from having a full set of tokens and templates. I just wish I could fiure out how to make appropriate Fury tokens!