Last 48hrs - and SciFi PEDION Modular Terrain available!

It is quite a thing to see your Campaign's counter reaching the "hour" format. You know that a journey is almost over, and you start planing what really matters: the implementation of your dream.
"Almost" being the keyword here; a bit less than 2 whole days can be a long enough time for good, innovative things to happen!

The clock is ticking. Pedion will be around, but this is your chance to get terrain in great prices and help us design even better stuff: support Pedion on Kickstarter, get the last terrain you will ever need!

Why now? Because Pedion has gotten better than ever: SciFi themed ground variations have been unlocked, Urban tiles and free stuff are just a breath away, and a new, "get'em all" pledge reward level is available!

How about some Science Fiction Battlefields?

By surpassing the £25000 Stretch Goal, backers may order their Set and Add-on tiles in two new variations, suitable to a more futuristic/apocalyptic setting: the "Red Planet" and the "Grey Wastes". The new paint/texture variations can be applied to all existing tile types, and they Unlock two new tiles: the Impact Crater and the Artillery Craters types.
The impact Crater tile includes one big crater, with the smooth style of craters cause by large asteroid impacts. The artillery craters are smaller, with the jagged edges of exploding ground. The Craters are an add-on, or you can Upgrade your Plain/Broken Ground tiles into them!
You can even "fill" them with some liquid, like water or lava... !

The Grey Wastes, Artillery craters tile

The Red Planet, Impact crater tile

Finally, another "upgrade" option unlocked for SciFi battlegrounds is the exchange of "normal" water on River and Pond Tiles, to Lava or Green toxic flows!

The New EPIC, Kickstarter only, Pledge!

Since we have unlocked a lot of new features (and probably will unlock more), we introduced a brand new pledge level, a great "get-them-all" reward for the 15 first among you! So, as a Kickstarter only Set, you may now get a huge 8'x4' Battlefield Set at £500, and it includes 32 Pedion tiles:

• 5 Plain Grass tiles, 
• 4 Broken Ground tiles, 
• 2 Forest tiles + 12 magnetic trees, 
• 1 Badlands tile + 4 magnetic Rock Formations, 
• 4 Road tiles (2 straight, 2 turns), 
• 8 Painted River tiles (1 turn, 1 Widening turn, 6 straight),
• 1 River Ford tile, 
• 3+2 Hill tiles, 
• 2 Crops/Orchard Tiles + 8 magnetic Fruit trees, 
• 1 Pond tile, 
• 1 Swamp upgrade + 1 magnetic Willow, 1 River marshland upgrade, 
• 1 Artillery craters tile, 
• 2x sets of Crop tile Fences. 

To this you may add 3 extra free trees and 1 free rock formation, as well any other SG freebies. So. do you have the space? For this is the wargaming board that includes EVERYTHING up to the £28K Stretch Goals! Full of features, either for 8'x4' epic battles or for multiple smaller configurations. Do not expect a photo of this monster, I do not have such a big table :)

Those SciFi/Urban tiles

The next Stretch Goal is tantalizingly close! At £30000 backer will be able to add a number of tile types more suited to an Urban environment: either SciFi, Modern or Gothic, perfect for wargaming in in such an enviroment.

The Urban tiles are mostly re-designs of the main Road tiles, with added texture and road options. Specifically:

1. To the existing 7cm Road width there will be another width added, 14cm; Such a wide road can easily be considered a double-lane road at 28-32mm or a highway in 15mm. 
2. To the existing Road surfaces (cobbled, dirt, asphalt) two new, futuristic surfaces will be added: Aluminum Hoverway (a bright, aluminum textured surface, that can denote hovercraft or spacecraft lanes and landing strips) and Plastisteel (Square or Hex grid in light grey or blue coloring)
3. Roadsides are expanded; apart from dirt (magnetic), now three more types will be available: raised 1" sidewalks (magnetic), sloped 1/2" black/yellow caution hatch (magnetic) and the impressive 1/3" LED illuminated roadsides (non-magnetic) - read more below*.
4. Tile textures are expanded with an urban range. So far, road tiles included the texture of their greater set (eg Green grass for Spring Green theme). Now, many more more Urban-appropriate textures can be selected for your urban tiles: Grey cement (all magnetic), Irregular cobblestone (all magnetic), Stone pattern (Granite or Sandstone, plasticard, magnetic hardpoints), Brick Pattern (plasticard, magnetic hardpoints), Futuristic Plastisteel Grid (Square or Hex, all magnetic)

WIP: Urban tile, with Aluminum Hoverway road, Illuminated roadsides* and Plastisteel grid texture (fully magnetic)

Backers can choose whatever combination of surface, roadside and tile texture for their Urban Sets. They can even choose some tile to be "transition" tiles from the rest of their Set; that means that tile on one side of the road can have an Urban texture and on the other the regular tile texture, like Grass.

The Urban tiles will be available as add-ons in sets, of 2, 4, 6 and 9 pieces.

Prototype of Illuminated Roadsides - LED strips clip to one another and transfer power*

*The Illuminated option roadside add-on is based on high quality, extremely low-voltage LED strips. One of the tiles is connected to a 12V power source (battery) and then the tiles snap one into another, so all LEDs can switch on and off. LED Strips will be silicon protected on final product. Manufacture and installation of lighting elements will be contacted by MP Illumination, the leader in technical lighting solutions in Greece.(www.mpillumination.com)

Who wants some Coastline?

And there is a new Stretch Goal as well! Many people love the idea of playing Sea battles or making D-Day scenarios come through. Pedion will deliver, if we reach £32000: we will unlock Tile designs for:

1. Sea/Water Tiles
2. Straight Coastline/Lakeside 
3. Curved Coastline/Lakeside
4. River Delta

What are you waiting for? Come and help us make everything true!

Good gaming,

George

Journal #6 - or, The Road goes ever on and on

The time has come to show you another major kind of tiles that will be part of Pedion - and of any wargaming board I know of: the Roads...
In case you are following our facebook and twitter feeds, you may have seen that most of the Pedion™ prototype tiles are ready and configured into various wargame layouts. The Road tiles were some of my first prototypes but I am quite happy with their design parameters.

As with the rest of Pedion™ tiles, there will be tile designated as "roads", ie a part of the tile can be used as road by moving units, with any bonus this may grant depending on the ruleset used. What really sets the Road tiles apart is that they must be designed in a way to connect to each other and form a road network when the table is set. Also, there cannot be just one or two Road tiles in a full layout; there will be either enough to form a road crossing between two edges of the table, or none.

By selecting square tile shape, there are some limitations on road tile design. The roads must "start" from specific places on the tiles, in order to interchange them without problem. An obvious starting point is the middle of each tile's side. That means that the generated roads can only have 90 degree turns, intersections or crossroads. This is not as serious a handicap as it sounds, since most human made/designed roads cross at 90 deg (this was one of the main reasons I preferred square tiles to hexagons since they allow only for 30 degree intersections).  However, I intend to design a 30/60 degree intersection system to allow for such offshoots.

Road Tile Variations

• For the time being, there are four (4) basic Road tile designs: two kinds of Straight road, a 90 degree road turn and a "T" shaped intersection. 
• The Road width is approx. 7 cm on the tiles (that's about 2.75"). I selected this size as it corresponds to realistic road sizes for the whole 15mm to 28mm scale range Pedion is intended for. Therefore, the road can correspond to a 4m (13') wide road in 28mm scale (1/56), up to a 7m 2-lane (23') in 15mm scale (1/100). For smaller scales there will be tiles with less wide roads.
• The prototype tiles represented cobblestone covered road parts. This will be one only of the available road styles; there will also be the option for dirt or asphalt roads. I went with the cobblestone since it is the most difficult to produce and presents a nice result. Asphalt roads may be more "scale-specific" as they will show road stripes. If Pedion™ expands, I am thinking of more road styles, suitable to sci-fi terrain.  

Check out the road tiles in the pictures below:

6 road tiles, suitable for a 4x4 game table

a T-shaped intersection, for more variety or urban enviroments

Road tile modularity

The Road tiles can be combined in an almost infinite number of ways over your gaming table. The final result is both practical and realistic, since the roads do not "protrude" from the surrounding surface, but look natural in the terrain. However, their modularity capabilities do not stop there.

Real roads have trees or other features on their sidelines, or are usually followed by lines of fences. In many of my games I have used roads next to walls, hedges etc.

So I decided to magnetically enable the roadsides, in order for the players to place any magnet-based terrain feature they want next to them! Instead of predesignating walls, trees etc, you can place and remove features as you wish (or your gaming scenario dictates!). All the "dirt" area on the tiles is actually capable of holding terrain features like the trees I created for the forest tiles. I will let the video speak for itself...

The magnetized features in the video connect because the roadsides are painted with magnetic primer. In this case, the magnetic primer remained strong enough fro the magnets to connect. However it is possible to replace the primer with metal hardpoints at regular intervals in future iterations. 

Basecoating over the magnetic primer

On general progress

As I mentioned above, most prototypes are ready, and I think I have enough hard data to finalize design decisions and move to the next step: bringing Pedion to the world, that is, you. It is my intention to create a crowdfunding campaign for Pedion, in order to scope if there is actual interest, and what would people prefer for their terrain tiles. 

The campaign will start rather sooner than later, since I am planing this for a long time, having made exhaustive calculations on manhours, development methods, costs, and shipping size & weight. I intend to make Pedion available in fixed, boxed layout sets, suitable for 3x3,4x4 and 4x6 wargaming tables, and allow each gamer to expand it by getting extra tiles as needed - check out a sample 4x4 layout including a river for your viewing pleasure :)

a 4'x4' layout variation, including 5 road tiles, as well as 1 forest tile and two hill tiles (soon to come)

There are still issues to iron out, especially cost-wise, since the tiles seem to be more costly to make than I anticipated, raising the overall set cost. However, I believe the sets will be more competitively priced than other solutions out there. Also, there is still  the selection of the crowdfunding platform, since, while I would prefer KickStarter, it is a nightmare to start a campaign from a non-supported country, like Greece.

All these will be discussed in future blog posts, and of course over facebook and twitter. So, if you think you would (or know someone who would) be interested in being among the first to get a Pedion™ modular battlefield, follow us there. Also, I would really, really apreciate comments and ideas on the Road tiles, to make them even better!

Good gaming all!