The Mouldering Trappings of Kings: Building a Barrow Mound



"Cold be heart and hand and bone
And cold be sleep  under stone
Nevermore to wake on stony bed
Never til, til the Sun and the Moon is dead
In the black wind the stars shall die
And still be gold here let them lie
Til the Dark Lord lifts his hand over dead sea and withered land"

Chant of the Barrow Wight, Fellowship of the Ring


Hey nonny, What a dingus!


First, a confession.  I can't stand Tom Bombadil.  Every time I've tried to read Fellowship of the Ring his inane jabbering has resulted in me abandoning ship in disgust.  As much as I loved The Hobbit and the lore of Middle Earth I never saw Fellowship through to the end until recently.  Once I pressed on I was in for a treat.  Not only did I enjoy a story I'd long neglected, I also experienced the sequence with the barrow wights.


Reaper's Barrow Warden Lord makes a fine Wight.


Middle Earth's wights are rooted in Tolkien's study of Norse saga Gripssonar and old English.  The aspect of his hoary, damned kings are the product of the former while the names owe their origins to the latter.  To me the horror of the Barrow Wights is their pathos.  Though demon spirits they are slaves to the will of Sauron.  When they capture their victims and arraign them gold it seems they are recreating the fate of the First Age kings.  Not only do I feel some sympathy for these bound spirits, the scene is also a powerful Memento mori.  I'm only rambling about the Barrow Wights because I managed to find a suitable model for Blood Eagle games.  For the Lord of the Rings setting I still have to order some but they are on the list because I like the sculpts quite a bit.  Right.  This is actually an article about building a barrow.


Bryn Cellie Ddu on Anglesey Island, Wales

Before starting my barrow project I had to get a feel for what I was trying to recreate.  My goal with all my terrain building projects is versatility.  As someone who's interests lack focus I prefer building stuff that can be used in more than one genre.  I opted for a reasonably realistic interpretation of a barrow mound that could be used in Dark Age or Low Fantasy settings.  The piece will also serve well enough in High Fantasy settings but covering it in skulls and sigils would limit it's, "downward mobility".  For some guidance I googled up some barrow sites in the UK and drew most of my inspiration for the project from Bryn Celli Ddu in Wales.  I was taken by the image because the forboding entrance and  the mix of stone and greenery made for an interesting composition.  From a practical perspective the vegetation made it an easy blend into the typical grassland board or mat that I am currently constructing.  Boards are a larger undertaking than I like so I started with this barrow to reduce the scale and go into the undertaking with a win for my team.

Yuck!  That doesn't look like much.

The first stage of the build was roughing out the shape of the mound with layered XPS foam.  I also had a white foam dome kicking around I'd forgotten the intended purpose of so I grabbed that too.  I also mounted the shape on an MDF base.  I allowed a fair amount of room for the footprint because I was going to be adding material and didn't want to run out of space or leave myself with a ridiculous slope if I couldn't stretch it out enough.

Eadwulf inspects the plaster rocks.




I was intent on using plaster cast rock on the face of the mound with the entrance.  I'd watched a railroading video and was impressed by the techniques so I had a go at it rather than using carved foam.  I was impressed by the realistic results and found it a very intuitive process; Almost like building a puzzle.  I added the rock castings from the ground up sanding here and there to improve fits.  All rocks were secured with a glue gun.  Once everything was in place I filled gaps in the rocks and contoured the rest of the slope with joint compound.  It was the first time I used plaster rocks in a project so I may have got carried away with the pile that accumulated.  I may have been overzealous but like the way the rock balances with the earth.

Surfaced and basecoated.

I skipped adding a naked celluclay picture since the base coat of paint does nothing to hide the excellent texture.  Like the plaster this was my first use of the material.  I haven't sculpted with clay in ages but the material was far more like that than the paper mache I remember.  Like the joint compound I had to temper my impatience and leave the project alone for a couple days before I could move on to painting it.  Celluclay can hold a lot of water if you are too generous adding it to the mixture to watch out for warping if you are covering light materials.  I added water sparingly as I worked when Ifound a consistency I liked working with.  The MDF and layered XPS was strong like bull so it didn't bend.  I sprayed the dry hill with a black primer then painted the rock in a dark grey and the groundwork in a brown I like for base painting.


Those rude draugr moved right in.  This is for Barrow Wights bitches.

From there to some overbrushing followed by progressively lighter drybrushing on earth and stone.  I placed a some stands of static grass plugs, then painted the project with PVA where I wanted greenery and applied loose static grass.  After the grass had dried I went back and built up some areas with fine clump foliage and shrubs.  I wanted to mimic the photos I'd seen as well as make the piece look wild and overgrown.  After so many additions I was worried about things falling off.  As a final security measure I sprayed the green areas with isopropyl and misted it with diluted glue. I'm ecstatic about the results of this project.  I usually walk away from projects OK with them but, this was a bit out of what I'd considered my wheelhouse so a positive result felt great.  Getting this one up and running gave me the confidence to get around to those game boards I'd been meaning to get on with for years.  The two coast modules are at the painting stage as I write this so hopefully I can post another happy terrain ending here fairly soon.  It was nice to play with paint.net and get off of my Prisma crutch for title cards.  I made up another for my last article I really liked the feel of this one because it reminded me of a picture from the old Advanced Dungeons and Dragons hardbacks.







Comments

  1. Looks fantastic, I may have to try this myself. Nice work.

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    1. Awesome! I'd did a fair number of WIPs during the build intending to post this up to share how I did it, and that it was relatively easy to do. If you follow through post a link to your project so I can check it out.

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  2. Enlightening as always. I feel the same about Tom as well but can't remember what he actually was.

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    1. Tom appears as a inbred yahoo in a dumb hat but may be a powerful spirit or godling. He has significant powers but seems bound to the barrowdowns. He has a river spirit trophy wife, Goldberry well beyond his means and probably keeps close so he doesn't get cucked. Tongue and cheek description. There's plenty of articles that do a proper job. He is still a dingus :D .

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  3. Looks excellent, I've wanted to build a narrow for decades, ever since I saw one in a very old white dwarf. I can only hope the one I eventually build looks as good as this!

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    1. Thanks Andrew. If you decide to do one up I didn't manage a step one, step 2 guide but, hopefully this will offer some help.

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  4. This is brilliant and looks amazing! I did something similar for the mound in my Witchfinder game, but not as intricate as this.

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    1. Thanks Micheal, very kind. I think you shared your mound on the FB group when I posted mine. I went looking for it on your 28mm Victorian so I could get another look, couldn't find it but got to check out your fields, jungle and all sorts of other awesome stuff!

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  5. Stunning! You have really pulled this off superbly well. Many congratulations, sir!

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    1. Thanks Bryan. I'm hoping to get a comparable result on the coastline. Fingers crossed.

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  6. Looks brilliant mate. A fab example of the original.

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    1. I enjoy finding cool things to make nearly as much as trying to make them. With fantastic terrain you have license to distort "fact" more readily. With the barrow I stayed pretty close to shore and relied on the photos I referenced to keep the composition grounded.

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  7. Fantastic work! Will definitely be using your tutorial to make my own.

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    1. Great to hear Craig. Half the reason I look forward to comments is checking out what other people are blogging about. I'm actually looking at doing some some RPG campaign design of my own at the moment so you may have some ideas I can explore on your blog.

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  8. That looks absolutely amazing!! Interesting because I'm exactly the same as you with Fellowship - to this day I still haven't gotten through it. After reading this though I'm going to give it another go :)

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    1. I'm happy to discover I'm not the only one. If he gets too unbearable just jump a few pages forward rather than throwing the whole book away. My eyes glazed over during the whole "Night at Tom's place" sequence and didn't pick up again until they left for the barrows.

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