EXT: Temple of the Moon

To start my year, one in the eye for the Leadpile!

This is everything you get in a single set, pre-paint job.

Just before the holidays caught me last year, I made a decent start on the Kazumi Rampart kit I got via Kickstarter. There wasn't much left to do for it, just a few washes, a big drybrush and sponge session, and I got it finished today.

As well as my usual average photographic showing off, this is going to be a review of the kit. You may have seen them about on On Table Top, who did an amazing build last year with the Cathedral set, or from the recent Kickstarter for a new flavour and add-ons. The burning question is obviously 'are they any good?'

Yes! Is my blunt answer.

There are six different solid walls - a windowed one...

...a solid one...

...a solid one with pictograms on...

First up - the sculpts. Lots of nice detail, although they're rather harder to get off the sprue than GW kits are. Thicker sprues and bulkier contact points, but nothing that's actually a problem. Strengthens the wrists more, if anything, like a good work out. I didn't find any missing details or blurry bits, and once you've trimmed them, they fit together extremely well.

...an open doorway...

...a shrine with windows...

...and a closed doorway! Either two or three of each.

Very modular indeed, these, totally designed to work in all kinds of arrangements. Stacked for taller walls, crossroaded for labyrinths, done in squares for small buildings - tons of options. And great for cover or LOS blocking, too. The Kickstarter also came with a ton of extras both for this set and the Cathedral design. I'm keeping my cathedral stuff to go with Necromunda stuff later, but this set of small statues and pillars really adds a lot of character to the table.

Although they're designed for magnets, which can fit into the holes in the pillars for maximum flexibility, there's another option. With you kit, you'll find a bunch of plastic pegs that work just as well as magnets. They slot in to the holes and connect two sections, vertically or horizontally. Whilst I haven't actually tried magnets, so it's a slightly fake comparison, I'm going to say the pegs actually better!

The pegs are a tight fit, but not an inconvenient one. 

Here's why - if you put magnets in, you're probably going to want to glue them in place. That's going to block up the holes, and that means you can't put the lovely detail plugs in place, which for the Kazumi temple are snakes, lizards and a bunch of Mayan basketball geegaws.

The peg join can easily hold a wall section in place without support (although I put support in here to stop it tipped the lower level over)

That's not all, because those same holes are also the socket for the floor connectors, crocodile clip thingies. Now, you're not really missing out there, in fairness. The one gripe I've got is that the floor system doesn't really work.

The clips hold it up fine, but the three shaped bits of floor (single, double and corner) don't really sit inside the ruins terribly well. Not just that they don't quite touch, which is a bit of an immersion breaker, but also that the corner floor is pretty useless. Because the clip has to sit on a pillar, there's no way of connecting it so that you can actually use the corner floor in a corner!

Here's a view of the double floor and the two corner floors in place. You can see the problem - the corner bit is always going to be hanging half-way down a wall section.

Shame - maybe you magnet masters out there can fix this (be warned, the magnet docks aren't going to help you), but I think the best solution would actually be to glue a few corners in place if you want to use them. That's a bit of a nuclear option, but one I may yet yield to. Plenty of options even if you do glue it, is my thinking, and it certainly takes the problem away if you're looking for a more permanent build.

Set dressing - a snake statue, two crystals and a pyramid

More set dressing - a tall and short column, a marker slab and a ruined sun disk

Painting it was pretty quick and simple, if a bit tedious in the way that drybrushing a lot of scenery is. The company cover shots of this stuff went with an amazingly colourful and eye-catching scheme, which looked great but was far too detailed and shiny for my taste. I went with a relatively authentic Aztec stone look, aged with a final stipple of dark grey. All the photos I looked at show a sort of crusty grey finish on the stone. It's either some kind of lichen or soot stains from pollution, I don't know, but it looks old and crumbly and I like it.

Painting Guide:

• Basecoat - Mechanicus Grey
• Basic Stone - Karak Stone heavy drybrush, Skeleton Bone medium drybrush, random bricks and details picked out with Tau Light Ochre
• Washes - Watered down Dark Stone with added Black slopped over the bottom third, then Biel-Tan Green wash on the lowest bits
• Old Paint - Various GW washes done over the painted bit, sometimes swiped with my thumb to remove the outer layer
• Gold - Greedy Gold with a simple Reikland Flesh wash
• Crystals - Blended green going from Incubi Darkness up to Jungle Green with White, then a lick of 'Ardcoat after varnishing
• Final Drybrush - Pallid Wychflesh over everything once dry, also painted more heavily into some recesses
• Weathering - Eshin Grey with added Black stippled liberally with a sponge, hitting the bits I'd actually painted with Pallid Wychflesh more heavily 
• Roots - Dryad Brown, Dark Tone wash, stippled with Elysian Green

A little footnote to the painting - because trying to the tiny pillar heads and detail plugs would be a nightmare, I stuck them all into pillars while I drybrushed. Simple and convenient, and they fit tightly enough that they hardly ever popped out and fell under the corner cabinet in the process. Just watch that you work them loose quickly once the varnish is on (or before, if you can face doing them separately), otherwise they can get stuck more permanently.

The stairs! The one on the right is actually from the Cathedral style, but works fine for this. They are pretty basic, they were a late add-on in the Kickstarter. The Kazumi one on the left probably wouldn't actually hold up architecturally! But they're fine as background scenery.

Tree roots - the larger one has a pin to cap a pillar, the smaller one just lies in place.

The price should be mentioned. At about £40, you're getting enough scenery for a good two square feet of table, depending on how you assemble it. That's much cheaper than an equivalent amount of GW stuff, and the quality is very comparable. That was Kickstarter price, in fairness, but the Cathedral set is already on the company's website for about £50.

Mel Gibson actually filmed Apocalypto on this. 

Scale - perfect match to GW stuff, as you can see with this Necromunda bulkhead.

Overall? A-, I'd say, a strong recommendation. If only those floors worked!

Here's the full set, packed into the Shadowspear box and ready to hide under my bed.

As it is, I'm really looking forwards to getting this on the table. It's a great set to go in the jungle board I already have, and also allows me to adapt that to a fantasy setting without much fuss. Expect pictures next time I fight!

The girls knocked together some sample layouts for me. This one and the one below took ten minutes or so between them, and use less than the full set.