In our Band of Brothers Crossfire/Fireball Forward video episode, we showcased a new custom ground mat we made for the scenario. For our "Free Stuff" page members we're offering a photo tutorial on how you can make this style mat at home yourself! 

--1 sheet of teddy bear fur (plush felt)
--4 tubes of white latex PLUS silicone caulk
--1/2" flat paint brush
--1 tube of cheap acrylic craft paint for the roads
--white spray paint
--light grey spray paint
--dark brownish/gray spray paint

When the mat is complete it's actually quite heavy! Remember, there are four entire tubes of caulk applied to it! We complete the tabletop by adding on loose scatter terrain, such as buildings, fences, stone walls, trees, bits of dead lichen, and haystacks. The final product is a pretty awesome looking table! It's a custom mat, but when you're done the game, you can just remove the loose scatter and roll up the mat for easy storage. The caulk doesn't crack or peel off. For us, this was a very successful experiment in making our own terrain mat!

We received many comments from viewers on the Vietnam episode last week asking about our napalm explosion markers. These were hand-crafted for the game using some very basic supplies and, in this tutorial, we'll show you how to make some of your own! Let's start with the basic shopping list of what you'll need to make your markers:

FLICKERING TEA LIGHTS
WHITE PILLOW STUFFING
PIPE CLEANERS
CLEAR TRANSPARENCY SHEET
SCISSORS
BLACK SPRAY PAINT
GREY CRAFT PAINT 
CRAFT GLUE

We have a fun terrain tutorial video on deck for this Star Wars episode, but in the meantime we wanted to share a few behind the scenes photos from making the Endor table. Most of the huge redwood trees in our game were 3D printed from free STL files, but a number of trees were homemade. These were crafted from cardboard tubes, textured with paper towels and craft glue. The 8'x6' ground cloth was also homemade, and the sequence of photos below shows how we taped off the forest trails with newspaper, followed by three layers of spray paint shading. If you're interested in terrain tips, be sure to stop back soon for much more!

We hope everyone is enjoying our mid-series break this week for the Q&A video and today's terrain tutorial on making flexible rivers. If you haven't seen those two videos yet, pop over to YouTube and watch them! But for our exclusive "Free Stuff" members, we have a special bonus Two Minute Terrain Tutorial that is not publicly available. The link to this video is only available right here for you guys. Keith will tell you his trick for making cheap, easy snow effects on the tabletop! 

Throughout the rest of the season on Little Wars TV, we'll be bringing you a series of two-minute terrain tip videos. These tutorials will teach you how to make creative wargaming terrain on a budget. By editing the videos down to roughly two minutes each, we're hoping to deliver you high value in a hurry. We thought we would offer our first of many tips right here on the Free Stuff page, exclusively for our members only. It's a quick tutorial on how we modeled the muddy fields of Agincourt with some $4 latex caulk and scrap felt. Give this one a try at home for your games!