Last time we left our village of Nakam Iya’if with plenty of terrain including completed woods, buildings, a well, scatter terrain and the first villagers to inhabit the area. There was one thing missing, however, a key element for making a collection of various items into a place – a way to get there.
That means this time is all about roads.
All Roads Lead to Nakam
The idea of this table is to produce something that works in any number of periods from the Roman occupation of Egypt all the way up to the 20th century. That could – and perhaps should – mean I need a series of different kinds of roads, starting with dirt tracks created simply by people walking over them all the way up to asphalt and metal barriers. But that isn’t really how roads work. I talked in an earlier article in this series about a palimpsest approach to the board – layers of history over and over each other building up a story of a place that can be read if you have the eyes to see.
With the buildings, trees and hills being more-or-less timeless pieces – the significant changes in building a whitewashed mud brick farm building in North Africa over the centuries being interior (and guess who didn’t bother painting interiors?) – the story of that palimpsest can best be told with roads. For that, we need to understand Roman road building in Africa, because – as I explained last time – our village is a well on a major route.
That means the Romans built a major road nearby, most likely on top of pre-existing Ptolomaic roads, at most a mile or two west of the village, a spur reaching south to the repurposed Egyptian oracle-oasis of Amun-Ra, Ammonium. Nakam Aya I’f is a farm, with a year-round well, just off that route. The Ptolomaic-Roman road network in North Africa is extensive and ranges from smaller tributaries to the massive, well maintained networks of trade routes in what is now Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. They built a system of Hydreuma – manned or fortified wells – that would keep traders and armies moving in water-sparse environments. While we haven’t gone down that route with the village (though maybe I could squeeze in a little Roman fort nearby….), this area of modern Western Egypt has a major north-south highway that likely follows the route of the Roman, Ptolomaic and Phaeronic, roads. In the past, spur roads would have sprung off this one to waystations, roadhouses, farms, small villages and other features. Our village, with a well, is important enough to warrant a cobbled road.
At this point, a quick aside. Sometimes, google scholar really serves up fantastic material. I spent a while reading The Well-Remembered Path: Roadways and Cultural Memory in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt by Jenna Gates-Foster, from the wonderfully titled Highways, Byways, and Road Systems in the Pre‐Modern World. Absolutely fascinating look at what roads do – not just in moving *stuff* but in creating and connecting landscapes. I will never get enough time in these articles to mention every reference or website I check to build up the village, but this was a lovely article. The road to the village is socially important, socially constructed and socially understood. On the table it boils down to “this is a road”, but in the life, the story, of the village it is an awful lot more.
It’s enough to say that this is to be a Roman road, though not quite the majesty of the Via Appia. Roman roads have survived almost everywhere they were built, either as layers of stone and cobble lying under major modern roads, or excavated examples or, best of all, still-glorious usable routes. Roman roads in Africa have – occasionally – been exceptionally well preserved, used right up until the vehicles of the 20th century demanded larger, stronger routes.
That works out well for me, as a Roman road will work right up until the Second World War, looking absolutely appropriate, and usable, throughout all the periods I’d like to represent. To make it work best, it needs to look a little beaten up, partially covered and relatively poorly maintained. It could be a road in the process of construction, or a new one after a sandstorm, or one long-decayed and now used only rarely.
The Plan
The overall plan is pretty simple. This isn’t a major road with milestones and exceptionally well laid cobbles – it’s a provincial, rural road, likely paid for by local farming “gentry” or built hastily by the army to facilitate getting water between Ammonium and Praetonium (Ammonium’s port – quite a distance north). It will run north-south on the board, terminating at the well. That’s just about 12 inches of roadway, with a patch of well trodden ground representing the end of the road and the centre of the village. No bends, just a straight section of road!
To get the ideal state of under construction/just a bit dirty/heavily damaged across aesthetically, that section will be roughly 50/50 cobbles and dirt/sand, but free of large boulders, weeds and other major obstructions. It needs to look usable along its length, if a little down at heel. It also needs to be flexible and hard wearing, something I can fit into the already bulging terrain box set aside for this project. That means it’s going to be made out of caulk – cheap, I have a ton of it that’s pointlessly drying out, flexible and easy to model.
The Process
The basic process of making caulk roads is to smear a lot of it in the vague shape you want onto a surface it won’t stick to. My first tries were doing exactly that, squeezing some out onto an old plastic bag, smushing it around with a tiling tool and scattering some sand on top to create texture – either by sticking or by falling off and leaving voids – and then running some base edges through it to create wheel ruts. It’s a thick application of about 1cm deep, to make sure it’s sturdy enough to withstand being peeled off and to stand up to gameplay.
Once that was dry – and I’d advise leaving it a good 48 hours – I peeled them off and stood models on them to see how they looked. The answer? Narrow. Might work as paths.
Round two was much, much chunkier, aiming for about 8cm wide and 3cm deep. I used an old abandoned project to help with this – a wine cart purchased for Napoleonics but now destined to end up as scatter terrain which gave me an appropriate width. Once the caulk was spread a bit thicker, wider and neater, I added some wheel ruts, footprints and irregular divots using various spare models, and quickly – while still wet but not tacky – used a roman styled roller on various areas to create the look of a poorly maintained cobbled road. Areas without the cobble texture got additional sand to create a little height variation between cobbles and ground.
After an even longer drying period, I trimmed each piece to regular dimensions, ending up with a lot more straight road than I really need. I used white caulk so expected the painting to be an absolute nightmare, but the Colourforge spray I have absolutely fallen in love with, sponges and drybrushes came to the rescue.
Finishing Scatter
I’ve had a big push to finish off the scatter terrain I included some very shamefully unpainted examples of last time. Farming and Storage has dominated – trading and selling will come later – so it’s been very animal-based scatter so far.
The Goat herd and Chicken roost are both practical pieces for games of Pillage, where herds of sheep/goats are a serious threat and chickens potentially an explosive chaos agent (look out for house rules for this soon!). They’re various metal and 3d printed animals on large irregular MDF sections from warbases. In other games they will work as rough/broken ground and add a lot of character to the table. I’m a little reluctant to add fields and field boundaries at the moment, at least until I can get a firm handle on what these looked like in the 10th century, so animals are a good way of showing that this is a farming community.
The storage scatter is very much what I had available, rather than any attempt to make things look era appropriate, but I figure that barrels and boxes are probably at least fairly universal. I should really be looking for some wicker baskets, perhaps even an amphora or two, as these are so generic that they really could be anywhere – not really what I want, but good enough.
The final bit of scatter returns to the Romans. I was a bit unsatisfied with how quickly I’d skipped over the entire period last time, so I thought adding a ruined building with a Roman feel would be a shorthand way of changing things up. Perhaps this is Byzantine, Roman or Ptolemaic, but either way it’s a marker of a slightly different way of doing things in the area that has now come to an end. It’s a mix of a spare mdf building, Mantic scatter terrain, Warbases base and some dodgy mosaic painting make this either a very small building or the entryway to a more significant one. Either way, it’s a nice reminder of things long past being used in the present – the palimpsest effect all in one ruin.
All Roads Lead from Nakam
The road allows life in the village to continue on through the Islamic conquest all the way up to the 11th century. It’s not an important place, but it is definitely a place. It has a well established geology, hydrology, and history. With the scatter terrain now at a solid size, it’s starting to look alive and used. There are reasons for people to come here, and reasons to stay. The road keeps the village alive, so I’m glad it’s finally down on the table.
Unfortunately for the inhabitants, it’s the road that leads the Crusaders here, when the great ships of lost fleets arrive on the horizon in 1096. They come, see and, to a certain degree, conquer – but most importantly for us, they start building.
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