Hey Sax! Long time no chat. ;)
"Scrub" and "rough terrain" may mean a variety of things, but here are a few ideas.
First -- my approach to terrain in general is an adaptation of Mark Luther's remarkable stuff. Perhaps we'll be lucky enough for him to pop into the thread and drop a suggestion or two.
The basics of the technique are to place elevations on the table, cover them with a cloth, add features such as crop fields, trees, buildings on top of the cloth (often using fabric-store spray adhesive to get them to stick and conform tightly to the cloth), and draw paved roads, dirt roads and paths, water courses, sandy areas, etc. onto the cloth with pastels. Additional materials can then be "sprinkled" about as needed.
Here are some examples that may speak to your interests.
My Italian scouts popped up over a Tunisian ridgeline to have a look, and quickly found themselves on the receiving end of some French mortar fire.
The terrain elevation under the cloth is done with several layers of cut up corrugated cardboard (one of my preferred techniques). The flat top of the ridge is pastelled a bit lighter than the rest of the table top. The slopes are pastelled in vertical stripes of 3 different earth tones, 2 darker and 1 lighter than the rest of the table top. The edges of the sub-layers of cardboard give interesting horizontal "bumps" to the vertical stripes. Overall it gives a pleasing (to my eye) presentation of a ridge with somewhat rough slopes and a flat elevated plateau.
In the background you can also see some scattered scrub.
This wider zoom (and different angle) of the same game table gives you a better view of the scattered scrub (btw – the ridge from the prior pic is in the distance on the upper right).
As Thresher also suggested, I used lichen for this scrub. I have been gaming for (mumble-mumble) years, and first bought lichen when God was still in knee-pants. I have collected a fair bit of lichen over the years (not only bought, but literally "collected"), and as you are (or were?) in NoCal, you might consider doing the same. Local NoCal oak trees will often have lichen on their north side. It is usually a very light/pale green. I have gathered a bunch of it, and kept it in a plastic bag in my terrain box. It kind of dries out, and gets crumbly. Well, that's actually a bit of an advantage for setting up dessert boards. I just reach to the bottom of the lichen bag, and there's a handful of dull pale green crumbles that I can toss about on a table. Looks like cactus / tumbleweeds / scattered scrub. Couldn't be easier.
This pic, from years prior, shows my technique before Mark Luther brought me into the light.
I will encourage you to disregard the masking tape roads and stream, and the cut-felt markers for forested areas.
You can see how I use cut corrugated cardboard. I have spent years using spray paints to base coat my tanks on these cardboard cut-outs. Sometimes (not always) I assemble several layers of cut shapes and glue them together for pre-formed hills, which you also see here. Then, towards the end of my time using this technique I also flocked a few of the carboards, as is also seen here. Then … I started using the "scatter some lichen bits", but in this case, as it is a board for a temperate climate, I used darker / richer green lichen (model RR lichen, store-bought during the Ford administration, I think).
Here's a closer view of the scattered lichen on a flocked layered cardboard hill / ridgeline.
Back to the Tunisian game board … here is an adaptation of another technique, also described by Thresher, for showing rough terrain. Using the Mark Luther method, I have colored-in on the cloth, using 2 or 3 shades of earthtone pastels, a ravine cut in the underlying elevations. Then, using spray-adhesive, I have scattered large grain sand (actually model Railroad talus) across the ravine.
Not as happy with this result as with the others. It was useful at game-time … no mistaking the rough terrain. But it was not as visually appealing (to me) as some of the other approaches shown here.
Just some ideas. Hope that helps. Looking forward to seeing what anyone else has.
-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)
paints up some WWII Soviet aircraft.
