"What to use for Wadi or Dry River Bed for Desert" Topic

I just use my existing streams. They are made of clear plastic so the base colour shows through. Add a few bits of gravel from the garden and hey presto, wadis.

Get some pre-wrapped "canvas" on a stiff board.
I like the 12" squares. There are also 8" ones. I get mine at Walmart Arts and Crafts section.
Get some Gorilla Glue, the urethane glue that foams up. Lay down two beads of the Gorilla glue, in two lines that are vaguely parallel but join at the ends.
Immediately pour a mixture of model railroad "ballast", sand, gravel, etc.
The Gorilla glue will foam up and entrap the sand mixture.
This is a good thing to do late at night when you're going to retire.
Next day, Shake off the non entrapped sand mixture.
You might also want to simply smear some glue to simulate sandy patches.

Anyway, when the foaming is finished, usually overnight, spray the whole board with Camouflage paint. There are several different brands that will work.
Dry brush to your hearts content, add cacti, etc. I like to make the interior a few shades darker.
Note that you can make larger wadis by making the mess "geomorphic". Simply continue the process on two canvas boards, but separate them as soon as you dump the sand mix on them, so they don't get glued together.

Obviously, trace out the pattern in pencil first, drawing the wadi wide enough so sinister natives can hide inside.
Dervish, Apaches, Bedouin, Pathan, etc.

I'm running 6mm WWII North Africa games using an FLG Desert battle mat with mouse pad like backings. Wondering what I might use to represent Wadi's on the battle field. And I'm not much of an artist. Looked for something that could be printed on Drive Thru RPG but didn't find anything satisfactory….seems like art is just too large, made for 28mm perhaps. Any idea's welcome. Thanks in advance.

1" strip of brown felt is the old school method. Or you could buy something like the Timescast streams and build up the edges with rocks and brush: link

I use felt as a base cloth. Brown felt for wad, tan or dark gray for roads, light blue for streams. I also use irregular cuts green with brown spray paint for woods and rough.

My method is based on what I have learned from Mark Luther, who posts AARs on this forum reasonably often.

The basic concept is a game table based on a cloth covering up the elevations, rather than the elevations on top of a flat cloth. Mark L uses cheap bedsheets as his cloth. Mark 1 (ie: yours truly) uses thicker canvas as my cloth.

For my underlying elevations I use corrugated cardboard. Many of the consumer goods that come into my home come in cardboard boxes. These are often carved up into pieces of varying shapes and sized. They can be stacked to build substantial elevations, or used in one or two layers thick to make minor undulations in the "flat open ground" which often dominates game tables (but seldom occurs in the real world). To get the cloth to follow reasonably steep inclines or declines, try using some double-stick tape or moldable "ticky-tac", both easily found in your local hardware store's adhesives aisle.

Once you have gathered enough cardboard from enough large boxes (think flat-screen TVs, home appliances, etc.) you can easily build a table with 90% of your terrain at one or two levels up, and ravines, gullies and wadis at the bare table level.

Variations in ground textures (such as muddy fields, eroded slopes), roadways and waterways can then be drawn onto the cloth using pastels. Pastels are cheap and cheerful, can be drawn on with sharp edges or rubbed down to fade nicely, and wash out in the laundry for a different map every game. Finally various scatter pieces (hedges, walls, crops, etc.) can be added on top.

For me this was an evolution from my prior approach, which was a felt cloth with various cut cardboard hills and colored tape roads and rivers stuck on top.

Here are examples of dessert terrain from games I have put together.

First, my old method with felt cloth and elevations added on top:

And then, my rendering of the basic Mark Luther technique:

I don't pretend for a moment to have the level of skill that my master himself demonstrates in his games. But still, my games look much better for using his approach at whatever level I achieve.

Hope that helps.

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

Mark 1, great display of the two different methods. Brilliant idea!

Very helpful info on this thread!

This link shows TimeCast latex river sections painted as dry wadis. The context is the Battle of Sari Bair, Gallipoli. I needed something that would conform to the contours:

A full set of photos is available here for the Battle of Sari Bair After Action Reports:

link

Robert

Tank you all for the great feedback. Nice pictures too.

I have a wadi in the works for my GHQ Terrain Maker layout. The bed of the wadi is on 1/4" hexes with banks/walls of 1/4" on either side of the bed.

One of these days, I will finish it off and show it here.

Awesome thread with great ideas. That Mark Luther stuff is next level.

That Mark Luther stuff is next level.

I find it to be really superb.

BTW – having mentioned him, I managed to not mention his TMP moniker. He posts here as microbiggie, if anyone wants to find some of his games.

While he has not done a lot of dessert terrain stuff (at least not that I have seen), he has posted about many of his games on a variety of terrain types. Always a great read, and always with remarkable pictures.

I have found that his approach is not difficult to pick up on. Maybe not at his level, but at a level sufficient to generate good results.

6mm goodness follows.

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

I used to have boxes of terrain makers in desert colors and had made some beautiful wadis. But setting up terrain makers is a lot of work and was never happy with the fact that they are cut imperfectly

Mark 1, thanks for the 'microbiggie' reference. Gorgeous stuff.

DanLewisTN, I made a jig once to cut even pink styro hexagons to avoid that GHQ challenge. It was based on a how-to I found online someplace. It worked, to a point, and the pieces were reasonably tight and serviceable, but I never liked the overall effect, with so many seam lines on the table, jerryrigging toothpick connectors between the pieces so they would not move, having to lay them on a cloth to reduce slide, etc. I moved on, but I still look at those Terrain Maker and similar pictures with some awe and admiration! I could just never quite pull it off myself.