Beastmen Herdstone feat. Phaistos Disc

I've been working on this little project secretly over the past week, and it's finally done.

Presenting: the Herdstone!

I was thinking of building a 'traditional' obelisk herdstone, but then I saw a documentary on the Phaistos Disc and decided to find out more about it. It looks alien enough to pass off as a non-human script, so I went on ebay and found a fridge magnet of the correct size.

To make the 'base' I cut a hole in a sheet of foamcore and then stacked it on three more sheets, and carved a hill shape out of them as well as some steps, covered the whole in masking tape, then glued sand on it.

After the glue dried, I spray-primed it black, painted it the ground colour I use for all my bases, dry-brushed a lighter yellow-brown, and flocked it.

The steps were painted grey and the edge of the hole was painted dark green with a light-green highlight as the disc. My fluff is that the herdstone is some meteorite/warpstone which is embedded into the earth.

The disc fits snugly, and between games can be removed and returned to my fridge. This also allows the hillock to be used for other 'races' by substituting the centrepiece.

The whole thing still looked a little bare, so I googled around and learnt that beastmen would leave heaps of skulls and other trophies around their herdstones, so I rummaged through my bits box to find stuff I could use.

I decided to make a small removable base of 'stash', centred around an orc sabre stuck into a blob of putty moulded on a washer. The base was textured, and when it and the various bits were painted, I applied white glue onto the base and arranged the bits around the sabre. Again, this gives me the flexibility of using the base as an objective marker or just decoration in a game.

Here's a shot of the herd painted so far posing for a family photo.