Siege Scenics "Urban Decadence" Review

Pricepoint

As with the last Siege Studios mix we reviewed, this mix is £4.99 for 200g, which again makes it the best ratio of material to cost of the brands covered so far. But as I've said before, getting the most product for your money doesn't necessarily make it the best product if the material itself isn't up to snuff. So let's take a closer look and see how this measures up.

What do you get?

This mix is entirely made up of two varieties of slate - small to fine granules of green slate (which, despite the name, is the light blue-grey kind in the photos, but is slightly more greenish when seen in the wild) and small to medium flakes of purple slate.

So What Do I Think?

I've joked before about Siege Scenics' often silly product names, but I think this one's probably the second worst offender in their range (just wait til I review their tufts someday...). To be blunt, there's nothing urban or decadent about this material; the closest I've come to seeing either of these in an "urban" environment is when it's lining a neighbour's driveway in the suburbs. While the green slate makes for a good "concrete" colour, which on its own could pass for very simple, single-material rubble, that illusion is broken by the purple slate mixed in. As seen in the picture below and elsewhere in this article, it can be very obtrusive given the shapes these larger darker shards can take.

If we compare with Krautcover's Tale of Grimdark, an admittedly more expensive material with its own problems, that mixture's range of different shaped & coloured materials allows your mind to fill in the blanks & imagine what kind of wreckage it might be.The larger rocks could be rubble from a wall, the crumbly bits could be smashed bricks or plaster, and so on. But here there's just two materials, which look very distinct from one another, so looking at it on a base any given "bit" is either one material or another, neither of which look like anything other than stone. So unless your vision for your army's basing scheme is "the shattered ruins of a slate cottage in the Lake District", this mix isn't great at what it sets out to do.

So let's talk about what this mix is good for.

 Image by Michael Graham for Geograph Britain and Ireland via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons License 2.0

This is Scree, a slow gradual rockfall that forms around the base of cliffs and hills. You get it a lot in places like the Lake District, Nordic regions and parts of Canada. It's also where a lot of slate like the material in this mix forms in piles of chippings, and if you're a Lord of the Rings film fan you'll recognise it from places like Helm's Deep or the bit where Sam somehow rolls down a hill hard enough to bury himself up to the waist in the stuff. You'll see from the above picture that a layer of light grass and plant matter forms on it eventually, and doing the same with either flock, static grass or tufts would add a lot of variety to your bases if you use "Urban" Decadence for a more natural environment.

QA

Completely without issue this time!

Does it Sieve?

Unfortunately, while both the lighter and denser mixtures we get from sieving both look fine, the denser mix exacerbates the issues we have with the mixture in general of it not looking like rubble, but at least makes it more useful for the loose rockfall we described earlier. The lighter mixture, on the other hand, looks a lot more like gravel, making it more useful for an urban environment (you'll have to provide your own decadence) and at smaller scales. We'll see how you can turn the former mixture into the more useful latter later on in the article.

Does it Scale?

These minis are 10mm scale, and for the base on the right I made an effort to stir the base in the lighter particles, and the one on the left in whatever mixture happened to stick. Even looking at this picture now and knowing I did this deliberately as a demonstration, the fussy part of my brain is telling me to go fish out this base of minis and pick those larger shards off. As you can see, the smaller scale does little to decontextualise the purple slate bits into shapes that could be rubble and instead makes them look more out of place and scale. 

This "definitely not Skeletor" - let's call him SkeleTony - is 54mm. The problem with the larger flakes is a lot less pronounced here, as all the rocks now appear about the size of driveway gravel. Sadly, this does make the mixture look a lot more barren and featureless without any eyecatch pieces or tufts, as even the largest flakes of slate are quite small next to SkeleTony's boot. A full-sized chip of either of these slates would work here as a small boulder or hero rock. Without it, SkeleTony just looks like he's standing in the parking lot outside Serpent Mountain, texting Animal-Person and Bad-Linda to remind him where the spare key is.

Does it Grind?

So it seems a bit grim for this basing mix, until we try something we tried with the last Siege Scenics mix - grinding it!

This is a quick before and after of taking the heavier mixture we got from sieving and smashing it up a bit. I used a mortar and pestle I happen to use to make basing pigment (a possible future article), but you could do the same by either putting it in a baggie or folded teatowel and crushing it with a rolling pin, hammer or booted foot. Slate's a fairly easy rock to crumble when it's already in fragments like this, so if you liked the look of the more sediment-like granules or wanted to use this at a smaller scale, it would be a quick job to crush up most or all of the tub this way.

Final Score - 3/5 - Steady Ground

It occurs to me that this mix's simplicity is both what led to its lower score and kept it from being any lower. When it's just two kinds of the same stone, that's not a lot to work with in terms of visuals you can achieve, but at the same time there's not a lot to mess up. Had this mix been pitched with a natural theme instead of an urban one, or leaned harder into the industrial theme with some additional materials, I'd have likely scored this higher. The larger chunks are easily broken up, if those are your main problem, but that's kind of unusual to have to do with a product like this, and the more you have to pick through a basing mix to make it workable the more you have to ask yourself whether it would have been worth a few extra pounds to get something better.

That said, I've got an army of Uruk-Hai that's almost done and I've ground up a baggie of this mix ready to use on them to show them marching to Helm's Deep, so I'm at least going to make use of what I've got.