OK, so here it is, finally finished. Getting to the finish line on this piece was a little rougher than I expected. I just never was overly happy with any of the ideas I came up with to mount the lookout platform on top of the roof. This is the only downside to not over planning everything. When you fly by the seat of your pants, you run into small issues here and there. I finally just ended up breaking out my razor saw and sawing the very top corner flat and gluing the lookout platform to that. It works well enough, and I can live with it. I also really wanted to finish this piece up because I have lots of ideas for the next piece(s), so in the end I just needed to get this piece off of the construction table.

I try to give each building a slightly unique feel so this piece has a stone wall first floor, and the roof tiles were painted to match the wood instead of the slate gray I usually go with. The next couple of pieces will probably get red tiled roofs, or maybe a thatched roof or two.

I hope this piece works well on the tabletop. There is at least one way into the building on each side of the first floor, one way per side up to the second floor and central ladders for the third floor and lookout platform.

A beaten foe’s head on the spike?

This was a cloak for a mini that I thought looked good as a tattered and worn banner.

Let me know what you think!

My friend Kyle was awesome enough to save quite a bit of data from my hard drive crash a couple of months ago, so I thought I would post a few pictures of some previous terrain projects. Unfortunately, I do not have any of these pieces anymore. I gave them to my gaming group when I moved to Houston a little over a year and a half ago. Of course, now I am back in Austin and the guy who had possession of the pieces moved off to California. Figures. haha

This first piece is a “wizard” tower made mainly of pink insulation foam. This was my first attempt at working with this kind of foam so I learned a few things with this build. Unfortunately, I do not have any pictures of this piece finsihed, and fully painted because I moved before I managed to finish it… much like most of the pieces in this post. I kind of have terrain builder’s ADD. I keep getting ideas for new pieces before I finish pieces I am currently working on. Besides, when I built these pieces, we needed a lot of terrain, ready for the table top, in a short period of time. I intended to finish each piece when I could, but it just never happened.

Anyway, this pieces was very narrow, but also very tall. The first level was inaccessible, but it had a ladder(not shown) added to the side to allow minis to climb up to the second level. From there, a grapnel and rope led to the third level, past the inaccessible fourth level, and on to the roof. This piece towered over the whole table… it was nice.

As you can see, it was dressed up with quite a few bits. I especially liked the ornate door piece, which I have had for no less than 20 years.

One nice thing I found with this piece. As we all know, spray paint eats styrofoam. What is nice though, is that pink insulation foam is very dense and the black spray paint base coat only gave the foam slight texture which basically simulated stone pretty perfectly. I, of course, tested a small piece of foam before I started spraying the whole tower. I was very pleased with the results though.

This next piece was just a small ground cover piece. I like pieces like this to break up line of sight for archers. One thing we learned early on when playing Mordheim was that when Reiklanders were up in higher locations and had clear lines of sight, no one could stand up to their archers. By adding lots of small cover pieces to go inbetween buildings, you can at least give yourself a fighting chance. This piece was very simple to make. I small piece of popsicle stick fence, one resin cast crate, one wagon wheel from the bits box, one barrel, a little joint compound and some kitty litter on a sheet plastic base and it was done. A note about these barrels. The one used in this piece was purchased from a hobby super store. They are in the doll house section and come in a little bag of nine barrels for $1.47. You can not beat these barrels. They are SUPER cheap, paint up really nice, and are the perfect size. They even have larger barrels if you want to make giant beer barrels in your terrain.

This is the above piece painted up. I was quite proud of the results. I REALLY wish I still had this piece.

This piece was what it was. It was the first piece I built for this set of terrain. I wanted to simulate a raised stone foundation for this building with the pink foam. I got lazy and decided to carve the stone pattern with my soldering iron. The results were less than I hoped. It was functional though, and I may build a new version of this building soon. Even though it was not overly large, it was simple and a quick build. A building like this, while not spectactular, is still better than an empty spot on the table.

This last piece was another idea I tried out. The idea was simply this… There are lots of partially destroyed buildings in Mordheim, but, where is all the rubble from the destroyed buildings? There are rules for movement through “rough” and “very rough” terrain so I thought why not try and show some of that rubble and use the rough terrain rules at the same time. The building was a decent sized three story piece, with a large rubble pile in the rear to simulate the collapse of the back of the building. It worked for what it was and I might rebuild this piece soon as well.

That is it for tonight. Hope you liked what I had to show(or, I at least hope you did not hate it). Comments welcome!

Another week, or so, another post. Currently, this terrain piece is probably about 75% done. Most of the painting is complete, which I do not usually do but if I finished building it 100% before painting, that would have made certain areas of the piece almost impossible to paint. As it stands, they were only extremely difficult. 🙂

Anyway, I only need to finish the roof pieces, and decide once and for all how I intend to do the small, “lookout” platform on the very top. I have that mostly figured out but I have to make a couple of decisions to finalize it. I also need to paint up and glue the ladders in place to provide access to all upper floors. That is a quick enough process. Hoping to have it 100% complete by the end of next week. Finding time to work on it with a 3 month old needing lots of attention has been challenging.

That is all for now!

We had family in this weekend to see the baby so with their attention diverted to him, I managed to get some more time to work on terrain. I was able to make quite a bit of progress and most of the basic construction is now done. Since the first post, I have added popsicle stick flooring to all areas, triangular foamcore pieces to the tops of the walls to prepare for roofs, a few extra windows, and lots of trim pieces. I think it is finally starting to look like something.

One of the things I run into from time to time, is that, contrary to what I read over and over again on various terrin building sites, I rarely plan to heavily when I build terrain. I usually just get an idea for a building in my head, grab some foamcore and balsa wood, and just start cutting away. As such, from time to time, I run into snags with where I want to go with a building. In this case, I originally wanted to do a flat terrace like top on this building, but I had already cut the balsa wood corners at a specific length and I decided I would go a different direction instead of trying to patch the two sections together. I decided, instead, to make a pitched roof like the two side sections but with a smaller, “lookout” type platform resting on the roof. It will be a little more work intensive but I think the result will end up looking better. I hope to have this one completely done by the end of next weekend.

This post is all about the “extras” of tabletop gaming. You know, the things that aren’t absolutely required to play the game, but make the game much better if they are there. First up is the Mordheim specific, wyrdstone counters. Sure, you can use the cardboard 2D counters that come in the box but who wants to do that when making custom 3D counters is SUPER easy. These can be done in a single evening and look great on the tabletop. They are made from craft glass pieces from your local hobby super store, stucco patch, craft popsicle sticks, and plain plastic mini bases.

For these counters I used round bases, even though Mordheim uses the standard Warhammer square bases because at the time, I just could not find square bases… So round it is! I made 6 counters even though most scenarios call for a maximum of 4. This way, I have a few extras just in case. All I did was add a glob of stucco patch to the top of 3 of the bases and glued shaped popsicle sticks to the top of 3 other bases. Once the patch and glue dried respectively, I sanded off the excess with a standard rotary tool being careful not to sand away the plastic of the base. After that, it was just a matter of gluing one piece of glass to the top of each base. And since this is craft glass, there are no sharp edges to worry about cutting yourself on. Once that dries, base coat with black spray paint and drybrush up the individual parts accordingly. As with everything I do for the tabletop, the counters get a thick coat of spray clear gloss(because gloss is thicker and tougher than matte) and then a coat of clear matte to knock down the shine.

Extra bridges and ladders are also always nice to have around to accommodate different table setups. These are very easy to make and can also be done in a single evening. The ladders are simply bamboo skewers with square toothpicks as rungs and detailed with either “nails”(created from leftover cutoffs from crochet mesh I used on one of the buildings I made) glued on, or string wrapped around each rung. The nail heads and rope(string) on each rung is labor intensive but the results make it worth the effort.

The bridges are just craft popsicle sticks, shaped and cut, with the occasional square toothpick added in, again detailed with “nail” heads. Both ladders and bridges are super easy to paint. Just base coat black and drybrush up with progressively lighter browns, then pick out the details with appropriate colors.

Unfortunately, I recently had a hard drive crash and lost a LOT of things including the pictures of this building getting built. Essentially, the techniques used were exaclty the same as the last building, with the notable difference being that I used crochet mesh, cut to size to simulate multi-paned windows. Just one way to give different buildings a bit of character and help each one look just a little different. I personally don’t like tables where all the terrain looks very uniform.

Again, questions, comments, and criticisms are always welcome.

For my first post on this blog I decided to start with something simple. As a few people who know me are aware, I like to play tabletop wargames. My favorite part of tabletop wargaming is building terrain, and it’s something that I feel I’m fairly decent at.
One of the games that I play is called Mordheim, made by Games Workshop. If you don’t know the game, Google it. It’s fun. Over the years I have built up terrain collections then lost them for one reason or another. This time, I plan on keeping my terrain around for a while. I will also post pictures of the terrain I build and explain how I did the pieces so that I can hopefully inspire other people in their terrain building as I was inspired by all the pieces I saw on various other sites. Any questions, comments, and criticisms are welcome.

This is the first piece I built for my new terrain collection. For my games, I like bigger, vertical pieces. I also like spanning several buildings with makeshift bridges so that there is no one way to get to good spots. That way, no one is ever completely safe and no one can dominate a game from a single position. This particular piece is a three story building with a small bell tower(still need to find a good bell to put in it) on the side. It’s made, primarily, of foamcore, balsa wood, thin cardboard, tooth picks, popsicle sticks, and a hardboard base.

This is where I started. I decided on the dimensions of the bottom floor, then I measured and cut out a piece of hardboard a half inch(I went with one inch after this piece) longer and wider than my bottom floor. I then took a pair of pliers and carefully broke off the edges all the way around to give it a rougher, more natural look. I cut out each floor from(mostly) one piece of foamcore and made the floor boards for each floor from craft popsicle sticks. This part is really time intensive but the result can’t be beat by any other way that I have seen. I cut each stick to length and then shave down the top sides to give the sticks a slight beveled look and to really highlight the gaps between “boards” once painted. For the upper floor I first laid down a piece of thin cardboard(recycled from a soda 12 pack) in the rough shape of my floor and laid the popsicle sticks over that. Around the doors, I created door frames from more popsicle sticks, and around each window, I made window frames from square tooth picks.

Here’s a nice top-down shot to show the floor layout and floor boards of the piece. In hindsight, I wish I had made the second floor a bit smaller as the first floor is fairly hard to manipulate minis in, but you live and learn.

I also really wanted a balcony for this piece. I’m kind of mixing genres here but I always liked old westerns where the street was always lined with businesses with balconies where bad guys would line up to shoot the good guys. Balconies provide good elevated areas to shoot from but they also conatain a risk. You get a good view of the table but you are also exposed. I like to mix in risk with reward in my games.

Here is the piece with the door and window frames finished out, and with the balcony railing in place. I decided to create a small gap in the railing to create a risk of falling if any minis get knocked down near the gap. Once again, risk and reward.

Unfortunately I didn’t take and pics of the painting in progress so I’ll have to just skip to the finished piece from here. All of the foamcore was coated with a thin layer of stucco patch with a little water added. Stucco patch is great for texturing. No sand needed, and with just a little water to thin it out, it’s ready to go right out of the container. It was base coated black, the outside was then built up with dry brushing from a very dark red to a highlight of almost fire engine red, while the inside was started with a light tan and dry brushed up to an off white. The roof tiles are thin cardboard cut into small sheets of tiles, that are trimmed to individual lengths and then bent slightly to make them look as non uniform as possible. Again, this is very labor intensive but the result is very satisfying. All wooden pieces were given a dark to light brown drybrush build up. Also, ladders made of bamboo skewers and toothpicks were added to give access to each of the floors. The final step was to give it a couple of heavy coats of clear gloss acrylic followed by a coat of matte to knock the shine down. The gloss is hard and thick so it gives the piece some protection on the tabletop.

All in all, I am happy with this piece though I did learn a few “what not to do’s.”

Here is a list of all materials and where you can find them:

Local hobby super store

Foamcore

Balsa wood sticks

Craft popsicle sticks

Craft square toothpicks

Assorted acrylic paints

Local home improvement super store

Hardboard

Stucco patch

Grocery store

Bamboo skewers

Soda 12 packs for thin cardboard