Project - Terrain

So I thought I'd spend some time talking about terrain today.  I'm REALLY not good at making terrain.  I've made more than a couple of attempts to make my own game board for the house only to have something go wrong with it and end up trashing a lot of wasted materials.  Really nice terrain or a really nice game board are while not essential to our hobby certainly important to the look and feel.

When the kids and I break out our 1" warriors we typically use pots, pans, the water cups we're drinking from during our gaming time as terrain.  This was getting pretty boring for us and that led me to look a little closer at getting some decent terrain for our Thursday night Dad vs. Kids sessions.  Why?  Well for starters, it's difficult to play some scenarios without terrain.  When looking for example at some of the Kill Zone scenarios you need to fill your game zone with typically 25-50% terrain.  Lets face it, you can only do so much with a couple of pots, a sugar container, and some water cups.

So back to getting creative...

Below are some pieces that I threw together, you see it finally dawned on me that I don't have to have a slick looking game "board" but I needed some decent looking terrain pieces to use on my 4x8 dining room table.  Our table is WAY  more than big enough for any number of sized games so what was truly missing is just some decent terrain pieces, pieces that are fairly simple to create with all of the totally awesome tutorials out there.  Not to mention, there are some great companies making terrain pieces out there that can easily be modified or added to to create some great pieces for your board.  So the next few posts will be on terrain.

Here are a couple of pieces I've put together.

 
First up is a ruined building.  It's basically some plasti-card cut into the two walls.  Now it's not cut as jaggedly as I would have liked, but it works for what I was looking for.  Then I just scattered some cork board around and created the concrete rubble.  The blast crater is a resin piece that I can't remember where I ordered from, but it came in a set of 5 so needless to say those will become additions.  Everything is mounted on a laminate floor tile I had left over from re-doing my floors so I cut up a piece into the basic shape I wanted and there you go.

Coloring is pretty straight forward, primed in gray then just worked the colors the way I wanted and for the most part I'm pretty happy with how this piece turned out.  Need to figure out adding more texture to the walls themselves, but there plenty of ideas sitting out on the net concerning adding the rough texture to the walls.  I may try the mixing sand with watered down PVA glue next time or maybe some textured paint.

The next piece is an objective marker I made.  It's based on one of the clear protectors that come at the bottom of a CD/DVD spindle.  From there I think I threw on some broken bases, plasti-card, and cork board pieces.  PVA glue and sand.  The "objective" part of the piece is a shrine made from some Space Marine bits and a cross that came from an old Reaper mini that never got painted.  Added in a teleport homer as well lets face it the piece works for any deepstrike scenario as well.  Nothing like making a piece multifunctional. 

Look for a new article coming up on reviewing some terrain pieces from a Pegasus Hobbies!

-BJC