The Pendulum Swings Back – Terrain!

My hobby swing has come back around to the 40K and miniatures world. This weeks obsession is with terrain.

My gaming group doesn’t play 40K very often, maybe 5-6 times a year, so I like to have new and interesting terrian to play on each time. This makes it easier to justify the scenarios and gives better narative to play by. We have the prerequisite forest, plains, mountainous, desert and ruined citiescape battlefields. We used 4×6 mdf boards covered by terrain matching cloth. Over this is placed foam hill, trees and other pieces of interest.

A couple of weeks ago I spent a Saturday afternoon hot gluing plants/grasses to bases to make enough swamp/marsh terrain to cover 2 boards. The other new board will by a lava board, something I’ve always wanted to try. The downside is I’ve only got a couple of days to pull it off if I want to use it this weekend.

Here’s a quick sketch of the proposed layout.

I tried to design it so neither side has a clear advantage and most of the  terrain will be movable as well. The river of lava is changeable as I plan to print this out, spray glue it down to tag board and trim it out so it lays flat to the table. As much as I would like to carve this thing out of an 8" piece of foam, it’s not going to happen.  

Due to the work I do at an advertising agency, I have access to a larger format color laser printer. I’ll print the river out in a series of tiles. here’s the river scaled showing the print out areas. Clicking on the image will show a larger one with the tiled areas marked for printing.

The little red and white scribbles are going to be alien "lava trees" made from some decorative plastic coral I found at Target for real cheap. I’ve mounted them to bases and will be washing them in black, then highlighting them with their respective colors to give them a little more depth. Paint the base black and viola! Alien Lava Trees! Here’s how they look so far… Click for larger image.

I have one of the hills cut from 2" foam and will cut the rest tomorrow evening (Tuesday’s are D&D night). I also plan on making a couple of bridges for units to cross, 3 smaller ones for troops and a large on that vehicles can cross. I picked up a can of spray texture cheap and will texturize the topsides of all terrain, spray them black, then dry brush a layer or two of grey.

I have all sorts of other cool ideas like lava tubes spewing cotton "steam" and some Chaos themed altars that would fit in nicely. I’ll post pics of the games next week.