It takes a village to....

I’m planning this mostly for Lasting Tales, but it will certainly be used for more fanatsy games, like rangers of shadowdeep. Lasting tales will be played on a 3by3 board, so I set up that space on my dining table and created some mock-ups.
They needed to be big enough to look like the beginings of a village, be able to contain some small furniture and models and look consistant but not the same. It’s the same people that build and maintain them, but they don’t exacty have blue-prints.

After making the cutouts I got some spare XPS-foam and my Proxxon. I made the bulk of the walls and woodwork from some leftovers. This is about 1-2 euro’s worth of materials. XPS can be very cost-effective once you made the investment in a good hotwire cutter and some accesoires.

Then some stonework.. I made more strips then I needed and got my texture roller. Before I use the one I bought from shifting land I like to add some rough texture to the foam. If you do this afterwards, you’ll push away the lovely stone-pattern you want. Lazyness is the  mother of invention. I often see people dabb the material with some tinfoil, but I made my own tool. I got a small wooden rolling pin and smother it in cheap super glue. Then I rolled it throuhh some small gravel and sand. This is to course for stuff like this (better suited for natural rock formations), but I make it a bit less coarse by rolling some tinfoil over this for a job like this. Rolling this over the material is far more relaxing.

I continued on making the big wooden beams I wanted on the corners. This remains one of the easiest way to hide the corners and I happen to like the look in this situation. I created the woodstructure with a small stealbrush.

Time to stick some walls together. Now it’s starting to get fun.
Once every wall was drying (hold the together with some pins and be sure they’re flat. I had to re-glue some parts. Not to bad, but annoying.)
In the meantime I made a loooooooot of small strips to use as boards. I’m gonna use these to have some nice relief on the facings of the houses.
And that’s it for now. Need to place a lot of strips along the walls and cut out the windows and chimney’s