I tend to find I get inspiration from sometimes really random things and from there my imagination just goes off on tangents.  As an example, my kids have a game that involves a moving maze, for some reason it got me thinking about those horror houses you get these days where live actors chase you around a house whilst dressed as chainsaw-wielding lunatics and the like and that got me thinking of I could turn that game of searching for treasure in a moving hedge maze into something more sinister.  That in turn got me thinking of movies like Silent Hill, which then led me down the path of maybe a supernatural setting etc.

So, I don’t tend to do much research or planning I just normally get a little spark and then my imagination runs away with itself.  I do find though that my builds tend to grow to something larger than I first imagined as once I start getting ideas, I want to incorporate them somehow.

When it comes to settings, I want it to have the right feel.  I don’t like the idea of random walls on a table just for the hell of it.  What would they have been there for, would they have been part of a garden if so, where is the house that the garden was for, if it was part of a defences, where were the defenders stationed, and how did they get there?  That kind of thing.

The same goes for hills and trees.  Why do you need a hill on each side of the table?  If there are also defences on the table, why are they not on the hill which would make an obvious defendable place?

Shipping containers, why are they scattered all over urban boards?  how did they get there?  Why not use abandoned vehicles instead?  I have never been in a city where shipping containers are scattered everywhere.   Maybe have an overturned transport vehicle and have the shipping containers having fallen off that.  Or base the game on a huge ship conveying shipping containers.

I guess for me it’s trying to make it look a little bit believable rather than a random mix of terrain that looks out of place.