Terrain – New Games and old
Recommendations: 56
About the Project
Didn't really make much of an effort last TerrainFest. I still have plenty of Terrain to make. A bulkhead set from Kill Team that I will use for Deathship One and Stargrave. A set of Gnawholes for Age of Sigmar. A set of Western terrain I will use for Dead Man's Hand. Some assorted bits I have only half thought up. And a few bits for my own Medieval Tourney Game "Mêlée".
Related Game: Warhammer Age of Sigmar
Related Genre: General
Related Contest: TerrainFest 2024
This Project is Active
Skaven Gnawholes - Completed
All three are adequate for my gaming needs. The elements of the chains and the gore and the flames and the rising Skaven heads drag some sponge and MDF it into the setting. It was worth the time and effort for me to avoid spending miniature buying money on the official pieces.
Do you like Flaaaags?
Looking forward to seeing them on the table top. I can imagine using them as mystic cultist wells of some kind in a Frostgrave or rangers of shadow deep objective.
Skaven Gnawhole - Finishing touches
I got some hobby chain and draped short lengths of it around the framework where it meets the uprights / legs to make them more solid. I was considering having the frame lift off, but see the whole thing as too rickety. I will need to store them carefully and they become quite bulky. As these are placed and removed quite often in a game I need to keep things quite robust.
Rather than use straps of thick paper as some kind of binding, I chose to try some metal work at the top.The bottom end of the insulin needle packaging is a solid round plastic piece that grips the three legs / uprights together. It was a bit tight so I split the pieces down the side and found scraps of the clipped packaging to cover the gap created. I made these as bases for spikes (the official ones have spikes so that seems to work.)
For one of the round plastic pieces I pulled off thin strands of kebab skewers, cut them up, and latticed them carelessly across the gap to look like laces. So this one will be a leather colour rather than metal.
Things are still drying but I am happy with the progress. I may still find an insence burner to add, but unsure if it's really necessary or have 3 available to use on them all.
Finished 1 of 3. Looks good enough to me.
The skaven head raising from the gnawhole nods to how they work in the game, bringing back rats from the dead when you take your licks. The axe and the bells are just for interest.Pastel Seafoam blue Army Painter SpeedPaint (ghost juice) was used on the head.
Skaven Gnawhole - Building
I made a mix of PVA, plaster, green paint and green flock and laid it down as a puddle in the middle of my CD bases.
I tried to keep the circle at about 8 cm as prescribed compared to the official ones. I can have the stones hang off the edge of the CD to take the overall size closer to the official size and painted the rim grey.
I cut away at the foam squares from miniatures storage boxes. Trying to make it look more natural. I dry fitted the stones in rough circles.
I soon realised that any runes and things were going to be difficult to cut into the spongy foam, so I found a denser foam material.
Before and after some cheap grey spray. This denser material came from packaging for something electrical and should look OK amongst the more spongy stones. It's a fantasy game, if anything looks odd I will come up with a headcanon reason why that's what I intended all along.
I kept a lot of MDF "sprues" from old kits. I don't have a shed with a stock of off cuts of wood or ready access to balsa wood. When you want something more substantial than coffee stirrers I reach for these. 
There's potential for these to fall apart and be a real problem. Once the PVA dries I am going to wrap thread around the joints or find some bits of sprue or something to look like iron. The official stuff looks very ramshackle so I am not to worried about this looking the same. The triangle is already the wrong kind but I am not particularly concerned. I also have some hobbying chain as per the example from GW. I think the incense burners and braziers might be difficult to replicate but I feel I need to have a nod towards that somewhere on each one.
The packaging of my insulin needles looked like it could be cut into the shape of a brazier. When I began to cut it the plastic was more brittle than I expected. I made an attempt at greenstuff flames.
I painted up the brazier and the flames. I will persevere with 2 more of these but know now that I should add more greenstuff and fill out the cage more and then add the lapping flames at the end. Also get more height on the flames because at the moment it looks more like tentacles than flames.
I finished my first structure but need to fix up some legs and see how to position them amongst the stones.
The gnawholes have some runes and a dry brush and are approaching completion.
I made some legs for the makeshift ceremonial frames. Kebab skewers cut down and bundled into 3s, bound with strips of thick paper.Skaven Gnawholes - Research
I saw that the official GW Gnawholes looked attractive, but looked like something that I could easily scratch build myself.
I googled the dimensions and found this. “How big are skaven gnawholes?
14 cm in diameter, though it varies because the rocks are so jagged. The swirly vortex in the centre is 8 cm in diameter, and the beams are each 18 cm long.”
The official gnawholes look like this. The elements of the wooden structure, the flames and the whirling magic in the middle will all need a nod to make it look official enough for opponents to be happy for me to use them.I was inspired by a cheap solution video but I don’t have the pink foam.
I am thinking of using a CD base and some foam rectangles that come out of the miniature storage boxes.
Covering up the holes on the CD and showing off the foam I intend to use for the stone.Age of Sigmar - SkavenTide terrain - Bigger bits
The flames came out quite well.
I would never spend the amount of time that I did on terrain normally. There was loads of detail and I enjoyed it.
The copper work around the top of the wall was inspired by the GW painting tips video on the terrain.
Age of Sigmar - SkavenTide terrain - incidentals
The terrain in the SkavenTide box was surprisingly good. The flames were painted in a style inspired from an Instagram short painting tip video.
I like the desecration of the statue, with the metal work across the mouth.Quagmire marker - Mêlée
I needed a muddy patch of ground. I wanted to keep it simple for someone new to the game. So I chose a CD as the size of the terrain piece.I covered the hole in the middle of the CD with a foil sweety wrapper. Then I took a mix or ready mixed plaster (from a tube from the £ shop) and PVA glue. Smeared all over the CD I added some small stone chips and some flock to give it some texture.
After the plaster dried over night I sprayed it with Lazar Cut Brown primer.I should have mixed in some £ shop brown paint into the plaster mix. If the cd chips it will leave ugly white plaster showing. With the brown mixed in it doesn’t leave those obvious chips.
I used some watered down Mournfang Brown in a few spots to break up the flat colour of the primer. I added a couple of patches of my brown forest floor flock and I am happy with the final look.
Plonked down in the middle of a relatively small battle area it will make a nice rough terrain piece that reduces movement and hopefully bottlenecks play to make the game more interesting.
Sprue Tree. - Mêlée
Made with GW sprue and some thinner Wargames Atlantic sprue and used Thin plastic cement to keep it together.For my Medieval Tourney game I want a tree for people to interact with. A lady’s favour is hanging from the tree. A small retinue of Knights is set to defend a bridge to prevent the other team of Knights from crossing it and taking the favour from the tree.
If I was making the game I guess a cheap 2D one would suffice.
Wherever there was a circular connection point I added "branches" from the remainder of the sprue to build up the volume of the tree to the front and the back.I used a GW sprue, older style one with circular profile rather than the newer rectangular edged sprues. It just happened to look like a branching 2D tree.
The whole thing was painted Lazer Cut Brown – TT Combat spray primer paint.
The added clump foliage helps make it look more treelike and making something from what would’ve been thrown away always feels like a bonus.
