Tuscany Hill Village Terrain Build

Now that I have designed the basic house in FreeCad and I’m comfortable that 3d printing will deliver what I want, I need to draw up some plans for the actual terrain. This will allow me to design the buildings to the space available.

This is a terrain piece rather than a gaming board build and so it needs to be small enough to allow space around the outside but big enough to actually game in. This means some compromises. Firstly, it will need to be a representation of a hill village rather than a fully blown village. It will also need to be able to take the gaming pieces, in this case 15mm Flames of War. This means that some of the features, such as the gate, will need to be large enough to accommodate a tank, something medieval Italian builders didn’t have in mind!

So, armed with a trusty piece of large paper, some cut out foot prints of proposed buildings and a reference tiger tank, I’ve set about squeezing as much into as little space as I can.

Here’s the process:

My aim is to create a central piazza which will also be the highest part of the village. This should be accessed via gates and in my mind, I envisage a simplified version of San Gimignano (picture below). To one side of the piazza, I would like a street of houses, but at a lower level, to try and create the tiered perspective. Ideally I would like this street to run all the way around but there won’t be space for this. As it stands, the design above is looking close to being 2ft by 2ft, which is already going to dominate a 6×4 table!

Below is the plan view of what I need to build. In addition to the houses that are already designed, I think I will need the following (with the colour coded box in the plan view),

• Gate and gate house (black boxes)
• Tall buildings with shop fronts on the ground floor and/or ‘cafe’ area (green and pink boxes)
• Bell tower (orange box)
• Town hall (purple box)
• Church with bell tower (brown box)

The roads are the black squiggles, the piazza the red squiggles and the green squiggles will be the rock face/ grass banks of the side of the hill.