Marvel Crisis Protocol by Lawnor

Terrain is expensive, and it takes up time to build and paint it that we’d often rather invest in painting toy soldiers or actually playing games.  As such I’ve dabbled in papercraft terrain before, and I think MCP is the perfect game to use it.  Here’s a few pieces I had to hand.

If you google “papercraft [insert item here]” you’ll find plans for most things in varying degrees of complexity.  I’ve found lots of files to experiment with.  The main issue is scale, but you can tweak that before printing to some extent, depending on what your printer can handle.  You never really know for sure what you’re getting until it’s printed out.

If you have image files and you want to control the exact size of what prints out Gerry mentioned a great program during a Gerry Can on flags a while back: Ifranview.  It lets you tell the printer the exact dimensions you want a file to come out.  It doesn’t work with PDFs, but screen caps and the Snipping Tool can help with that.

They’re very simple to make.  Just print the files using a convenient printer, often located as a place of work.  Glue the paper to the inside of a pizza or cereal box using a pritt stick, or a glue you trust not to dampen and warp the paper, or affect it’s finish.  Let it dry plenty before cutting it out.  Allow larger tabs than the file suggests.  You can always trim off later, but you can’t grow them.  Score along the outside of the fold.  Score along the inside too if you can, but be careful not to score too deeply.  You don’t want it coming off.  Fold and dry fit the whole thing, before gluing it together with superglue.  Pritt stick isn’t really strong enough and PVA takes too long to dry.

Once it’s assembled and dried, these card backed printed shapes are fairly sturdy.  The ones in this image are many years old and happily take being thrown in a box or having plastic models climb all over them.

With access to a printer, a few pizzas in your belly, and an hour or twos work you can fill most of a table with papercraft terrain for minimal cost or effort.  Google and see what else you can find.  Share links for good stuff below please.  I’m on the lookout for a good wheelie bin or an appropriate street bin.  They’d make good size 1 terrain, and they’re basically boxes in shape so they’ll be easy to build, and sturdy too.

Oh, and see that mat in that image, and with the police cars below?  That’s printed on paper.  I have access to an A1 CAD printer at work and Ifranview let me print in 3 foot strips.  I found an image of an MCP mat online and was able to print it in two strips.  It’s not exactly high res, but it’s good enough for a test of concept, and it’ll be fine once it’s covered in terrain.  Maybe you know someone who has access to something similar?  If you have a quality image for me to print I’d be grateful for a copy.  Thanks.

My image was just grabbed from the Muse on Minis web store.  I’ll see about doing something less pirate-y for my next mat.  Does anyone know if AI art generators can be persuaded to make something suitable and at a high enough resolution?  Surely a challenge for Warren Meets Mat Meets AI Art.