Your First Piece of Terrain

This article originally appeared in Issue 06 of The Campaigner, published in 2013. The issue is still available as digital download or in limited print stock.


By Owen Top

Getting started in a new hobby can be a tricky business, and getting started in a new aspect of a hobby you already enjoy can be just as hard. Sometimes I think that’s why so many people never make the jump from building tiny plastic men, pushing them around the table and rolling dice to see who dies to making tiny buildings for the tiny plastic men to fight over.

It can be hard to know where to start. So here’s some advice for people who want to get into terrain making. And you should all want to get into terrain making, because using terrain makes every game much more epic. To that end, here is some useful advice.

Your First Piece of Terrain

Start small. You’re not sure what you’re doing, and you’re not sure if you will be any good. You’re not even sure you’ll enjoy this. So don’t start by deciding to build a four-foot square section of the death star in 28mm scale, with working lights, fully operational lifts, and a button which makes Darth Vader sound very disappointed in his fleet commanders. Start with something realistic. Something small. Not something too small – that’d be fiddly and you’d need magnifying visors and tweezers. Something that’d fit on a 20cm square base should be fine. Maybe even something which would fit on a CD.

Start with something useful. Terrain is there for a reason. That reason is to change the tactics and strategy required to win the game. Terrain can do this in a number of ways – it can obscure lines of sight, provide cover, block lines of advance or slow down troop movement, as well as provide some sort of objective to fight over. You need to build something which will do these things. It doesn’t need to do all of them, but it must do some of them. A small building is a good place to start, or maybe some standing stones or fences.

Your First Piece of Terrain

Start with something simple. Until you are confident with your tools and your skills, you don’t want to go off the deep end. Even when you are confident, you might not want to go off the deep end. So you should start with something fairly simple. Like a small building. But not a small building which is gradually being transformed into a giant, slavering, rabid wildebeest by forces beyond man’s comprehension. Sure, that’d be cool, but it’d also be hard. That can be your next project, when you’re more confident.

Start with something for your army. Nothing gives home-team advantage like themed terrain. It’s always more fun to have something to fight over that your tiny plastic men would really want to fight over. You can tie your buildings in with your army, and make things match. This gives your games more character and story. Instead of defending the ancestral empty shoebox, Lord Jean-Luc Crier Pantalon can defend his ancestral home. And when the bad guys start blowing it up, well, things just got personal.

Article continues in Issue 06. The issue is still available as digital download or in limited print stock.

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