On Terrain

A hundred years ago, there was a great series of DIY terrain articles in White Dwarf. I forget the name and even the year the articles came out, but if you ask anybody who has been in the hobby since the late '90s, they'll remember them: a bunch of articles on Lizardmen jungle terrain, including a small village, a pond, some ruined temples on the edge of hills, and a giant castle to wrap the whole thing up.

The articles a smooth, easy to read, easy to follow and were at least one clear factor in my hoard of polystyrene nonsense that I collected in the last months of high school and early university, before a succession of moves meant that I scattered them to the four winds.

Now that I'm back in the hobby (and have been for about two years now!), I want to figure out how and what to build to get a similar end result...

A few pieces I finished in 2019, made from... stuff.

These days, Games Workshop sells a lot of bespoke plastic terrain kits, including some spectacularly ugly forests but also some really sturdy and fun industrial pieces. Games Workshop's rulesets also give weirdly specific rules to terrain blocks in their games, including such gems as 'Imperial forces get bonuses next to statues! What do you mean, "other factions also have statues"? Don't be silly.' You'll see quite a number of the industrial pieces in the after action reports on this blog, as my regular opponent has a whole pile of 'em.

Unfortunately, these kits mean that White Dwarf articles rarely focus on building terrain any more - which makes sense, as Games Workshop sells terrain, so why encourage DIY? For me, though, the plastic kits, combined with the ubiquity of the 'grimdark' pseudo-Gothic architecture makes nearly every 40K board look the bloody same. A set of grey or grey-black spikey ruins, maybe a couple hills or a pile of rocks. It gets a bit tedious.

© Frontline Gaming, 2017.
No disrespect to Frontline Gaming; this is just what so many boards look like.

If you look at Infinity or Star Wars: Legion, you see a dazzling array of wargaming terrain. Infinity boards usually feature bright graffiti and billboards; Star Wars remembers that its setting includes ochre deserts and emerald jungles. Pretty much any time I see a Beyond the Gates of Antares board, it features bright colours and weird, alien plants.

© Game of Travel, 2018

Back in the day, 40K terrain may have been a bit silly awesome, but homemade terrain adds a touch to a game that just isn't the same with the stock plastics. The Tabletop Warlords, a Gates of Antares youtube channel, build all their own terrain, and their battles are vastly improved as a result. Matakishi's Tea House is an intense horde of inspiration and beautiful terrain, nearly all built from cork and other materials.

© Leadballoony, 2019

To be fair, I'm not advocating never purchasing any terrain. I intend to buy a whole bunch. It's just that it's better to broaden the vendors from which we buy, and mix it with things hacked together out of stuff. It's okay if sometimes a building comes out a bit wonky. Put some graffiti on it, and now it's an ork structure. Patch some corrugated iron over it and it's part of a slum.

..I seem to have gone off track. The reason I opened with the anecdote about the old Lizardmen terrain was to talk about how I wanted to use terrain generators to create a list of terrain to build, but I suspect that I've rambled on quite long enough. Stay tuned, star travellers...