Terrain: Planning

..right, let's try that again. Last post, I rambled on about how great homemade terrain was and shared a handful of examples of the sort of thing I meant. I mentioned how Star Wars: Legion and Infinity were showing up Warhammer 40K as speculative fiction wargames, by remembering that colours other than black, grey, or stained orange exist. I completely failed to mention why I was rambling about terrain.

Same photo as last time; some pieces I bodged together in 2019.

I've always wanted to have a set of terrain to match my armies. I wanted a green and verdant fantasy board for my Warhammer Empire (and when I get around to sprucing them up, I'll do just that), back in the day. These days, I don't play any fantasy games (despite having about four army projects. yeesh.), but I have managed to amass quite the pile of Mantis Warriors.  I've given them ochre desert bases, and I'd like to start accumulating a set of desert terrain to go with them.

How do I do that?

Well, I have done a couple of pieces already. Two electricity generators or power stations, some kind of squat hab-building, and some chem-storage pieces. I'd like the expand on this, adding more hab-building structures to develop into a village of sorts. Despite my ramblings about home-built terrain, I'll probably buy a few MDF kits to make this quicker and significantly easier, as I totally lack the skill to cut things in a straight line.

The board of a game I played in May 2019; almost none of this is mine!

While I do live in Australia, I live in the comfortable green urban bits; I totally lack imagination for desert terrain. My mind kind of goes slowly blank and I burble about 'rocks?' and 'you know, the... temple... thingies in the Sudan. you know the ones'. So it might be a good idea to see what Professional Terrain Layout Guys think could be good. Let's look at some old rulebooks for ideas. This article over at Goonhammer also has some good points, especially about placement.

Warhammer Fantasy Battle 3rd Edition suggests an 8' x 4' table divided into eight sections, each with about 1-4 pieces of terrain each, for a total of 8-32(!) pieces of terrain. A d100 table determines the pieces. While not desert-y, this should still give me an idea of the kinds of terrain that make wargaming interesting, walls and farms and so forth:

• 01-17 - Hill: 6x6"
• 18-22 - Steep-sided hill: 6x6"
• 23-25 - 12" of ditch in 4" sections
• 26-37 - 12" of hedge in 4" sections
• 38-44 - 12" of wall in 4" sections
• 45-64 - Wood/orchard, 6x6"
• 65-67 - Debris/difficult ground, 6x6"
• 68-70 - Ruins (.i. difficult ground + obstacles), 6x6"
• 71-72 - Small building + garden enclosed by hedge, total area 6x6"
• 73-74 - Small building + garden enclosed by wall, total area 6x6"
• 75-77 - Three small buildings within 12x12" area
• 78-79 - Small farmyard - farmhouse + one/two sheds, enclosed by wall, total area 12x12"
• 80-81 - Inn + stable + walled courtyard, total area 12x12"
• 82-84 - Pond/lake (impassable), diameter 6"
• 85-89 - Section of river (with additional setting up notes which I'm skipping here)
• 90-93 - Bog/difficult ground, 6x6"
• 94-96 - 24" of ancient/agricultural earthworks, equivalent to walls, total area 8x8"
• 97-00 - Graveyard, total area 6x6"

That last obviously ties into Fantasy necromancy rules a bit, but that's no reason to ignore it...

Necropolis of El Bagawat
© Alamy Stock Photo (Photographer:Stefan Espenhahn) 

Let's see what else my rulebook collection offers. Next up is the Warhammer: Battle Book from 5th edition. While determining the number of piece is... weird (one each and then one side can declare they are done can result in a weirdly empty board), the chart itself is a vastly simplified 2d6:

• 02 - Deep river/lake, impassable. A deep river must have a crossing point for each half of the table it crosses.
• 03 - Shallow river (crossable at 1/4 move) or stream (1/2); rivers have the same rules as above.
• 04 - Difficult ground (bog/debris/soft sand/shallow pit/rocks/scrubland)
• 05 - Steep hill, impassable cliffs on 0+ sides
• 06 - Wood
• 07 - Hill or Wood
• 08 - Hill
• 09 - 12" of walls/fencing/hedges/ditches
• 10 - Single house/tower + 6" of adjoining walls/hedges
• 11 - Village - 2-4 buildings + 12" of adjoining walls/hedges
• 12 - Very difficult ground - quarry/swamp/thick wood/briars

I'm terrible at probabilities, but it's obvious that this has compressed a lot of the flavour out of the 3rd edition table in favour of simplicity, and in exchange allows players to decide what entries mean for themselves. The 'village' entry covers most of the 'inn/farm' sorts of entries, for example.

Adrian Wood's classic ork army, in front of a village. Note the colours.
© Games Workshop, 1996

Let's move away from generic lists for a moment and check out the desert-specific table in Warhammer 6th edition. It offers several ways to general the amount of terrain, including a similar 'divide the board' system as 3rd edition, except that boards these days are 6x4', not 8x4' and they suggest only one(!) piece per section, so we'd be looking at a mere six or so pieces from the following:

• 02 - Deep ravine - very difficult ground/impassable. May not extend over half the table.
• 03 - Wadi (dry riverbed) - difficult ground
• 04 - Boulders/loose rocks - difficult ground/hard cover
• 05 - Jebel (rocky hill) - difficult ground/impassable on some edges
• 06 - Sand dune - difficult ground
• 07 - Jebel OR sand dune
• 08 - Palm grove/cacti fields - difficult ground, soft cover
• 09 - Single ruined building + walls, gateway
• 10 - 2-4 buildings - additional rolls add a building to the group
• 11 - Oasis - impassable water + boulders/trees
• 12 - Quicksand - destroys 2d6 models per turn in the area (!)

These are great. They give some flavour for the generic terrain results from 5th edition (which are very similar to the 'Realms of Men' table in this book). Instead of hills, we have scruffy, difficult terrain hills. Forests are less common, but we have rocky area terrain.

The quicksand could be fun to make, but I doubt I'd use those effects in any modern games!

Sudan
© Another World Adventures

Okay, what else do we have... Oh, I could look at some Warhammer 40,000 rulebooks, that might be an idea.

Second edition suggests at least 2d6 pieces on the board (should be at least D6+6 if you ask me, but okay) and notes that the following are 'pieces':

• A single hill, building, marsh, lake, pool or section of woods/jungle/petrified forest
• Two large items - craters, rock spires, big trees, monolithic pillars, boulders, pylons, wrecks
• Four ruined wall sections
• Four or five individual medium-sized trees/bushes, rocks/oil drums/crates, craters
• 12" long continuous section of crevasse/wall/hedge/monorail/stream/river

Ooh, a petrified forest could be fun. I also enjoy the massive tree pieces that my local gaming store has, which are presumably intended for Star Wars: Legion (or conflicts in California, I guess). Stuff that emphasises science fiction weirdness and the alien ecologies and societies (even if some are human) in the Imperium, that's the ticket.

Logan's World, from pp.224-228 of Rogue Trader
© Games Workshop

Let's turn our attention to 3rd edition. There's a lot to love about this edition, as it stripped away a lot of nonsense - but long before worse elements were added back in (looking directly at you, 7th edition). While it does feature some great tables for Ice, Agri, and Death Worlds, they did lack a table for deserts - but the Ash Wastes terrain list is pretty close, so we'll start there.

The 'divide the table' rules offer 24" chunks, so about 6 areas. Each of these gets D3 pieces of terrain, for a total of 6-18 pieces of terrain:

• 02 - Toxic river - impassable; may not extend over half the table; one crossing point per table half crossed
• 03 - Sludge stream/canal - difficult ground, maybe some cover. Fine for vehicles.
• 04 - Sludge beds, 9x9" - no cover, difficult ground except to vehicles
• 05 - Detritus, 12x12" - difficult ground to anything not infantry (which get cover)
• 06 - Rocks, 12x12" - difficult ground
• 07 - 2 or 3 ash dunes - difficult ground/hills
• 08 - Craters - cover, not difficult ground
• 09 - Chem wastes, 9x9" - difficult ground, non-vehicles can take damage
• 10 - 1-4 old ruins/buildings + 12" of walls/fences
• 11 - Mine - 2-4 buildings + 12" of walls/fences
• 12 - Settlement - 2-4 buildings + 12" of walls/fences

The Ice World chart is similar, offering crevasses, refineries, and research stations, but the effects are similar. While crevasses are probably perfect for the desert terrain I want to build, it's a bit difficult to add the 'down' element to a flat board, so I'll probably save that for the magical future where I can build an actual board.

The sludge/toxic elements don't really work, but we can easily cross reference with the Warhammer 6th edition desert table above to see what the desert-y equivalents are. Alternatively, there's nothing stopping me from building some gross waste canals on the desert board, filled with the polluted waste of some off-board ork city-factory.

Yeah, I wish
© Warzone Studio

Epic 40,000 has a fairly odd terrain generation system. While it divides the board into chunks (6 for a 6x4' board) with a D3 per chunk, as is becoming familar (this one is 6-18 pieces), the actual determination of terrain is a weird D66 table. As 6mm terrain ideas aren't as useful for coming up with stuff for a 40K tabletop, let's just list what they have for a desert table and see what's nifty:

• Complex: A collection of buildings such as a desalination plant, hydroponics installation, refinery, mine head, derrick, workers' hovels
• Cliff: Hill with 1+ impassable sides
• Hills, possibly with dangerous terrain slopes of soft sand
• Dune, possibly long but low
• Rock spires
• Oasis: Pool + vegetation
• Oil pit: Counts as marshland
• Roads
• Quicksand: Pools which count as marshland or some fluid moves below the surface, so a hazardous/impassable river
• Sandstorm (more of a board-wide weather effect than terrain)

In the ice table, they suggest research stations and entrances to underground cities, both of which are also appropriate to desert worlds.

Oil sludge pit
© Ascension Technologies, 2019

Alright, so I have some good ideas now for terrain stuff, and some of it is even desert-themed or generic enough that I could bend it to my will. I'm also beginning to get an idea of how many pieces I'd roughly want. Let's start to put it all together.

Amount: 6-24. Some pieces can double up (a tank can be a single piece or part of an industrial complex), but I want enough variety that I won't just use all the pieces every game.

Archetypes: If we stick to broadish categories, the list of terrain pieces looks something like this:

• Hills (dunes/with cliffs/jebel/mesa)
• Walls (hedges/ditches/pipelines)
• Wood (cactus field/orchard/petrified forest/palm grove)
• Rocky area terrain (boulders/debris/craters/half-excavated archaeological sites/pillars)
• Lake-ish (quicksand/oil pit/oasis/swamp/bog/chem wastes)
• Ruins (wrecked vehicles)
• Buildings (singular/plural) (mine/settlement/research station/refinery/farm/city entrance/tower)
• Roads/tracks (dirt/sealed) - especially important to give context to buildings/settlements!
• Croplands (gardens/graveyard/scrubland)
• Scatter terrain (trash/barricades/civilians/rubble/autonomous drones/cyber-tumbleweed/grox)

Numbers: Here's where I get a bit unstuck. I suppose at the very minimum I need several hills (dunes/cliffs/&c), a number of walls (separate and attached), some difficult area terrain (rocky/wood/lake-ish) and some roads, but how many would roughly cover the random generated tables above?

I need someone who is good at basic probability calculus. (Or to not be finishing this post at 2317, but the dune-ship has sailed on that one.)

Tank of gamergirl bathwater I finished a few days ago

Still, all this gives me something rough to work with. I'll pick through some websites, terrain tutorials, and the giant pile of rubbish I'm hoarding in my workroom, see if I can't put together a list of 6-20 terrain pieces that will cover all the above, be fun to build, be fun to play and are within my limited capabilities...