I think I might be a terrain junkie

Hi and thanks for dropping by the Vault once again. I've been in hobby butterfly mode recently; whilst I should be cracking on and painting more Dark Eldar for Mayhem I rather rashly agreed to run a Frostgrave intro game or two at the club in the near future. So my hobby time has been split between building warbands from my Fantasy model collection, and sorting some terrain out.

And that's the focus of this post; the joy of collecting and putting together a good looking set of terrain on a gaming table. I'll share a few pictures and some ideas on where to pick stuff up.

Skull Mountain; courtesy of the local Aquarium shop

So I'm planning to run two Frostgrave games on two tables. I'll be using the "Mausoleum" scenario which needs a nice centre piece building for gribbly undead to spawn out of each turn.  One of the tables will be ruined city-esque whilst the other will be a bit more Summergrave to be honest (but hopefully it will still look cool).

I have never designed a whole table top from scratch (although having seen Alex aka Epitude Rusk's table set ups I have been very tempted to do so  (subject for another article!)).

First job this weekend then was to spray up some of the terrain which has been lounging as bare plastic for quite a while;

Superplay Keep, and some random pillars

GW ruined Wizard's Tower

GW Magewrath Throne

So a mix of pieces from different sources. I also sprayed up a bunch of the Superplay wall sections and towers although I won't need them for the set up I have in mind:

Bare plastic

Primed black

AP Grey spray over the black

It all needs highlighting, detailing, etc. but it will be good enough for the demo.

Which leads us nicely onto a couple of views of the layout I have in mind:

Overhead shot

Model eye view

Overhead 2

That will hopefully give a nice looking table to fight over. I noticed I forgot to add the ruined wizard's tower. Doh.

In terms of a shopping list there's items from a variety of sources:

• Deep Cut Studio's 3x3 cobblestone mat
• Galeforce 9 Gothic Ruins (lovely lovely pre-painted terrain, currently OOP, but rumoured to be coming back this year).
• GW Magewrath Throne
• GW Arcane Ruins (this is a fantastic set, it can make a nice set piece or be used for scatter terrain).
• Superplay Keep (this is from a kid's castle play set; it's actually nicely detailed and works well for 28mm. It's also ridiculously good value (at least when I picked it up).
• Poundland compass and courtyard stepping stones (yes they are actually stepping stones and yes they cost a pound each).

So the lesson from all this; look everywhere for terrain! The usual suspects make great stuff, but there are a lot of alternative sources and some of them are really good value.

The downside of terrain kits is a lot of it needs painting. And time spent painting terrain is less time spent painting models and playing games. Luckily we have a ready local source of painted terrain; the aquarium section at the local Garden Centre!

Table two has got bit of a templey, gardeny vibe to it.  No painting required here, so straight into the set up pictures.

Wonky overhead shot. Apologies if this makes you dizzy

Enter the Dragon!

There are those skulls again.

Nice shot of the shrine/mausoleum itself

The shopping list is a lot smaller here:

• GW battle mat
• Blue felt for the waterways and ponds (the old wargamer's standby)
• Couple of ruined scatter terrain pieces bought from Beatties many many years ago
• The majority of the pieces are from a couple of local aquarium/pet stores. 

The ranges seem to change in the aquarium store quite regularly and there are often sales on, so well worth looking at!

Hope you've enjoyed pictures and may be been inspired by something. If you've got favourite sources for (or pieces of) terrain drop a note in the comments below!