Terrain of the Cave
You may have noticed the terrain on our gaming tables. Not to be immodest, but all of it is mine, and most of it is scratch-built.
The rock-terrain is made out of styrofoam. Styofoam has the advantage of being light and easy to cut with a hot wire cutter, which are cheap and easy to find.
One also doesn't usually have to buy styrofoam. Whenever you buy something big, it tends to come packed with styrofoam to protect it while it's in shipment. Regular shapes, like rectangles or big flat squares, are good for making terrain out of.
You can also get good rectangles of styrofoam at a crafts store. The downside is actually having to shell money out for it, but the upside is you get a lot of uniform pieces to work with.
After shaping the styrofoam, it helps to strengthen the bases if you glue thin cardboard to the underneath. Soda 12-pack boxes are ideal for this, as they're big enough to base quite a large piece, and you're apt to have them as a consequence of purchasing your favorite beverages. When you're letting the cardboard set to the styrofoam, put some heavy stuff on top. This keeps the combined cardboard-styrofoam piece from curling as the glue sets. Older editions of the 40K rules work well for this.
After your bottom pieces set, you can glue other pieces on as you see fit. Toothpicks can be broken up and used to help keep pieces together.
Once you nave your final shape put together, you want to paint a couple coats of white glue over all the exposed styrofoam. This strengthens the piece against wear. It also lets you spray paint the piece. Without the glue coating, styrofoam will melt if you spray-paint it. Do two coats at least, as the glue will pull away from spots as it dries, leaving bare spots if you do just one coat. Water the glue down a bit to make it easier to paint on.
After you've coated the piece, you can either paint it, or you can texture it with some crafting sand. Crafting sand is also available at craft stores. You just paint on a layer of glue, pour the sand over the piece, then pour off the excess sand onto some unfolded newspapers. You can then recover the excess and use it later.
Once that's dried, go ahead and paint. I just spray painted mine with a brick-red spray paint.
My first efforts at buildings were just made out of conveniently-sized cardboard boxes. I measured out some inner walls and window placements, and did a lot of very careful cutting with a hobby knife.
They're not bad looking, but I made the stories 2" each. GW terrain has 3" stories, so these aren't quite the right scale. I call them ratling tenements.
More recently, I made this thing.
My goal was to make an office block type building that could dominate the center of a table and block line of sight. I built it with interior walls, so drawing line of sight all the way through is virtually impossible.
The material, as with all the subsequent pieces, is foam-core posterboard, which you can get just about anywhere. Cutting the paper exterior with a hobby knife is easy enough, but the foam interior tends to bunch up. I don't have a good solution for that, but it still works well enough. As you can see, I use cardboard strips to help keep the pieces secure in place. I cut strips from the parts that already have fold creases in them - they just work better.
The interior is spray-painted with a flat gray primer. The exterior walls and ceiling are painted with a textured spray paint, to give it the look of concrete.
Then I did this sucker.
Same material and construction technique as the office block. I did something semi-smart and made templates for the wings of the building out of cardboard, so I could trace the shapes onto the posterboard instead of laboriously measuring them out.
The central tower is a separate piece from the base structure, so they can be used separately, or the base used without the tower.
Or the tower used without the base.
I also made bunkers based off the templates for the big facility building. These I painted by brush with craft paint. I like the result better.
Most recently, I built this sucker.
The intent had been to build a planetary defense laser, but the scale is a little small for something intended to engage cruisers in orbit, so it's more for shooting down landing craft.
The base is, again, foam core posterboard. I used the templates for the previous pieces, minus the ramparts at the top. The turret base and domed turret are styrofoam pieces I found at Michael's. The gun barrel is made from a couple pieces of PVC pipe I had laying around. The gun shield is just thin cardboard from a 12-pack box. I used some wood filling putty to fill in the gaps on the sides.
I enjoy making terrain, and it saves me money. It's time consuming, and you need a lot of space for it, but when you have it, you can have a great looking gaming table to play on!
