So, I have been building terrain for several years now: hills, walls, shrines and the like. However, I’ve never built the standard foamcore ruined building for use on my gaming table. A few weeks ago, I started to correct that error.
The outside of my ruined building
I started, as I usually do, at the computer. I used my vector drawing program to draw a two-story wall section with window holes and such and printed it out for a template. That allowed me to trace my template on to some nice, non-bent and non-molested pieces of foamcore, which were actually difficult to find at my place. After I cut the shapes out of the foamcore, I glued them to the piece of MDF I had prepared before. The MDF was cut using a RotoZip saw and then it was sanded and smoothed with a combination of my crappy Dremel and a sanding block.
And the inside, and its happy rubble
Once my foamcore walls and base were all glued together, I started working on details. I’m a big fan of details in terrain. I glued a mixture of sand and kitty litter to the “broken” edges of the walls, and added it to the floors along with some other little pieces of sprue and plastic for rubble. I also glued down jagged pieces of plaster that I had prepared and broken earlier to give the look of broken concrete. I want to cover the floor and make it look convincing, but I still need the terrain to be usable. If I can’t stand a miniature on most of it, then it’s not a very playable piece of terrain, it’s mainly just an obstacle. Obstacles have their place on the gaming table, but not usually as an entire ruined building. Therefore, I’m careful about my placement of my debris.
Finally, I added pieces of plastic card and cereal card as molding and other architectural details to the structure. I believe that even simple foamcore ruins can be greatly improved with some simple window sills and other surface embellishments.
As it turns out, I thought I had something else going on this Saturday, but now I’m mainly free, so I’m going to see if I can finish the detailing on this piece and get it primed (if it’s not rainy) so I can start painting it. I’ll post more images once I get to that point.
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