[Hobby] Terrain Building | Sandstone Buttes

I'm bored with Ruins. (This is not an unusual claim from a 40K player.)

I've decided to do something about it. (This is.)

There is shadow underneath this red rock

I've been bashing these out on and off since September. They're not very time consuming, but they do demand a certain level of grip strength and repetitive movement that I can't always sustain. The process is simple enough: 

1. chop a cardboard box into rough polygonal shapes about two inches across
2. stick those shapes into stacks with PVA glue
3. leave them to dry, i.e. put them on a shelf and forget about them until the cat ceaselessly meddling with them becomes a nuisance
4. cover them in DAS modelling clay - I used Terracotta because I wanted to make them look like sandstone
5. leave them to dry, i.e. put them back on the shelf for another three weeks and laugh as the cat tries to knock them around and fails
6. drybrush with an off-white acrylic paint - I used Citadel Bleached Bone because I had two pots of it for some reason

Come in under the shadow of this red rock

If it's not literally straight out of How To Make Wargames Terrain, Nigel Stillman's 1996 magnum opus, the spirit is certainly there. It's been fun going back to the DIY terrain approach - reminded me of the time I made a Trollblood village for Hordes tournaments out of soup pots, a carelessly abandoned broom, and about four packs of DAS modelling clay.

This stuff's brilliant, by the way. Inexpensive, air-drying, and available in red or white depending on the task at hand. It's heavy enough that terrain becomes less knock-about-able (that's not a word, but you know what I mean), and I theorise it should add some heft to any MDF building it happens to end up anchoring.

My next project is to make footprints bases for these and for my Necron buildings. I have a stash of 9" by 3" vinyl tiles (there are many benefits to a spouse in the construction and decorating trade), plus some smaller segmented ones - 3" by 3" squares and triangles. 

It should be possible to denote a UKTC board out of these. The big L ruins are ideally on on 8" square footprints, medium Ls on 8" by 6", small Ls on 8" by 4", and "new ruins" on 9" by 3". A few of these might end up an entire inch longer or shorter than they ought to be in one direction, but that's all right. The spirit of the thing, clear denotation of where units can hide and where they can't, is what matters. 

You know only a heap of broken images

It's not quite there (the tallest pieces don't really form a natural L on the 9" by 9" base), but there's potential here. Ultimately it doesn't have to be spot on. I'd like to avoid the experience of my test game with the Young Master, where I accidentally picked one of the worst GW layouts and set up a board that was far too deep, granting significant line of sight advantage to the already cranked Thousand Sons. I'd effectively created an asymmetric engagement for myself by not knowing or caring enough about the terrain: asymmetry is a fine thing when it's deliberate, but when it's accidental, bad times result.

Have you a little T. S. Eliot in your home?