Chaos Castle Pt. 1 - Structure

What fantasy/sci fi world is complete without a glittering castle, polysteel bastion, fortified artillery position, dark ziggurat or twisted alcazar with all the trimmings? The answer is none, in case I hadn't clued you in to the rhetorical nature of that question. With this in mind I've been planning to show you how to build one for quite a while but wasn't quite sure what I wanted to make - castles/strongholds make very large terrain items and can be hard to store, so it's unlikely that it'll be too large, too tall or that you'd have more than one (unless they were small keeps or the like, or if you had a massive room/shed/real castle to house them in). Pondering this I decided that I wanted the castle to fit in with my recently made terrain board set - stony, cold, very little life, god(s) forsaken, constantly stricken with bizarre weather events and so on.

Deciding that I was spending too much time idly thinking I went to work about the house, cleaning out the spare room and garage so as to appease the lords of domesticity. Just as I was considering what I was going to make my castle from I came across a couple of boxes with polystyrene liners - remnants of some recently purchased electronic goods. Lining them up next to the recycling bin I decided to take a closer look. After pulling them apart I could see a future in these polystyrene lumps and subsequently saved them for the construction of my new edifice. If you don't have polystyrene suitable for your building/castle/dungeon/giant pants I recommend that you chat with your local electronics store or tech college - they usually have a tonne of this stuff and rarely do they have any use for it.




Before putting the pieces of the castle together there was a bit of work to be done. Each piece had to fit perfectly at a 90 degree angle to the others, so some cutting was required. When cutting polystyrene there are a couple of methods - the most popular being the 'bread knife' and 'hot wire' techniques. I used the former but many swear by hot wire cutters, they tend to be cleaner and very fast (but create a terrible smell). Using a bread knife is slower and you have to be careful not to tear chunks off, it is also a bit messy but it's the cheaper option (assuming you have a serrated/bread knife) and works perfectly well. Before you cut make sure that you've got the angle correct - once cut there is no going back.



NOTE: If using a knife don't push or force it through - use a gentle sawing motion instead, let the serrations do the work. If you're using a hot wire cutter make sure that you're cutting on something not likely to melt/burn easily. For both method make sure you're outside - the hot wire will make a horrible smell and the knife will leave a mess (I cut with a plastic bag beneath the polystyrene as it captures all the waste and makes life much easier).


Above: All angles correct and ready to put together.

Once all the cutting was done it was time to line up the pieces and see how they fitted together. To do this I used a few double pointed toothpicks, though you could use cocktail sticks, skewers or anything similar. Stick a couple on each surface to be joined and then carefully slide them together. Make sure that you do this BEFORE you add any glue, else you won't be able to change them around/modify them.





Above and Below: If you look closely you'll notice that there are some rough parts inbetween the 'pillars' at the front - the same goes for the pieces of the side. This is where I've used to knife to flatten unwanted protusions off, making the walls look more consistent. I'll be using filler later to smooth these over, give the foam some texture and to ensure that the foam doesn't melt when I undercoat it (more about that in another installment). The small pieces of foam in front are parts that I cut off of the pieces of foam that I didn't want - they're going to help by continuing the line of the half pillars and filling the gap.



Below: The final product. I was excited about how this was going to turn out but now I'm psyched - unpainted and factory white it's looking cool, but once it's rendered, detailed and painted it'll be a different ball game altogether. In keeping with the spirit of how I believe this hobby should be approached there will be as much recycling and as little monetary expenditure as possible, relying instead upon creativity and items we all have lying around (though I am going to scrounge through my parts box for quite a few bits and pieces).



In case you were wondering the back of the castle is not going to be a wall...



The next installment will demonstrate how to base, add detail and get the castle ready for painting.

Cheers!

Terrain Boards Pt 1 - Getting started

Introduction

So you've spent a tonne of time painting an army, hundreds of dollars of miniatures that have been painted and are resplendent with detail. It stands to reason that you should have a lovely battlefield upon which to wage a holy war or a bloodthirsty onslaught. Terrain and games boards are underrated, they really add detail and interest - you've spent so long building and painting a host, it makes sense that they get to play on a sweet battlefield.

There are many methods available to make terrain suitable for tabletop gaming which, depending upon the application, can be great to look at but not easy to work with, or good to work on and look at but very expensive and inflexible. With this in mind the method proposed in this tutorial is based around price, flexibility, simplicity and good aesthetic.







What you'll need

The great thing about this method is the average price, depending on how much you want to spend you can have each game board for around $10. The examples shown in this tutorial were cheap as chips and look great (in my humble opinion). Anyway, back to what you'll need:

PVA Glue (don't buy PVA from specialist suppliers, get the stuff from your local hardware store [they're exactly the same])
Chipboard sheets (the size depends on what you want, the ones used in this tutorial [900 x 450 x 12mm {3' x 1.5' x 1/2"}] are available from most hardware stores pre cut and can be arranged together to make larger boards easily)
A larger, used paintbrush
Plaster or Filler (cheap wood filler is great, tough, fast setting and easily mouldable)
Rocks and/or Gravel
Lots of Cardboard (different thicknesses are handy)
Paint
Newspaper (put it under boards you're working on to protect furniture and floors from glue, plaster, paint and the inevitable crud that comes with terrain making)
Stanley/Modelling Knife and Scissors(kitchen shears are the best)
Undercoat spray paint (make sure it's matt spray, not gloss)
Flock, polystyrene, static grass, barrels, walls, barricades or anything else you'd like to add






Getting started

First of all you should have a good work area that isn't in the way and try to make sure it has good circulation (all the different things you'll be using tend to smell when they dry, it's always good to have fresh air when working with glues/paints/solvents etc.). You'll also need somewhere outside that you can spray undercoat each of the boards and you'll need to leave them there to dry.




Once you've set up your work area you can get started. There are a few things you should keep in mind when making your boards -

Storage - How and where are you going to store them? Do you have enough room?

Size - How big do you want them to be, how many will you have, what configurations might you use?

Height - This relates to storage and strength, if you make tall boards they'll be hard to stack on smaller/tighter shelves. Taller terrain will also break more easily, so its better to make tall terrain items separately (this also aids in flexibility re: desired placement on the battlefield).

Tightness of terrain - How close do you want difficult ground to be together? Too close and it could makes bigger games difficult, for my boards I've put them mostly in the corners and have limited them to one terrain item per board (this means you can turn them around to make central areas with lots of terrain, evenly dispersed terrain items or a wide plain/valley for bigger pitched battles).

Theme - Boards tend to go together in themed sets, i.e. one particular style of terrain and colour scheme for each set of boards. With this in mind you should choose what style you want before you begin and perhaps try making a small terrain item (a hill, rocky cairn etc.) in said style to see if you like it. The ones in this tutorial are old, bluish, stony battlegrounds with tufts of life clinging to what little arable soil there is. You could do something similar or completely different - lush green pastures with hedgerows, a marsh with rushes and waterlife, snowy drifts criss crossed with lava streams, the mortar scarred remains of a distant planet, a barren desert...the only limit is your imagination.

When you've get everything you need and a place to work you can start Part 2 and begin putting it all together.

Terrain Boards Pt 5 - Details, Details

If you've got a board put together, painted and completed you can now add detail. This can be almost anything - grass, bushes, patches of soil, broken shields, rusted weapons, corpses, skeletons and a thousand other things. In this tutorial I've just added some static grass and a few small bushes. I could've added some more of the aforementioned detail but I want to use this particular terrain with both fantasy and science fiction game systems, so I didn't want to add shields, spears, guns etc. as they wouldn't be suitable for both. As mentioned in Pt 2, you can add submerged/buried items before you undercoat the board and then paint over them once you've finished (half buried vehicles, weapons, barricades and so forth work well), or you can paint items and then glue them on when the board is finished.


Flocking

Flock is any kind of loose artificial grass, soil, gravel or similar that is used in miniature modeling and terrain. In this tutorial I've used static grass/flock, which leaves a great 'fuzzy' 3D grass effect, but you could also use regular flock (usually green coloured bits of sawdust) or in fact anything that leaves you with your desired aesthetic. Miniature specialist stores have many different terrain items and varieties of flock, but I've found that model railway stores have bigger ranges in addition to loads of other terrain items and materials. Either way take a look around and see if you can find examples so that you'll know what they look like.






To apply flock you need only put some PVA in the areas that you want to flock and then sprinkle flock on top. Always put on a little extra to make sure all the gaps are filled. A bit of this will be too much and you can brush/blow it off once the glue dries and over time some flock will naturally come off with wear, but this is nothing to be worried about. Optionally you can tip it off on to a piece of card and reuse it but I don't bother as it is generally messy and difficult.

The photos below are an example of how much I applied to the glue.






Below: Images of the finished flocking after having any excess blown off. There are also images of a couple of matching boards that I've made as part of this set (9 boards in total). A good set of boards can be arranged into many different shapes, widths and lengths - the total area of this set is 9' x 4.5' (2700mm x 1350mm).





The glossy reflection from the river is easy to achieve - make a mix of two parts PVA and one part water and paint over any area you want to make glossy/shiny and then leave to dry. Repeat this process as many times as you like to get a deeper, glossier surface. For this river I used 5 coats, for snow I usually use 1 or 2, for deeper ponds/lakes I usually just pour the PVA/water mix in straight and let it level off. This will provide for a deep, glossy look but will take much longer to dry as it is much thicker. You also have to make sure that the water feature has edges at you'll need to contain the mix and make sure it doesn't spill out.



Above: The collapsed mine is the corner off of a packing crate that has been cut, PVA glued, rendered and painted like the rest of the boards. Be mindful that PVA'd polystyrene takes longer to dry than cardboard, so in order for it to adhere properly it's best to leave it overnight. The jagged steps attached to the left of it are rendered cardboard and a few select stones.




Once it's all dry and you've removed the excess you're ready to play. When stored try to keep the boards in a cupboard/behind a screen/under a sheet, so as to avoid gathering dust, and store out of direct sunlight as the boards will tend to discolour. You could also apply a coat of matt varnish but I find it to be expensive and it ruins the look of the boards by leaving a slight sheen.

I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial, please comment and let me know what you thought. If you've got any requests for tutorials let me know aswell, I'm always happy to make more terrain and show you all how.

Cheers!