Tools and Supplies
How much you want to invest in building terrain for your games is up to you. The great news is that you can put together great looking terrain for relatively little money. The most basic building blocks are very inexpensive. In fact, much of what you will use is probably already in your house.
Bits Box
The first thing you will want to get is a plain box. This is your "bits" box. Whenever you come across something that you think will be useful later, put it in this box. This can result in a lot of stuff being collected. Mine is not contained in a multi-drawer rolling storage unit with different drawers for different types of supplies.
Cardboard
After you have a bit box, begin looking for corrigated cardboard. This has two uses.
- Basing Material
- Building Material
Basing Material
When using cardboard for any piece of terrain, you must remember that moisture and glue will warp the cardboard. You can minimize the warping by gluing two pieces of cardboard together, making sure that the corrigation is set at right angles. There will still be some warping but you can straighten much of this out by gently bending the cardbord back into shape.
Depending on where your friends and relations do their shopping, you may already have shaped and prepared basing material. Some of the cardboard inserts used by Amazon.com to help protect their books comes in two standard sizes (9"x12" and 12"x16").
Building Material
Corrigated cardboard has several advantages. It is easy to cut and shape into walls and is inexpensive. Quite often, you can get the material for free. It also is also surprisingly easy to make simple end joints (by glueing one side to the other) or by rabbeting the edges of cardboard to overlap the edge of the adjoining piece, covering up to visible corrigation. (This technique is detailed on this part of the Major General's Wargames Page.) Again, the great difficulty in working with this material is its tendancy to warp when painted or glued. Gluing the cardboard to a base can help.
Thin Cardboard
This is the material used for most food packaging. You can use this material for roofing buildings and other structures and making floors.
Twigs and Pebbles
If you look around your yard, you can find a lot of material that will blend into your terrain well. Twigs make great logs and trees (although you will need some lichen or foliage clusters to make them look alive) and pebbles can stand in for boulders.
Straws and Bottle Tops
Straws and stirrers of various sizes make excellent pipes, pumps, stovepipes. The "sport-tops" to bottles make excellent bases for steam engines.
Thin Plywood and Wood Corner Blocks
Clementine Oranges are sold in small boxes made of very thin plywood and braced at the corners with wooden blocks. If you carefully disassemble these, you can use the wood (so long as it hasn't been warped too badly) in making buildings and the corner blocks for bracing roofs.
The Things You Have to Pay For
There are some necessary bits that you will have to pay for: a utility knife, paint and/or flocking (loose green or other colored particles), and glue. Using flocking of different colors can add depth and complexity to your terrain. Tallus (fake rocks) are also available. Balsa wood is also great for making buildings or other structures.
Traditionally, gamers tend to look for this material in hobby and train stores. I have found an even better place to shop for material is a store specializing in dollhouses. Not only do they have all of the material described above, it also carries balsa that is pre-shaped, furniture that is roughly to scale with PEG miniatures (quarter inch scale).
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Glue
Learn from my mistakes. As I have mentioned elsewhere, white glue is a great building material. Because it's water-based, it seeps into wood and cardboard to create a strong bond. It dries clear and most of us learned how to use it in kindergarten. Yet, these same properties can give you uneven results. Even balsa wood and heavy card will warp under the stress of too much water-based material. While stick glue allows you greater control of the ammount, thus reducing the chance of warping, it is not as easy to work with if you are not on a flat surface.
The answer? Rubber cement. Don't underestimate the usefulness of this readily available product. While I would still recommend a dedicated hobby glue or white glue for bonding pieces of wood together, having rubber cement can make the difference between a great looking project and a so-so one. In the case of the water tower pictured here, the wood has been glued together using regulare white glue and modeling glue. When gluing the thin strips of wood to a piece of durder to make the water container, however, I used rubber cement to avoid any warping of the wood or cardboard. Likewise, the base was flocked by brushing rubber cement onto a piece of corrigated cardboard and sprinkling it with flocking (I have found flocking loves rubber cement.). The tower itself was then attached using four dots of white glue. If you compare these results with my earlier attempt to build a sodbuster's cabin, you can clearly see the difference (especially in the cabin's roofline).
Terrain
Sodbuster's Cabin and Field of Grain
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This sodbuster's cabin is made of cardboard on a 9"x12" cardboard base. The pump in the yard is made of two pieces of thin straw and a piece of a 3"x5" card as a handle. The field is made of cardboard on a 12"x16" cardboard base. The grain is a piece of coarse doormatting dusted with flocking that has been sprayed with diluted white glue. The sides of the mat have been hidden with spackle.
Cemetary
This cemetary is made of several layers of cardboard built up to make a hill on a 9"x12" cardboard base. The grave markers are made out of pieces of popsickle sticks (These are made by scoring both sides of a popsicle stick with an utility knife and then breaking the stick along that line.). I used a .05 pen to write the names on the grave markers. The tree is a stick that has been built up with foliage clusters. The hedge is a green scrub pad that has been brushed lightly with glue and dipped into flocking. More flocking was glued directly to the top of the hedge. The open grave marker is Graveyard Greg, a PEG fan who found his name on a gravestone in the Doomtown CCG.
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Corral
This corral is made of cut balsa wood mounted on a 9"x12" cardboard base. The sheep were purchased at a dollhouse supply store.
Return to Top
The distinction between this section and the last is fuzzy (After all, there is a sodbuster cabin leading off the terrain section.). What distinguishes one from the other is that the buildings pictured below have finished interiors. I got a lot of help in builidng these from Gary Chalk's "Wooden Buildings for the Wild West and Civil War" in issue 160 of Wargames Illustrated (Chalk covers Adobe buildings in issues 146 and 148. Issue 156 has an article detailing a gorgeous riverboat.) and from the Vulture Gulch set from MicroTactix. Both have buildings that can be used for inspiration. Chalk's article even includes templates. The MicroTactix buildings can be used as templates as well, as is evidenced by this outhouse. All the buildings have floors made out of the type of cardboard used in cereal boxes. In all but the stable, the floorboards are drawn on with a thin-tipped pen. In the stable, the floor has been flocked using rubber cement. Click on the picture of the building you want to see.Buildings
