The Great Terrain Build-Off

As both Merlin and myself look at the games we play and assess what we have, he decided he needed more terrain, especially buildings. I suggested looking at the Warhammer Townscape set, as many of the buildings are suitable for fantasy and medieval games.

He decided to start with Building 19 in the set, it being a fairly straightforward build. Rather than just encourage him I decided to challenge him to a build-off, both of us producing our own take on the building and blogging our results (see his build here).

Now I have built this building before. Twice. Many years ago I made it for Orc's Drift, it's building number 2 in those games, you can see it top left in the following picture.

Bloodbath at Orc's Drift

My first build was made from really thick card that we used to get supplies in at work, (think 'chipboard', in the Wylock sense rather than the UK sense, but about 5mm thick). 

I made it again much more recently at 60% the size for 15mm gaming. You can see this version here.

My second version used thick card from packaging from a well known online retailer and major South American River. The small size of the model meant I could get away with thinner materials. 

For this challenge build I'm going for foam board. 

I was tempted to alter the look of the building considerably. I want some crude drystone buildings for a future project and this seemed a good opportunity to experiment. However, on reflection that doesn't seem to fit the spirit of the challenge, so I'll make it as close to the original as possible. 

Well, I say I'll be sticking close to the original, but I'm changing a couple of features. As I mentioned in the 15mm build, the chimney could be shifted to a wall. I'm thinking that the extension might be a bake house, so a chimney shared by the main building and the bake house sounds sensible.  Thinking about the purpose of the build will help me when it comes to painting and adding little details.  A bake house will need lots of fuel for the ovens, and perhaps sacks of flour.

I also noticed that the Townscape includes an optional lean-to. I have no recollection of this on the Orc's Drift model, and I must have missed it in the Townscape when I built the 15mm version (it is on a different page, my excuse and I'm sticking to it). Lean-tos were a common extra on these card models, it's pretty much up to the builder where they go. One of the side walls is blank, and I was originally planning to put it there. I cut the wall height down so it fit. But once I'd built up the foam board shell I decided it looked better on the end wall opposite the bake house. 

Construction is pretty straightforward. Rather than print off the relevant pages I set the pdf to 100% and measured on the screen. I did fudge some of the measurements as they were odd, leading me to suspect that the pdf is slightly out of scale. Ah well. 

My foam board is a tatty bit of old advertising, donated by T'Other One (thanks!), I think they were throwing them out at his work.  Any slight areas of damage will be hidden in the texturing. The board is 5mm thick, so the side walls were reduced in length by 10mm and the front wall of the bake house and the lean-to were likewise shortened.

The pieces cut out and ready for assembly 

Joints were glued with tacky glue and temporally pinned. I built up the main building, the bake house and the lean-to as separate sub-assemblies. The main building got triangular off-cuts to strengthen and true the joints, and the two additions got a length of foam board across the back. 

Sub assemblies

These were then glued in place, after testing different positions for the lean-to. 

Trialling the lean-to on the side wall.

The lean-to on the back wall.

Currently the glue is drying. The next step will be the chimney, probably made out of an offcut of XPS, and card for the base of the roof, then texturing and adding the timbers before my favourite stage, tiling. 

I found the following blog with a very good build of this cottage about half-way down this post.  Not only has he produced an excellent result, he has done the same for ALL the Warhammer Townscape buildings.  I have found a couple of interesting techniques I plan to try on this build, but I won't say what yet, don't want to give all my secrets away to Merlin quite yet.