Building Tatooine in 20mm

If you've seen my 20mm Imperial force here you'll know I aim to be playing some games set in the Star Wars universe. Both Bodvoc and I felt Tatooine was the best setting to begin with, especially since I have some Sandpeople and some Jawas (though Jawas crop up on several other worlds apparently).

There is some nice terrain available for the Star Wars:Legion game, but of course its far too big for our purposes. Some of the 3D printed stuff looks great, (check out the Imperial Terrain Desert World stuff), and I suppose it could be scaled down, but I don't have a 3D printer.  I can use it as inspiration for building my own terrain though. There are also quite a few you tube videos and blog posts which make simple Tatooine buildings, mostly for Legion, so taking a little break from my schedule of mini projects and Palette Cleansers, I decided to have a go.

For the first build, I started small and generic. I used half a 40mm diameter polystyrene ball and some XPS. All the cutting was done using a Proxxon and my new Guider Pro.

I used the singly based Imperial Officer, henceforth known as Moff Forescale, as a guide for the height and width of the door. 

The door frame is a bit wonky as I added it late on in the construction so simply bent a thin strip of XPS, rather than cutting it to fit. 

The door was simply thin card cut to fit, then with more panels added, and finally a frame.

After a coat of mod podge it was textured with a mix of filler (spackle), PVA glue and a small amount of sand. Then painted using a mix of match pot emulsion, craft paints and hobby paints.

To make it look a bit more 'Star Wars' I added panels of card and some wire as some sort of pipe.

Pleased with this I went on to make another building, being a little bit more ambitions this time.

Tosche Station 

The second building was inspired by one of the buildings at Tosche Station. I found a cutaway diagram of the site on Wookiepedia and used that as a basis. I had some card tube from the inside of a roll of kitchen foil that I used for the vaulted roof, this sort of set the dimensions for the rest of the build. Comparing it to better images I realise it's too long, and the walls are vertical, not sloped (I misinterpreted the perspective on the first image). Never mind, I still think it looks OK for Tatooine.

A final bit of scatter terrain is a pile of crates. Simply blocks of XPS cut to size, each crate is a 10mm cube, then the distinctive patterning is cut in with a craft knife, then deepened with a pencil. The circle in the centre of each side is from the inside of a pen.

My 20mm Tatooine terrain so far

I've already got more buildings underway, and I'm experimenting with more complex designs.  FfoL is played on a suggested three foot square table.  If we scale down to two foot, then we want enough terrain to cover at least 25% of that, i.e. 1 square foot.

These have been excellent practice for larger terrain for the 28mm scale minis as well.  I'll definitely want plenty of those.