Progress has been made on my modular city board project. I’ve made a start on the first two pieces: a Titan/Knight maintenance facility, and an Administratum building:

You can probably work out how this was made: I used balsa wood to create the walls (I manually mitred the ends so that they’d make nice corners. I used cocktail sticks to create the posts, and used 28mm razor wire rolled around a paint brush handle to create the barbed wire around the top. The resin buildings come from Old Crow and Wargamer.pl.

These Forge World buildings (now sadly out of production) are very nice, but have a thick 4mm base which makes them look a bit weird as stand-alone buildings. Rather than trying to cut the base off (I did have a try with my trusty razor saw) I decided to build up around the base with 4 squares of 1mm plasticard, each 1cm smaller than the next, to create a set of stairs. Since the finished piece is too big to share a panel with anything else, I decided to put it on its own panel, at a diagonal angle. I might add some more detail in the empty space in the corners later on.

A while back I mentioned my plan to create a modular city system for Epic. After months of waiting to find the time, I’ve finally made a start!

I started with a large sheet of 0.5mm plasticard. This is hard to get but can be found from professional modelmaker’s stockists, such as the 4D Modelshop in London, where I got mine.

The system is intended to be compatible with the Ziterdes modular gaming table that I use for all the games I play. This means that I had to cut the sheet to be 600mm square: when it’s finished, I will mount the sheet on a piece of MDF or similar to raise it to the same height as the Ziterdes boards.

My plan is to have a simple grid system, with square blocks that can be moved around as required. Indivudual terrain pieces such as buildings will be mounted onto inserts that sit in holes cut into the sheet. This gives the impression of a raised pavement, and also hides the joins, making the whole thing look like it’s a single piece.

After cutting the sheet to size, I cut four 200mm x 200mm squares out, leaving a 50mm border around the edge and 100mm gap between each hole (the roads are 100mm wide: not very realistic but they need to be big enough for titans and other super-heavies to maneuvre!). This means that if two boards are placed next to each other, there will always be a 100mm gap between each terrain piece.

Having cut out the four holes, I now have four 200mm x 200mm pieces of plasticard, which will form the base of each terrain piece:

More to follow!

It’s taken me more than a month to get round to posting again, but let me assure you I have not been idle! Now that the Warmonger project is finished (apart from creating some banners to hang on the thing before I submit it to Epicomp 2008), I’m working on a terrain project.

I’ve been slowly accumulating a collection of 36 of the old foam buildings from the original Adeptus Titanicus box, and I’m going to turn them into a city. Here’s a picture of them as they are now:

I am still working out the details of this project: ideally, I’d like to make the individual pieces modular so that they can be rearranged (there’s nothing more boring than playing over the same terrain over and over again), but I don’t want to sacrifice the realism: I want the final product to look like it’s a real city, albeit one that’s one a distant planet 40,000 years into the future 🙂 Once I’ve got my plans together, I’ll start posting progress updates.