Realmgate to the Garden of Nurgle

The local Warhammer store has asked me to build some extra terrain for the grand Games Workshop campaign this summer. I don't have a lot of information to go on other than that the campaign is set in Ghyran, the realm of life. I have been asked to build two Realmgates, one for Nurgle and one with a Sylvaneth team. I'll also be repainting (or re-using) some of the store's older terrain and I get to use a few brand new kits to hack to pieces. Always a nice bonus. For my first Realmgate I decided to go for Nurgle. Time being a bit short I used the Realmgate Wars Battle Tome for inspiration and then started building. I want this Realmgate to have a diseased theme (of course) and give it a completely corrupted by daemons look. You should not want to get near it. I started out with the old base of a Witchfate Tor. I made an MDF base and added a 4cm layer of polystyrene to get some extra height. The Realm Gate has to be imposing!

The work space looks relatively clean, it must be the start of a new project!

I used the Baleful Realmgate set for the gateways. This will help gamers instantly identify the terrain piece and these kits offer quite a few conversion opportunities. The basic set-up has the gate floating in the air on wisps of smoke. For nurgle I wanted a more solid look. Having build the base of the gate on top of the Witchfate Tor base made it all a bit too wiggly. Here's me holding up the cut off gate.

Holding the gate requires no glue, but for the long term gluing things to each other is recommended (arms get tired ;).

As you can see from the picture above I also started cutting out stairs in the polystyrene. Getting into a hobby flow made me forget to take pictures. The centre of the Witchfate Tor had a sigmar symbol on a clock. I glued a few bits from the Bloab Rotspawned kit on it .

This is going to be a sickening thing. Good!

More Blaob Rotspawned bits where used to cover up the empty space between the Witchfate Tor, Realmgate stairs and polystyrene. The ugly dent there was caused by careless me pouring too much super glue or plastic glue on the bits above. There are huge gaps between the new additions and the rest of the building as the bits from Bload where never meant to be used as building blocks. So the next step was greenstuff. Lots and lots of greenstuff...

What do you do with left over greenstuff? Roll it up and turn it into tentacles.

I cut the remainder of the smoke curls to size and glued them back on horizontally, then added some greenstuff to cover the gaps.

One of the nice things about Nurgle is that you don't want smooth greenstuff. Giving it some interesting dents and curls will make the paint job look better later on.

Sharp readers may have already seen the top of the Realmgate. I cut the arme of the Bload Rospawn to different angles and added another mouth full of teeth there. The I followed up with more greenstuff to cover up the carvings and give it a more Nurgly look.

Come near me mortal and I'll drag you into Nurgle's garden!

Next up was extra care for the polystyrene base. I used a special soldering iron to carve out stones that matched up reasonably to the stonework on the Witchfate Tor. I then covered the polystyrene stonework in a mixture of PVA, insta-filler and water to protect it from paints and the like.

Stonework carved with a soldering iron. But will I do with that slope?

So the terrain is finished and ready to flock? Well no. I hated the slopes I made. I thought about pouring PVA on them and adding super glue (it gives a fantastic Nurgle effect). But decided against it. In stead I grabbed my hobby knife and scalpel, took out the slopes and made more stone in what was left. That's more like it.

The orange balls making a Nurgle symbol in the wall are part of a cheap and incomplete bingo wheel I picked up somewhere for the purpose of terrain building.

I added this central bowl and carved to rivulets running towards it from the outlets of the Witchfate Tor. It is filled with leftover bits of polystyrene and sprue and covered in PVA and superglue.

More stonework. I have a good feeling about this Realmgate. Now to get a bucket of liquid green stuff and a gallon of Nurgle's rot...

Last step was pouring sand on the exposed bits of MDF base and maybe walking around it once dry to make sure I did not forget any details. Now on to building a Sylvaneth Realmgate. Time is short...