4 questions to ask if you want playable wargames terrain

My Vampire Counts are in dire need of a castle to (un)live in. Also with Armies on Parade still four months away I actually have time to get a head plan and build a nice big centerpiece of terrain. With all terrain I make, I aim for things that a) look cool and b) are playable.

a) Look cool
Getting point a) takes a bit of creativity with stuff found in thrift stores and cheap stuff outlets like the local Action store here. Getting a few bits with interesting looking textures goes a long way if you want to transform polystyrene and dirt into miniature terrain.In preparation I always scout around the internet to make my own personal 'mood board' for new terrain. Just google a general term for whatever you're trying to build and pull a number of nice pictures of the internet for reference. For my upcoming project the search will be 'vampire castle'. Yeah searching is not a very difficult activity.

b) Playable 
Making playable terrain is often overlooked by enthusiast terrain builders.  For instance this manufactorum I build a few years ago looks (imho) quite nice.

Here we go

Let's attempt to make a nice irregular blog with updates on my painting and scenery building skills with a few battle reports added in where possible. For now here is a quick snap of Arbaal the Undefeated, painted up about a year ago:

If possible I will be adding some back-dated articles of older projects.

Chaos Dreadhold with huge Realmgate

I recently got a chance to work with a few of the Age of Sigmar scenery kits for the local gaming store. The request was to make something cool for an event. We chose a nice looking portal building from Age of Sigmar Balance of Power and I got to test a bunch of Chaos Dreadhold buildings, a Baleful Realmgate and a parts of the older Storm of Magic kits.

Let's start off with the end result:

Vampire Counts

Around Christmas 2015 I bought a big lot of second hand vampire counts stuff for a low price. As my second project for this year I've been painting a lot of it. Here is a quick impression of some of the models from the lot. Me being me, after the cheap first second hand batch I will be expanding with a number of newer kits to get a serious vampire vibe going for Age of Sigmar.

Banshees, Fell Bats, a few Black Knights and a Winged Vampire Lord

Swamp terrain

Terrain is important in all wargames, but especially in Age of Sigmar. One of my ambitions was making a swamp terrain table to play around with in the Realm of Life. I finally managed to build one over the course of a few weeks and paint it all up on a glorious Sunday. Here are the results. For those interested I included the (very few) work in progress shots I have at the end of this post. As I'm planning to visit a few more of the Mortal Realms this year, I might actually take enough photos to create a few tutorials. For now, just a lot of pictures.

Orcs, orcs, orcs, orcs, orcs

I started the year (and ended last year) painting a lot of orcs, goblins, trolls and other models. I got all of these second hand or from a very old box out of storage. I should expand this army, and not everything I have is painted, but I got a bit tired of painting green, so maybe at a later point in time.

A Stone Troll 

Sanctus Reach part II - The Knights Strike Back

This is a battle report from the second battle in the Sanctus Reach campaign book. You can also download this as a pdf file.