Making Terrain Boars explained in Plain English for the Technically Deficient
A lot of folks approach me at conventions and ask me about how I make my terrain;
more of then than not, they approach my good friend (and one of the founding
members of the Irregulars) Alan W., who is much better at this sort of thing, about
how HE makes his HIS terrain. People are drawn to the stuff. They want to know,
and to understand, how they can build battlefields worth fighting over without
paying someone else a large amount of money to do it (if, indeed, that someone
else is even willing to consider such a tact).
The sad truth is that there really is no hard and fast rule. Alan can do it because
he's a woodworker, because he's been doing this stuff for years, and because he
has more talent in his little finger than most of us have in our big, thick heads. I can
do it because, well... because I've had a lot of failures during my participation in
this glorious obsession of miniature wargaming and have learned my lessons the
hard way. I'm a hack.
But here, I'd like to share some advice with you nonetheless. First, because I'm
asked about it a lot; more importantly, however, because like many aspects of this
hobby, nobody had the time to tell me when I started down this road. I had to learn
it myself. Take it for what you will. Hopefully, once you've read through these
articles, you'll be able to muddle your way through halfway decent looking terrain
boards, using very simple techniques and easily acquired materials. You may not
have magazine quality terrain, and you certainly won't have Alan quality terrain, but
you'll have something to be proud of, nonetheless.
The Task At Hand
For the task at hand, I'll be taking you through the process of making terrain boards
for the Historicon 2005 project I've mentioned elsewhere on the site - Tel El Kebir.
The task is imminently suited to terrain making tutorials because the terrain is
essentially very basic, requiring the mastering of forms over substance, without a
lot of stress over flocking, heavy vegetation, etc. that can sometimes plague other
projects.
This will be a work in progress sort of deal here. I'm going to post sections of the
report as I progress through the process of producing this terrain. As such, if it's a
miserable failure, it will be a miserable failure I share with the Internet world; if it's a
success, well then, hell, maybe you'll earn a modicum of respect for the Mad
Hungarian, yea?
What are Terrain Boards?
Most wargamers begin with very simple terrain - a ground cloth, a few books
placed under it to represent slopes, and you're set. Gradually, however, this is
supplanted with slightly more sophisticated stuff, so that by the time you've been in
the hobby for a few months, you've invested in a decent looking ground mat, and
maybe a few pieces of terrain that you've purchased or built yourself.
Nevertheless, some types of terrain are difficult to represent unless you're willing
to spend the time and effort to make them, particularly unusually mountainous
terrain and entrenchments, which are both rather difficult to get "right" with the
standard ground mat/drop cloth covered with typical wargames terrain.
If you have an unlimited budget, and space to store it, there is always the
possibility of simply permanently modelling your terrain as part of your terrain table
itself. Some of my mates in London, for example, were keen on WW1 on the
Western Front and spent a lot of time carving entrenchments and positions into the
surface of an old table they'd converted for gaming that conflict. Unfortunately,
such an approach has its limitations: first of all, it's deadly wasteful of resources;
secondarily, you're stuck with it pretty much forever. So, what to do? Terrain
boards are a solution to this very problem.
Terrain boards are detailed ground pieces with integral terrain, usually (but not
always) square, which are designed, either singly or in combination, to recreate a
certain battlefield environment and thus compliment a miniatures game either for
public or private use. Originally, terrain boards were designed as single piece
"tabletop size terrain", but most terrain boards made these days are known as
"modular terrain boards. This means that they are designed so that they can be
placed together to form specific shapes and later altered for changing
circumstances by the logical placement of road intersections, river crossings, etc.
which link to each other regardless of the placement of the sections.
Terrain boards are best for games involving entrenchments, mountains, caverns,
and that sort of thing. They are also very useful for games such as DBA, which
require battlefields generated from a limited number of terrain pieces, some of
which are strictly governed in terms of their placement and utility. Some folks also
use them for urban environments, though it is important to note that terrain boards
with unusually shaped three dimensional objects (such as the Tractor Factory at
Stalingrad) can be a real pain in the ass to store safely as opposed to going with
the simple drop cloth method. They are also increasingly popular for use in naval
games, though I frankly have no problem using the good old blue cloth ocean. In
summation, it's really a matter of personal preference.
In our case, we're building a "semi-modular" terrain piece. It's designed in sections
primarily because storing a battlefield in this size, for a game in 25mm scale, can be
difficult. However, I've also designed my initial sketches for the terrain with the
idea that I do not want to keep fighting the same battle until I'm fifty; that said, my
terrain boards could be re-used for other projects with the subtraction of certain
pieces or the addition of new sections as needed.
Step One: The Research
The first step is usually the longest, the one that most folks either love or hate
depending upon their inclination: research. If you're doing an engagement from
history, this will involve the searching of a number of books and reading up on the
nature of the engagement. There are a number of very good books for getting good
battlefield information, but this varies considerably depending upon the engagement
and the war in question.
For example, for Historicon 2002 the Irregulars had agreed to do the Battle of
Monterrey from the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. This was a real
challenge on many levels, not the least of which because the Mexican War was
not particularly well covered with maps, and written descriptions of the various
engagements could differ sharply. In the end, some lucky late night searches on
the internet and some time in the U.S. Library of Congress netted me a real find: a
Mexican map of the engagement, which is as likely as accurate as I was going to
find. In other cases, this may be slightly easier - if you plan to do the Battle of
Bastogne, for example, there are a whole bucket of books on the whole Bulge
Campaign, even divided by section of the battlefield in the case of Osprey's
extensive line of publications. Conversely, ancient battles can be incredibly
frustrating to research, with the added difficulty that we aren't absolutely certain
where many of them were precisely fought.
"Fantasy" and "Hypothetical" engagements are generally much easier to research.
If you want to do the Battle of Hoth (a fantasy of mine for a very long time, I must
admit), you will need to spend some time *gasp* watching certain sequences from
the Empire Strikes Back until you are blue in the face (like my favorite Grand
Admiral). If you are doing an engagement from, say, Dune, you'll have a slightly
harder time, because Frank Herbert didn't sketch battlefields; other fantasy and
sci-fi writers vary widely, and many require original thinking on your part to fill in
the gaps. As for hypothetical engagements, you'll still need to do some thinking
about the engagement you wish to represent, or the terrain you wish to model. If
you can't find anything, it isn't a big secret that many of the biggest and best
fantasy and sci-fi scenarios are thinly veiled copies of historical engagements -
Imperial Star Destroyer force launching a TIE assault on the Sluis Van Shipyards?
Read the hell out of stuff about Pearl Harbor...
In any case, all of this assumes you already know, or are willing to learn about, the
most important details regarding the history of your battle/scenario. You should
know why the Harkonnen are attacking the Atreides on Arrakis, for example;
likewise, you'd better know that the Germans played a (small) role in the Battle of
the Bulge, hadn't you?
In my case, I had a fairly obscure battle (to anyone but colonial wargamers or
British and Egyptian patriots), the Battle of Tel El Kebir, 1882. Initially, the search for
maps was very difficult, owing in part to the fact that there was an identically
named engagement at the same position during the First World War, and in part to
the fact that there are plenty of British references to the battle that have nothing to
do with the actual topography or nature of the terrain, which is what is important
for the creation of terrain boards. However, I did know enough about the battle
from an historical standpoint to boil it down to its essentials - a battle in the desert,
featuring an early morning assault on a line of entrenchments (6 km, in fact). Better
than nothing. I knew that I needed two things - desert and entrenchments. Even if I
couldn't find the maps of the battlefield that I needed, I knew that there were
enough engagements in North African desert from the late nineteenth through mid
twentieth century that I could fake the thing, if necessary, based upon the map for
another historical engagement. Fortunately, I hit pay-dirt and found several maps.
Now I had to determine what to do with them.
Step Two: Putting the Research to Use
So, once you've got the research done, or at least finished to the point that you
are ready to construct your terrain boards, you'll need to determine what to do
with the information you have. In the case of Tel El Kebir, I had managed to acquire
several maps (most of them quite by accident); doubtless, you may well have the
same experience with your engagement of choice. Below is just one of the many
maps I discovered.
While many of the maps I salvaged varied somewhat in their depictions of the
terrain, I decided to go with two means of eliminating extraneous data. The first
was to rely upon maps drawn by observers who were involved, at least indirectly,
with the engagement. This meant cutting out a great deal of the information gleaned
from secondary sources, but it made my job much easier; nevertheless, I did keep
one of the secondary sources as a useful guide - Donald Featherstone. As with
so many other aspects of the hobby, Don is absolutely trustworthy when it comes
to his map information, and his Osprey title, Tel El Kebir, 1882, provided an
exceptional three dimensional view of the entrenchments and their environs.
My second method of elimination was to go with only those features most common
to all of the maps I'd gathered. Some maps, for example, depicted unusual features
and redoubts not actually present in the maps made by those who were there;
others added oases or lakes (probably as a means of spicing up the relatively
simple desert terrain), and I eliminated these, as they were not common to all of the
maps available.
It now remained for me to proceed with sketching my concept and for scaling the
battle as appropriate based upon my resources and the intent of my scenario.
We'll cover all of this in Part 2.
-Alex
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Terrain Boards: A Simple Approach. (Part 1)
