Quest of the Ringbearer: Terrain Update, Part 1

Good morning gamers,

Today we're back in Quest of the Ringbearer land and we'll be covering how the terrain is coming for the missions that are in Quest of the Ringbearer. If you haven't read the post on what terrain we need, you can check that out here. Today we're focusing on terrain that will apply to many, MANY missions and a few specialty pieces that we'll need. Here we go!

Trees

I got a bunch of trees from Centaur for my birthday last year and I have only recently started putting them to good use. I have twenty scatter terrain trees now (some tall, some short), which have been placed in 40mm circular cardboard bases, stacked with 25mm circular cardboard bases to give them some interesting rise. The flocking was a mixture of Green Scenics Burned Earth (I think) and some green flocking that I got from Amazon:

With the flocking, the trees look a little different from the normal board, making the difficult terrain visible but not too clashing. I have a bunch of other trees, but don't plan to have them as scatter-terrain (instead, they'll be added to other terrain features for variety). Speaking of which, we've also been working on . . .

Hills

I've made hills out of XPS before (I have a two-section hill that I love), but am not happy with the work required to make mounds of earth (glue causes warping if you don't press down on it hard enough). Thanks to a tutorial from the Terrain Tutor, I looked into expanding foam instead. After a few failed attempts, we have this:

Added some spackle/filler to smooth out the surface and added more flocking and a few big trees to finish the effect. Job's a good one! As playable terrain, their slopes are steep, but they all have pathways to the top and the rest will just require climb tests.

Farmland

The first scenario in Quest of the Ringbearer is Farmer Maggot's Crop and for that you need . . . well, crops. There are lots of ways you can do this, but I've used square carpet samples that I got from my local hardware store. Two of those mats were cut up and put on cardboard bases to give you a walking-through-pathways feel (spackle for the ground). Each then got shades of green or yellow to provide some variety.

Added to some of the stone walls I built ages ago, I think this will be sufficient for the board that we're using. Still gotta do that smial and kennel, but that'll come later.

Hedges

So there was a month where both my laptop and my wife's laptop were on the fritz, so I shelled out not-that-much-money-comparatively-speaking to get us new ones and with them came four things that looked like this (they looked very promising):

With these in hand, I got going chopping it up into various pieces that looked like this (have eight of these strips now):

I put them on bases and got as much green paint on the hedges and bases as the porous material would allow (I use cheap acrylic paint from my local craft store, less than $1 for the tube):

Then it was off to the flocking station - dark green flock on the hedges themselves, light green flocking on the base for contrast:

These will be needed for the Shortcuts Make For Long Delays mission, but can also be used as barriers in normal game play (or in the Farmer Maggot's Crop scenario).

Stone Gateways

From the unused sections of the foam holders I got the following bits that . . . well, look like gateways:

I need four barrows for the Fog on the Barrow-Downs scenario, so I took two of each of these and have them as removable additions for my hills (each one is shaped to fit a different hill):

Here they are, shaped to fit (still trying to decide whether to spackle them or not before I paint them):

River

There are three scenarios (four if you want to use it for the Anduin riverbank in the big Amon Hen scenario) that use a 48" long and 6" wide river (Buckleberry Ferry, Flight to the Ford, and Lothlorien), so we better make one. I looked at a lot of different river videos and decided to go with the toilet paper route instead of the resin route - the first layer of toilet paper went like this:

Going from one layer to three layers of toilet paper led to a more blended feel in the middle and got a nice wave effect:

A mix of green and blue paint (that ended much more green than the picture appears) got the water looking not-white and I then added some spackle to the sides to form the river bank:

Some painting and flocking of the banks later and it's looking pretty good (one got a ford made for it, since I'll need that for both Flight to the Ford and Lothlorien). Plus, in normal game play, it would be essential anyway:

I will say this: I used a thin cardboard for the basing and I should have buckled down and spent some money on MDF, since I got some SERIOUS warping from these. Thankfully, I own a lot of heavy books, so the project was saved by Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and of course Tolkien and I was able to smash them back into something pretty flat. If they warp over time, I'll pull out the old boys again the day before I play to smash it into shape. But next time, I'll get some decent basing material. :)

Conclusion

Well, that's it for this terrain update - if you're making terrain for Quest of the Ringbearer (or have other terrain projects going on), let us know in the comments below. Until next time, happy hobbying!