We're back for Part II in this series, in which we'll be talking about the walls and buildings we're making for the Minas Tirith board. Last time, I showed the modular layout for the board and this time we're going vertical with some of the buildings and structures that will be on it. Keep in mind that Fantasy Fellowship from Quest of the Ringbearer are on my mind while reading - I'll be coming back to that a lot in this article!
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| Photo Credit: Sott.net |
The Outer Wall
If you've seen the tutorials from Zorpazorp, you know how this begins - big blocks of polystyrene bonded together into a big mass. Well, we're doing a 9" high wall instead of a 12" wall because it will work better with the buildings we have and the storage constraints we're looking at (and because of Fantasy Fellowships - more on that in a moment). It all begins with polystyrene sheets:
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| Lots of cutting going on . . . the wife has been very patient with the polystyrene bits . . . |
Once they were cut into 9"x12" panels, it was time to line them up and start skewering them:
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| Skewers and glue, man, skewers and glue . . . |
Glue added to both sides, smash the other two panels around the skewered one, and boom - 3" thick wall in action. In Fantasy Fellowships, you have the Pyre of Denethor Scenario, which is played on a 24" x 24" board and has two 9" x 12" blocked-off sections that makes a 6" corridor for Gandalf and Pippin to come down into the tomb . . . conveniently, our walls will be able to lay down on their sides to accommodate this. Of course, a wall that high is going to need stairs . . . so I made a staircase:
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| It will need a bannister around the sides to protect those on the stairs from being shot, but that'll come later . . . |
The stairs are 7" switch-backs that would allow some models to try to climb a few steps up (or leap a few steps down) to save some movement. Each stair is 1" long and will be treated as adjacent to each neighboring stair (for the purpose of supporting and engaging). As you can tell from the image, these stairs are going to need some filler to clean up the joins, but it's well on its way.
Added to the two 12" long strips of wall (and a few buildings - more on that in a bit), here's what we have:
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| A mostly empty board, but it's coming together . . . |
These two wall sections can be placed together for the Atop the Walls scenario from Gondor at War/Fantasy Fellowships, so we're ready for that when we get to it! The next big project will be the gatehouse. . . which I have a rough design for and have started the process of carving up the pieces. The board and walls will eventually be coated in something (probably mod podge) before being sprayed a more natural color, but I need to settle on where the buildings will be first.
The Inner Wall
As we move into the rear of the board, I glued down the panels we cut last time for the second level and also made a ramp way to get to the second level:
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| The second level is being bonded with the aid of Doyle, Shakespeare, and Hugo - I owe them so much . . . |
I plan to use the Trebuchet tower template for the gateway of the second level (and one other Trebuchet tower to make the other panel of the wall more interesting). The ramp is shown above running along the second level, but the gate will require the ramp to run straight out instead. The same structure will be used for the gatehouse of the main gate - just wider at the doorway and taller. Not much of an update here I'm afraid - but we can now move on to the buildings!
The Buildings
So I started building these by getting blinds for my house . . . and then saving the boxes. :-) Blinds, as it turns out, are delivered in massive boxes that are super sturdy - perfect for what we need (if we can hide the corrugations). It started off like this:
I then traced the templates for the five buildings I got from Zorpazorp on the box (went through the entire front of the box and part of the side) and started glueing the buildings together. After some coats of spray paint for an initial pass, here's what we have:
An important thing I wanted to do was make as many of the buildings as possible splittable into two pieces - this is not just so I can have partial buildings for Osgiliath/a mid-siege Minas Tirith, but also because nestled buildings store better than blocky, bulky ones. The buildings will be enhanced with details later, but what we have now is a good start.
Conclusion
While the boards are intended to be usable for all the Osgiliath and Minas Tirith scenarios in Gondor at War as well, Quest of the Ringbearer is hard on our minds right now (more on that next month) - and as you can see, we have enough to get started with the Osgiliath scenario late in the campaign:
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| Just need some scatter terrain ruin/rocky bits and we'll be good to go . . . that and painting, of course . . . |
So . . . to finish the buildings, all I need to do is just repeat all the tracing and cutting and glueing and spraying two more times (at least, I think I need to see how full the board is with the projected amount of terrain on it - it may end up being more than that). :-) Hopefully you enjoyed this update - and if you haven't gotten your templates from Zorpazorp yet, you should do that right away! Next time, we'll see if we can get a gatehouse built and prep segments of the board for painting - but until then, happy hobbying!
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