Minas Tirith Me Up: Osgiliath/Minas Tirith Terrain, Part V

Good morning gamers,

It's our fifth post in this terrain mini-series on our Minas Tirith/Osgiliath board. As we talked about last time, we're just working on some buildings today, fleshing out our boards so we can have more whole buildings when we play (instead of only half-buildings or open plinths). We'll be kit-bashing the Zorpazorp templates for Lachie's Minas Tirith project, so if you already have your templates printed, you can follow along!

Photo Credit: Sott.net

Four New Buildings

Our first building that we're making is based on the wider tower structure - originally, this thing has a double-arch side, a single-arch side, and two closed sides. This modification will be simple - we're going to have one single-arch side and three double-arch sides, which will not only make this building different from its original design, but when we split it in half, each half will not only be different from its brother, but will ALSO be different from either of the other halves from the previous building:

Building #1 - lots of doorways so the building can be rotated in any direction (based on how I want the arches below to face)

I've also modified the top of the building significantly - each side has a door-like arch. This is because this building is intended to have a walkway bridge OVER part of the map, similar to one of the buildings in Lachie's Tuber-Town - so let's look at where he's going to connect to next.

Our next building is one of the longer buildings and it has basically kept its original design EXCEPT that instead of having two roof eaves that taper to a point at the top, there's a tower on one side that uses the same designs we had on the tower that will attach to it. To make the other half distinct from the other side, I've modified the windows of this structure a bit (no cross-beam stuff), removed the protruding bits from the sides, and made the door open (instead of closed):

Building #2 probably needs a removable roof section - and definitely some crenellations around the square tower . . .

To get the walkway to work, I made a strip that was longer than it had to be so it had some purchase on each building. This current piece of cardboard is only temporary - I'm making a more permanent one out of foamboard that will be slightly wider than 1" and have low walls on both sides and magnetic strips on the bottom of the ramp to bind with some washers I'm going to embed in both of the other buildings (should keep it sturdy).

Okay, two buildings down and now we're headed over to the skinnier tower. This one proved a lot more difficult to convert because it's not that interesting. So I settled on doing a curved arch gateway on one side, a large arched window (that could be climbed through) on the opposing side, and chopping a big chunk out of the top (like the building has been damaged by a catapult or something):

Building #3 - to be used exclusively where we would expect aerial damage to have occurred . . .

I got a drill for Christmas and it came with a domed piece of cardboard to protect the drill head - I'll be cutting that up to make both of the skinny towers have a domed roof (one damaged, one intact). Our fourth building is the other long building and for this I decided to change the exterior decoration. Normally, this building has a sort of recessed wall area made by having another layer of foam (or cardboard in this case) sticking out of the building - I turned what would have been the recessed sections with windows into arches:

Building #4 is probably my favorite from a gameplay experience of the set (I've walked through it so many times and love how easily the game ebbs and flows through it).

Our final building will be placed abutting the main wall - and I'm delaying work on it for now because it's going to be integrated with a stairwell (and I haven't quite finished it yet).

Pillars For The Waterfront

But we're not done yet - my waterfront panels have been bereft of terrain (you know, besides shallow water), so I've made up a BUNCH of modular pillars to place throughout that section. These stand 1.5-3" high and will have magnets affixed to their bottoms and washers that have been appropriately placed in the board as well so the terrain binds to the board snugly (but I plan to put TONS of washers around the board to give us modular variation options). I'm pretty happy with how they turned out - nothing fancy here:

Standard black, then a heavy grey dry brushing, then light white dry brushing - nothing fancy.

Conclusion

Got a helper to set up the board - he says it looks good! :-)

As we begin the new year, Centaur and I are excited for the new box set that arrived (as I've said in other posts, he got the good half and the terrain, while I got the evil half and the rules). The buildings do shift around a lot, but thanks to a bunch of cheap washers I picked up (various sizes) and 30ft of magnetic strips, I think I can embed some washers into the board where I want the buildings to sit and file down/affix the magnetic strips to keep them from moving - more on that (and terrain for the plinths of the new buildings to lock things down) in a future update.

The board is really coming together, but there are two sections that REALLY needs love (both of which will require the making of a few more wall-abutting buildings): the first level and the second level. While I don't foresee using either of these much for matched play (my experience with these large walls is that maelstrom scenarios, Reconnoitre, and Storm the Camp can be a nightmare for deployment with them on the board - not to mention those shooting lists that hole up atop the walls), I do want them for scenario play (the Atop the Walls scenario in particular) and they look really cool. Since we're farther along on the first level, we're going to work on getting that done next. Until next time, happy hobbying!