modular Mordheim mayhem

With all of the inspiration here and elsewhere, I figured it was better to get some of it down before I forgot it all. With my fumble-fingered-ness today, this is the 3rd time I've tried to type out this post, so you'll understand why I want to put it somewhere before I accidentally Ctrl-Alt-Del my own thought processes by accident. Before you get all excited, no, nothing really great to see here... yet. This is more of a project diary where I can have a central place to put and organize my thoughts, and eventually get some nicer pics of some original work as opposed to stuff I've merely constructed to others' specifications. So, up front, I apologize if you got your hopes up. Stay tuned, though, this could be fun.

So this set of pics shows what I've got so far. A bunch of the cardstock and plastic base buildings and one aftermarket all-plastic building (and a metric buttload of WFB models, no Mordheim specific models... yet), all on a table that's perfect for tutorial skirmishes but not anything much bigger. The table's not what has me quibbling so much as "what can I make?", as I have far larger tables at the local gaming emporium/den of iniquity. No, it's the buildings that have me itching to start making terrain. The base buildings are great... to get a group started playing long enough until they make it to the point of disgust and make their own. The layouts are really good, they're just not especially sturdy (wish I'd thought to take a pic of my use of a piece of sprue to prop up one particularly wavy floor - not original, just a good example of my argument) and so eventually I'd like to salvage the corner and cross beam plastic bits (along with the doorways and windows) and replace all the cardstock with styrene sheet (also called plasticard). Why do all that? The plastic bits do look really good, and the styrene is easy to manipulate, lightweight, and far sturdier than the original cardstock.

There are some things I'd like to do before all that. First on the agenda is more ladders. You can see in my pics (if you look really closely) that I only have the 2 ladders provided with the base set and the Blood on the Streets set, but there are easily tens of places that could use a ladder or three. I've picked up a bunch of little model-y wood bits to start making up ladders and would be doing so right now if I wasn't typing this. Maybe tomorrow night during my oh-so-boring training meeting at work I'll get started on some, but probably not. Will keep you posted on this as it develops.

Second off is modularity. Yes, I want to start making a modular gaming table/board before I replace the buildings I already have or start building my own designs. Why, you might ask, would I do that? The way I plan on going modular will easily incorporate the buildings I already have, and once I get all of the original buildings on their appropriate bases, replacing those with styrene replacements will be easy as the new ones will be in very similar dimensions and footprints on the bases. If you're scratching your heads at this point, it's okay, some explanations are on their way.

My trip towards modular gaming tables began before my recent fascination with Mordheim, particularly when I ran across this board and this board. Considering my start in tabletop wargaming lies in BattleTech, you can kind of see where my like for those began, and the height variation solution in the 2nd link really piqued my intellect. Unfortunately, as nice and as elegant a solution as that is, it won't see much use in Mordheim, as the terrain focus tends to be on different levels of buildings. It'd be useful in setting up a static board with static buildings, to give your gaming area a more natural feel, but otherwise it's hard to make buildings with level floors that will sit astride a variety of slopes. But that's where my modular itch began, just so you know who to blame when the Terrain Apocalypse comes about.

More recently (as in the last week), my desire to create modular terrain pieces were fueled by these finds: this article on GW's website about a modular City of Death table, this article over on Terragenesis, and last but not least, this one right here on TBMB. Each one has some really good points going for modularity in this fashion, particularly about basing your terrain. Basing is a large boon to quite possibly flimsy structures (we build mostly for looks, not realistic structural integrity), but has some drawbacks. Ashton Sanders had a very informative post about basing (found here) where he discusses in detail advantages and disadvantages to basing your terrain pieces, which I won't repeat here in detail. I will say that basing for a modular board takes care of some of his stated disadvantages, namely lip/edge conflicts (modular game board pieces are meant to fit together) and color scheme ('cause you should be painting them all the same, as well as decorating them similarly). Whereas separate pieces of terrain pushed together like he pictures suffer from those maladies, modularly based terrain overcomes those nicely (see any of the above modular links, but especially the GW City of Death article and the last link on TG), and even possibly the question of storage and travel, as it's far easier to fab up something when everything conforms, to a greater or lesser degree, to one standard measurement. Modular game boards even tend to allow height differentials, but only if you're willing to make your hills one board square (see the above argument concerning hills, buildings, and levelness of floors).

So, I want to do a modular board, here's some nitty gritty on it that I've been cogitating over. I like having one size of base, as that promotes the plug and play aspect of the modular gaming board, but 1 foot square bases seems terribly large to me for Mordheim. It works well for 40K, as even though the pieces are mostly skirmish formation pieces, it does have large vehicles to accomodate, and therefor works well, as in the GW City of Death article above. Six inch squares seems more logical to me, for several reasons. No vehicles comes immediately to mind, as does general closeness of buildings is more desirable than open spaces in Mordheim, and the general size of buildings lends itself to the smaller footprint. Look at the buildings that come with the base set - they all conform to being able to fit in a 6" square, or a 6" by 12" rectangle, or a 12" by 12" "L". Even the Pegasus Hobbies gothic ruins fit on a 12"x12" "L". But wait, you're saying, you have to build everything on a 6" square, how do the bigger ones fit? Well, quite nicely, to be honest. If you build everything on a small square and adhere only to the 6" square (or 1' square or 2' square) you're limiting yourself to that shape and size for EVERYTHING. If you open yourself up to having some, but not all, pieces on multiple contiguous bases, you invite in larger set pieces (like the awesome looking carriage inn from Blood on the Streets), but still can plug them easily into your game board. Think of it like Tetris for terrain, but you have only a few gonky, large shapes to contend with and plenty of small bits to fill in all the gaps.

And I'm not downing others who have made their boards on 1' square blocks (Lord Xi - you're doing fab work, keep it up, your stairs are definite inspiration for looks and playability), this just feels more right to me. I don't have to really stretch buildings to fill closer to the edges of 6" square blocks, so the buildings are closer together and that makes all those gangplanks more useable and the layouts more fun. On top of it, think about how many separate 6" blocks are in a 4' square area: 64. That table I shot pics of my terrain earlier is 4" shy of 4' lengthwise, and a little over 2' in width. See how many buildings and terrain pieces are in there? Now picture that with every inch covered by something every 6", even if it is just the odd road or road with barricade. You've almost doubled the terrain in the same area, and it looks better. More Mordheim-y, that's for sure.

I'm going to stop there for tonight. Please feel free to comment, critique, or make snide comments (The Intartubes - Giving the Peanut Gallery a run for its money since 1994). I will leave with one last cool example of modular game boarding that went away from what you normally think of as a modular board - the hybrid modular-sectional board. Definitely a good idea, and proof yet again that there's always a different way to achieve the same goal.

Well you obviously are putting a lot of thought into your project; commendable, even if it is a practical idea I don't put into practice myself. AND, as I have a tendency to lose messages myself, I can identify with your posting plight.

For a commission, I did a type of modular Mordheim gaming board awhile back. The central piece was a standard 4'X4' pink foam board with two 2'X4' extensions. The extensions could be used on any of the cental piece's sides or as a separate 4' square board. The variety of set ups from the three pieces is quite extensive.
To add to adaptability I used a standard foootprint for the buildings bases that fit into cutouts in the paving stones, which allowed the building to mount up in a visually appealing manner, but permitted them to be swapped around for variety's sake [Is that confusing or what? ].

Posting your project plans is an excellent way to pick up advice & alternate methods of achieving your goal. Getting in on your thought process & checking out your WIP [pretty cool stuff BTW ] is a pleasure that quite a few of our Fellow Forumites will tune into. An EXCELLENT POST. Keep updating it as your work progresses.

DN - Thank you. I find that the spiffy ideas hit out of the blue, and I'd better be writing them down or acting on them with a quickness, or they just fly away like so many random particles sleeting across the universe. Any pics or link to posts of your modular game board?


I really like what Sevej was doing over on TG with his own modular boards, particularly the use of foam and carving said foam with as blunt an instrument as possible (popsicle sticks) to give it a very realistic look. The plan is to base my squares onto 1 to 2 inch insulation foam board. Why so thick? Rigidity is the main concern, as I fear floppy bases iffen I go too thin, but I also want to play around with depth a bit. You know, make at least one 4-square base with a chunk of the comet in it, and appropriate impact crater. And Forum Lead Tom's beautiful sewer entrance on his board has me thinking that a similar one should make an appearance on my board, as well as random sewer grate tokens scattered hither and yon.

That, obviously, leads into eventually having a separate sewer board to extend the play to the belowground areas of Mordheim. Why a separate board for the sewers and not just build it underneath? We have the table space at the local gaming store to set multiple 4'x4' boards out (just one table is all we need, really, as we have about 4 4'x8' tables to game on), and I feel you're just asking for trouble if you bury your sewer board underneath your main playing board. Don't get me wrong, it looks awesome; I just forsee too many times having to pull up tiles to get at a sewer tile and knocking everything around on the higher tile and losing everyone's place. Still can do a really spiffy sewer level, though, probably out of thicker foam, just carve a bunch of different pieces (straight, 90* bend, 45* bend, 45* straight, cul-de-sac, t-junction, 4-way junction, etc) out on 6" square blocks and mix-and-match to fit the board overhead.

More thoughts later, and hopefully some ladders.

My Mordy group bought all the materials for a modular board about a year ago, but it never got past the planning stages. I look forward to seeing what you churn out. Maybe it'll even help to rekindle my project.

ID - looking forward to producing something and sharing it. It's hard to do things as a group when only a few people are interested in the project.


Speaking of, my own game board project is pretty much my own project and no one else's, at this point. My gaming group, suffering from severe GADD, is fixated on WH40K and won't be helping me with terrain until they've played a few games and switched their fixations onto MH for a while. For this reason I'm glad that I've gone with 6" squares for my base block size, as it will be much easier to convince people to pitch in when all they have to cover is 6" squared.

So I did sit down last night and got two BIG ladders done. Why so huge? Ease of construction and I've got a lot of terrain they will work perfectly for, namely the upper stories on some of the larger base pieces, as well as the plastic gothic ruins pieces. No pics yet, as I barely got them glued together, and looking to stain them (as they are actually made out of wood) and wrap some thread around the crosspieces to give it that slapdash look. Which they've got plenty of already, considering I built them from craft sticks cut by a dull X-Acto knife, and didn't bother squaring anything up or measuring when I cut. They look very MH-y, I must say, and hope to share those with you folks soon. More ladders need to be made, in a variety of sizes, as well as replacement gangplanks for the cardstock ones that come with the base set. After that, barricades, barricades, barricades, which will unfortunately have a Skaven theme to them as that is the majority of my bits. We'll see. Maybe I'll start scouring eBay for bits from other armies to give myself more latitude.

As for bigger pieces, I need to get some insulation foam as I didn't find any of the kind I wanted at Lowe's the other night. I'll ask one of the locals, as I've seen them using it a lot, find out who their local supplier is and pick some up. First thing is to base all the buildings I've got on the decided-upon 6" (or multiples thereof) bases and start carving in details into the foam with the aformentioned popsicle sticks. Details will include cobblestones, interior floorboards, and the linke. Rubble will be made from the abundance of sprue pieces I've gathered over the years (the long straight pieces I've been harvesting to make rails on my handmade movement trays, but that still leaves plenty - PLENTY - of smaller bits for use) as well as other bits I have laying about the place. Like I said, first I have to actually acquire the foam.

Been scanning around the 'net to find some likely bits for both inspiration and to purchase and add to the flock. I admit that I am a wargamer 1st, and a modeller/painter a distant, distant 5th. In other words, if I can find affordable pieces that look good and will last, I'll gladly save up and add them to my existing terrain. Forge World has some interesting pieces, both in their Warhammer and WH40K terrain sections. Did I say 40K terrain? Yes, yes I did. Take a look at the CityFight ruined bits about halfway down the page, and you'll see a few pieces in there that would work and not be too awful bad. Out of their WFB line, I'm most interested in the walls - remember, MH is a walled city, so you could easily have a set of walls running down one side of your board, for scenery if nothing else - as well as some of the other pieces. The gothic graveyard set would be AWESOME if I was playing undead. I'll let someone else in the group decide they want it bad enough to purchase it, and save my money for elsewhere. Like over here or there. GW themselves have some nice pieces as well, have to decide what I want first off and build from there.

For ladders, quick and easy option is this type:

Take a look at the middle options, as those are quick, and easy, as well as Mordheim-styled.

Thanks, PFT. I'll try and get pics posted tonight of what I've been doing.

Okay, the promised ladder pics can be seen here, along with a couple of bonus pics of some of the metal bits I got in my original huge deal of a find (see my intro for that particular story). The two ladders on the left were my first ones and I didn't think to pull out the plastic ladders from the base set (which you can see on the right) to make sure my dimensions were correct until AFTER I'd already made them. I'm keeping them and explaining the size difference as them being "made for the Rat Ogres". I like the idea of having some really tall ladders to get to the tops of my tall terrain pieces directly, sue me. The other 4 ladders are built to the same scale as the ones from the box set, as you can plainly see, and all of them look very wonky and slapdash - perfect for MH! I'm going to build only a couple more (based on those single-polers that PFT showed us all above) and then I'm going to make everyone else who wants to play build at least 2 ladders of their own to add to the mix. Can't have too many ladders, and it makes them more connected to the game in a short amount of time.

As for the metal furniture bits, I'm looking to build gangplanks and barricades to replace the cardstock ones from the base set, and quite a few of these pieces are going to be used in the barricades. As you can see, I got a wide variety of fantasy-themed scenery dressing pieces, and when I pulled them out for their modeling debut, I came up with uses for about everything. Those are piles of skulls leaning up against the tweezers, and really cool looking little minis that I can't wait to incorporate in somewhere. I've even got a chest buried in the ground with its own elvish-themed fantasy lid AND a sarcophogi (sp?) with the big relief of the person inside on the lid and the dried out, rotting corpse on the inside. You can see him just above and to the left of the gravestones. I really didn't know what to do with the chests before (good fantasy dungeon set-dressing, not so much for MH), but now I'm thinking to do something different and make them my Warpstone counters. They're just begging to be painted up and then scattered across my terrain.

In addition, found the local supplier for pink foam insulation, and going to buy a sheet of it this weekend, as well as a sheet of MDF or pressboard for a stronger base underneath the foam. Other than that, I've been reading the Starting Warbands thread on here and doing major overhauls on both of my lists (Skaven and Reiklanders). Hope to have a decent list for both hammered out soon so I can get a game going at the local shop. I've got Goblin and Dwarf models (from the Skull Pass base set for WFB) and need to look up the rules for those warbands as well, just so I can offer the locals even more choices.

Enough for tonight, got a 3-day weekend, so hope to have more to report later this weekend. Enjoy!

I am majorly jealous of that colossal assortment of metal bits. They're all quality pieces with a lot of variety.

Looks like one of your modular pieces is destined to be a graveyard. I can't wait to see your board make some progress.

Barrels, chests, furniture, et all REALY dress up a gaming board, AND always can be removed for the combatants. You've got a nice variety of thingys; should you need more, try Mega Minis Dungeon Decor available from the War Store [ www.thewarstore.com ].
The ladders look excellent. NICE WORK!

ID - I know, I'm waiting for lightning to strike me or something, as I normally don't enjoy that level of luck on a regular basis. And the graveyard is a definite piece I'm going to do. Possibly two of them, one small patch with the small assortment of metal bits I already have and a larger one built on Forge World's excellent Gothic Graveyard set (scroll about halfway down to see it). But a graveyard is definitely in the works.

DN - Thanks for the linkage, they've got a bunch of good stuff there. I really need to find a weekend to peruse the entirety of their (TheWarStore.com) website, as you really can't tell exactly what they have in stock. It's disappointing, as they have a HUGE selection, but their website could be laid out better to make it more accessible. And thanks on the compliment - more ladders have been constructed, just have to remember to take pictures of them to share. Next on the Ladder Agenda - stain, good drying period, thread for the crosspiece bindings, and finally a clear sealant over everything.

Going back to one of my modular game board inspirations, I noticed that he had done his squares in an odd size (19.5cm^2), and a bonus of that odd size was that players couldn't judge distances based off the modular squares. I don't have that advantage going with 6" bases, but considering most of my future players can either eyeball strange distances like 18", with no other reference points, pretty accurately, or are just too dim to realize that you could judge distances based off of the size of the modular base size, I'm going to stick with the 6" plan. I like these kids, but one of them tried to argue that the distance between the first and second knuckle on EVERYBODY'S index finger was exactly 1", and therefor the same (and kept arguing even after we pulled out a tape measure and showed him otherwise). It just makes me shake my head and *sigh* sometimes. (Those of you living the US, Interesting Fact of the Day: dollar bills are 6" long and quarters are 1" wide, standard. Handy measuring devices if you're ever without a tape measure or ruler.)

As someone who can't hear, I've noticed that quite a few folks who can simply don't listen.

Dude!

This is an inspirational thread. I actually like reading long posts when they include this much insight into your inspirations and design theory. Keep 'em coming!

DN - I guess it's more than just a nickname, huh? But you are correct - people who can hear don't always listen. Just like when I call someone a "retard", it's not because they're mentally handicapped (I call thse people "mentally handicapped") it's that they have a brain but choose not to use it. Frustrating as hell, but what can you do?

PD - glad you're liking it bud, hopefully I'll keep it going for a while. It's been entertaining and definitely thought-provoking on this end.


Speaking of entertaining and thought-provoking, I took Monday off from work to make a 3-day weekend, and spent most of it watching the Lord of the Rings Special Extended DVD set. If you don't have it, save up your pennies for this one, as it has almost 72 hours worth of viewing - the movies total up to around 13 hours, add that in another 4 times for the 4 separate commentaries on each movie, plus each movie has two discs full of bonus features, at about 3.5 hours per disc! I just watched the movies and the making of's, and saving the various commentaries for later, but one thing struck me last night in the Return of the King "making of" special feature, particularly the section covering Minas Tirith. Sad to say, while they were talking about all the cool stunts they did on the streets, I'm staring at the paving stones they've got all over the place. They followed this neat pattern of large, square blocks near the houses (for foot traffic), and a "street" up the middle that was made of much smaller, rectangular cobble stones (for horses and carts). It's such a neat pattern that I want to do something like that on my board. I have to be careful to make sure either all my pieces are edged in smaller cobblestones or all are edged in larger "foot traffic" blocks. The first option means enclosed areas, like that gorgeous FW graveyard, must have boundary areas around it that can have the road go around, while the second one almost totally precludes using cobblestones at all. A third option, and the one that looks more and more palatable the more I think about it, is to have specific road blocks (you know - straight, t-junction, 4-way, 90* turn), and incorporate other pieces (like that weird obelisk thing in the base set) into their own 6" blocks. Have to cogitate on that a bit more.

Speaking of cool things found in the "making of's" for LotR, I watched one of their excellent model makers pressing block forms into the walls of Helm's Deep with a little rectangular-headed tool. It reminded me of the leather stamps I've used every so often in the SCA, so went and looked around for a good long while at a bunch of leather stamps, and no joy there. Then, wonder of wonders, I run across Random's modular board and how he's using some modified Legos to make brick and cobblestone impressions, quickly, in his foam board. Surprise, surprise, I have some Lego's (on a slightly related note: ever heard of Brik Wars? if you have Legos, you should take a look) and a willingness to modify a few in the name of making a stamp to easily make cobblestones and paving stones. I'll be using foam boards to make my bases, just like Random does, so now I have to get some foam and start experimenting to see which blocks make appropriately sized and shaped indents in the foam for my modular bases.

And no, I did not get foam or MDF this weekend. Mother Nature dumped 4-6" of snow on us Friday night, and it's still mostly here. I'm driving back and forth to work and only venturing out for emergency supplies at this point. Modelling supplies do not fall into that category, sadly, so no better terrain shots as of yet. Hope to get some this week and start knocking out some stuff. We'll see, as I've been working on what I've got at home, and probably won't switch over to terrain until I've gotten a couple of warbands assembled (paint is another project for another day) and ready to fight.

I haven't posted here in a while and I apologize, as I have been thoroughly distracted by work and other hobbies. Played a bit of paintball, been working on my armour for the SCA, and been distracted greatly by a little computer game by the name of Dwarf Fortress. It's highly addictive, as the gameplay is very similar to the Dungeon Keeper (another favorite of mine) in that you don't actually make anything happen but set things to happen and your minions (dwarves, in this case) do them in whatever order they "feel" like doing them, and it eats up a ton of time as you go about building your little bearded empire. Who knew underground farming cycles and methods could be so entertaining? Be warned, it will eat your time and the game itself is nigh impenetrable to the newbie, so if you are interested, I highly recommend this tutorial. I recommend reading just to see what I'm talking about.

The main killer in my recent drop in interest in all things Mordheim is the group here - besides some initial interest shown in playing, they quickly dropped it in favor of building up either their current 40K army or starting a new one. I'd been talking my wife into playing Mordheim as she'd only been a little interested in playing Warhammer with me, and she has been helping me paint my little rat horde of doom, but with our daughter (almost 6 months old now) and her hobbies, she's been too busy to think about starting up playing. Oddly enough, I don't want to play Mordheim against myself, so my interest has been on other things.

Which brings us to the latest distraction in my life - in a little under a month, I'll be getting a promotion and start working at our state headquarters 4 hours away from where we currently live. And trying to move the whole famn damily inside of the next 2 and a half months. So even the short term goals I had originally set - get foam and MDF boards as well as getting some warbands together - are out the window until sometime in July or August when we get settled and I find a store in the area I'm moving to (and after a quick Google search, looks like there is! and these guys look like they do more in a month than my current local store has done in the last 6).

The interest to complete this board is still there, glowing as embers underneath the ashes, ready to burst back into flames once we get resettled halfway across the state. *sigh* Too much to do in too short of a time. Oh well, onward and upward! Or as we like to say in the Army, "Improvise, adapt, and overcome!"

This is a lot of nice posting. I really like all the links to the different modular terrain ideas. I did a lot of searching myself when we started our table to get some ideas on how to do it exactly, wish I had seen this post.

Check out our table, it's far from finished, but it might help you get some ideas on creating modular terrain. We're doing various size terrain sections, starting at 6"x6" squares.

Pictures of the table with modular terrain sections (without all of the actual terrain yet, we're working on that): http://www.tabletopgeeks.com/table-with-terrain-blocks/
And the table itself: http://www.tabletopgeeks.com/the-mostly-finished-table/

Good luck with your modular setup!

Svenn - thanks! The thing that I've always liked about the internet is that it easily offers you the opportunity to footnote your work, and point whoever is reading your thoughts at the pertinent info. I never liked the movie Antitrust, but when Ryan Phillippe's character hacks the Microsoft-like corporation's system and every page has a hotlink every other word, I thought that was awesome. I don't try for URL links that dense when I post on the 'net, as that's just overload, but it proves how interconnected you can make information.

Anyway, yeah, did a lot of modular table searching when I decided that's what I wanted to do. Took a brief look at your site and the table looks like it's coming along rather well. I'll take a longer look sometime this weekend on my home computer where more of the pics will come up. Keep up the good work and keep us updated!

I think you read my mind with the comet idea, if you look at our page you can see the start of that exact piece maybe give you a idea or show you what NOT to do...