Trying To Build Terrain

After moving a local group finally started up a gaming club and we've taken over several tables in a local comic shop for all games workshop games. This is great... except for one thing. When you start something, you start with zero terrain.

We've been working diligently and pieced together a lot of Warhammer 40k terrain, along with tons of volcanic terrain someone donated. Finally, several aquarium pieces round out our selection.

What this means is, my pushing Mordheim on the group is running into the problem of lack of fantasy terrain and buildings. I started piecing together a building with thin black foam and have worked a little on an orc palisade/wall however these won't give the city feel mordheim requires.

In searching I came across Worldwakegames and their terrain. I saw a post farther down but it was a month old and no one really knew how things were working out with it. Is there anyone who has seen this terrain and found it worthwhile? Do you get enough terrain for a mordheim game in one $50 pack or do you need multiple. Thanks for any input!

Also, if anyone has access to any other paper terrain that's decent and printable I would be forever in your debt.

On a side note... how did your groups get their terrain? Everyone pitch in? I'm assuming you need about 75% terrain cover for a board, right?

I've no experience with paper terrain, but there are a few options you can look at:

WorldWorks Games (which is the one I assume you mean in your post) looks pretty good, but I've no idea how much board it would fill up in one pack. If you get that, I'd recommend investing in the Streets of Malifaux as well for a complete look. Do note that according to what I've seen, you need to purchase the Terraclips separately.

Dave's Games offers some pretty inexpensive buildings as well (about 3-4 $ each). Although these require more trouble assembling they should look ok, and with multiple skins you can probably get 2 or more buildings from each model, provided you cut them up into different ruins configurations.

Finally, if you want to get started without spending any significant amount of money, you can get scans of the original Mordheim buildings online. You can mount them on foamcore (as I've seen several people do on the boards).


If you feel you can't get 75% coverage at the moment, you can always play Border Town Burning, it requires less terrain, though I prefer the cramped streets of Mordheim myself. The ideal situation would be starting with a terrain pack and then getting 2 or more people coordinated on building terrain (you can even divvy up work, no one guy plans it out, one cuts/assembles, and another paints, etc). Good luck!

If you search the board you will find a few different topics about card terrain already (including some links to free downloads etc) So if you are looking to go down that path then you will at least have a starting point there.

From my experience the general pros and cons are as follows...

Cardstock Terrain

Pros:
Low skill requirement
Quick to make
Cheap
Easy to replace
No need for painting

Cons:
Easier to bend/break
Doesn't look as good (an arguable point but there it is)
Might not support the weight of heavy metal models (depending on the building construction, card thickness and size/number of model etc)

Foamcore/wood

Pros:
Fairly sturdy (not a good as plastic but should stand up to most wear and tear)
Can look much better (depending on you skill level)

Cons:
More expensive (still not bank breaking, but more expensive than some paper/card )
Requires skill to look good
Can be time consuming
Harder to replace

Personally, if you are just starting out with this club and are pushing some Mordheim, I would recommend throwing together some papercraft buildings etc. Given a day you can easily print off + build enough terrain for a dense mord table on the cheap. Then use this terrain to see if others are interested in continuing a campaign. If everything goes well but you want higher quality stuff, you can gradually replace the paper buildings with foamcore/wood ones as you go. That way you don't need to wait for weeks, and pay more money, to build high quality stuff to find out people aren't as interested as you hoped.

On saying that, my biggest suggestion if you decide to go with cardstock terrain for Mord, is to make any narrow ramps/walkways/bridges out of some cheap craft wood (popsicle sticks, wooden skewers etc) as thin strips of card are more likely to bend/break when heavy or multiple models are placed on them.

also if you are looking to spend some money for some great cardstock plans that are perfect for mord, or even just for inspiration, take a look at the ruin bundles at http://davesgames.net/

Hope that pseudo rant helps ^^'

If you're looking for a quick, nice looking solution to the lack of urban terrain, check out the Terra-Clips stuff from Wyrd Miniatures:

http://wyrd-games.net/shop/TERRACLIPS/

You can disassemble the buildings/sewers, which might be useful for storage/transport at/to your L.G.S.. Remember to buy a box of clips if you order a kit or two.

DeafNala wrote:

If you're looking for a quick, nice looking solution to the lack of urban terrain, check out the Terra-Clips stuff from Wyrd Miniatures:

http://wyrd-games.net/shop/TERRACLIPS/

You can disassemble the buildings/sewers, which might be useful for storage/transport at/to your L.G.S.. Remember to buy a box of clips if you order a kit or two.

The terraclips stuff is rather good, unfortunately it is very expensive for what it is imo. Also to get enough for a full table you are looking at $120 (for streets+buildings+clips) Unless OFC you just went for the buildings, in which case it would still be $70 :S A rather large investment that might not pay off if the gaming group doesn't take off.

I really appreciate the responses. Eventually we'll be building the building anyways out of wood and foamcore however I was going for a quicker route to jump in and then slowly work into it.

The terraclips designs were what I was looking at on worldworks games and the videos showed they could handle the models fine. I just wanted to get opinions from people if anyone had used those before spending the $70 pricetag.

It's not so much a skill level when building terrain (although that is definitely an issue) it's more of time for myself. There's only 3 of us building terrain. Others have donated bits and such but only 3 of us are building and at least I have limited time a week to either work on my own models or terrain so I figured a quick method would get me enough in the store that I could spend time on more high quality single pieces rather than multiple terrible ones.

Foam Core is cheap obviously and with little work you can pump out a few buildings fast. They won't be great as they won't be painted or based (floor boards) or any other astetic touches but you can wip out some basics fast that you can add too latter.

Card board is another cheap and fast alternative that as you invest $0 you can make them fast and as poor of quality (walls not straight for example) so you can populate your city fast this way and be good for something "now". Probably with you and your 2 friends working on these you could each come in to your next game with 9+ buildings after a week as each building could take as little as 20 min each to throw together.
Just hit your local grocery store and ask for boxes.
I did this and have been tossing them as I replace with better quality foam core buildings.

My base city for me is the Mordheim starter box (2 of them). But I know the price tag on those now is rather high.

Hi Emoge,

If you are looking for cardboard terrain try this link

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/fpm/archive

it is not Worldworksgames, but they are for free and will do it for the beginning