A 40k Table’s Worth of Terrain

I’ve had a bit of a setback with my painting: a week ago I tripped and fell face first onto a wooden barrel and fractured my eye socket which has had quite the impact on my ability to see properly as you might imagine. Time will tell if I need surgery to fix any lingering issues, but in the meantime precision painting is right out, which means the army challenge I’ve been doing is on pause until I can regain the ability to see properly. I’ve found myself with a week off work so I thought I’d focus on a less demanding painting project: terrain!

I had a fair amount of the previous generation of warhammer 40,000 terrain sets, the ruined imperial buildings that came out in the Cities of Death era, in my pile of long-neglected kits and this seemed to be a good time to put them together. No precision building required! I had in mind the following requirements: 1) the terrain needs to be playable (i.e. no crazy complex buildings with overhangs that make it hard to reach for models), 2) should support competitive play (most of my 40k playing friends are very into competitive play), 3) should be nice to look at!

Requirement 2 is the most demanding, but thankfully the current body behind the World Team Championships has a very clear document on how their tables are to be set up (check http://worldteamchampionship.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/WTC-2021-Terrain-Maps-9.31-Low-Res.pdf if you’re interested), and that seems to be the standard followed by events (locally anyway). I’m not a fan of the cardboard cutout-type terrain they use for these events, but I felt that the older 40k terrain kits would lend themselves pretty well to creating nice looking alternatives with close enough gameplay.

I picked one of the tables in the WTC PDF and went about recreating the pieces I would need:

• 2 Large Buildings
• 4 Smaller Buildings
• 12 Containers
• 2 Craters

For the large buildings I used the Shrine of the Aquila kit, and for the smaller buildings I used the old Imperial Sector kits. For the containers I used the containers I’d painted for This is Not a Test (https://lairofthelagomorph.wordpress.com/2021/02/04/containers/). For the craters, I used the old GW craters.

I wanted to be able to use the terrain for less codified play too so I made sure to build and paint the 6 building sections in pairs so they could be combined into a bigger single building.

The buildings were painted very simply in three steps:

1. Undercoat with coloured spray can (I chose three light colours at the hardware store, each building got a different colour inside and out)
2. Sponge some rusted chips (I used some acrylic burnt umber and old case foam)
3. Rust wash (I diluted some acrylic raw umber with water and dish soap, then covered all the buildings in it)

I’m very happy with how that rust wash settled and dried, that was a bit of an experiment but came out very good I think.

I want to go back over these at some stage in the future and paint in some of the more detailed areas (a lot of skulls for example!) but this will have to wait for the old eyesight to come back. For now they have a nice industrial or ship-like look to them that I don’t mind

The craters were simply done with a series of successively lighter drybrushes using Raw and Burnt Umber, Yellow Ocher, and White.

Overall a nice project to keep me busy this week, I think my eyesight is getting better (I’ve been able to type this post with not too much difficulty!) but it’s slow going so I may not be painting regular miniatures for a little bit. On the plus side I have a lot of terrain in dire need of paint, so that may just be my focus over the coming weeks.