Siege equipment part I: Siege ladder

(Deutsche Version) Since I explained how to create parts for a castle, I now have to focus on the attackers. As a first step, I want to start with the most easy part, namely the siege ladder.

To create a siege ladder, you need a piece of wood which has a cross-section area of 3x3 mm, I used balsa wood. For a ladder, you need 72 cm. The balsa wood is cut into two pieces of 18 cm length and 9 short pieces of 4 cm. Now, you have to mark the large pieces at the positions 1,3,5,... cm and glue the short parts on them. This completes the siege ladder, you can add some brown color (I would propose watercolour because you still can see the wood structure from below).

Tabletop terrain - hills

(Deutsche Version) In this post I want to introduce some new terrain plates: Hills. As like all my other terrain pieces, I build them from styrofoam. I also use the base plate made from wood on which I glue all the other things.

I defined the height of the hills as 5 cm, this fits to the 28 mm figures. Let's figure out the transition between two terrain pieces. This has to be the same for all hill pieces for being able to combine the terrain in any way. I build the hill from 5 plates of 1 cm thickness which are 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 cm width. The scheme looks like this:

Now you can build the first basic shapes: Edges and corners. For a corner you need 5 pieces in the size of 12x12, 11x11, 10x10, 9x9, 8x8 cm. These are glued on top of each other fitting to one edge.

Now, this looks a bit like a hill. To improve it, you can easily tear off parts out of the styrofoam which looks a bit more like rocks than the 5 plates before.

Now you have to paint the hill. The two plains in brown and the rest in grey. All the grey parts are then drybrushed in white and then grass is put on the plains.

I would suggest to tear off more styrofoam than in this picture (this was my first try so it does not look that good). You can now build additional pieces like edges or inner corners.

The elevated plain is simply a 6 cm thick block of styrofoam glued on a wooden base plate.

Tabletop terrain - the castle part II: tower

(Deutsche Version) Basically a castle consists of three parts: Walls, turrets and at least one gate. Let's continue with the second part of the castle, i.e. the tower.

At first the plan: The tower has to be connected to the wall on both sides. I defined the area of the tower to 12x12 cm. This means that there has to be 4 cm of wall on each side of the tower.

The tower consists of three 6 cm thick styrofoam plates which are cut to 12x12 cm and then glued on top of each other.

As a next step, the small wall pieces on the side are built. Therefore two blocks of 12x4 cm are cut out of the 6 cm thick styrofoam. As the last step, the platform on top has to be built: A 14x14 cm big plate out of the 1 cm styrofoam has to be equipped with merlons. I used two parts which are 14 cm long and two parts which are 12 cm long to create the merlons as depicted below. Additionally you need merlons for the small wall pieces on the side which are 4 cm wide and fit to the other wall.

Afterwards, you have to paint everything, similar to the instructions in the wall post.

Tabletop terrain - the castle part I: wall

(Deutsche Version) I always liked sieges very much, therefore there had to be some kind of castle in my terrain. At first I will start with the easiest part of my castle. A straight piece of wall.

The first thing you have to consider is how to fit two wall pieces together. My plan is the following:

On the left, you can see how the merlons should look like. On a transition from one wall peice to another, two 1 cm wide high pieces meet and form a "normal" 2 cm wide high piece:

The wall is made of styrofoam, I use a 6 cm thick plate for the wall and another 1 cm thick plate for the merlons. This is now glued together and then painted. Prior to painting:

The first layer of colour - I use full-shade tinting colour which you can buy cheaply.

As a next step (and to improve the look) I  use a method called drybrush. The brush is dipped into a little colour which is then wiped off onto a piece of paper. Now you simply take the dry brush and brush above the grey colour - you can see the result here:

I think that the structure of styrofoam (which you can see even better after dry brushing) looks pretty good. Alternatively you could use extruded polystyrene (XPS), this material has a flat surface and can be cutted more easily. If you want to see any structure, you have to scar this into the XPS. This can look better than with styrofoam but is more expensive and takes more time.

Tabletop terrain - a lake

(Deutsche Version) Constructing a lake is pretty simple. At first you have to create a basic terrain plate. Afterwards you draw the lake onto it:

Now cut/tear out the lake from the styrofoam:

As a next step, paint everything brown. Afterwards paint the lake blue. To have a better optical result, you can also glue some sand to the edge of the lake:

Now add some grass:

And if you want to, you cann add some Iceland moss:

Tabletop terrain - the first plate

(Deutsche Version) Let's start with the first and easiest plate: Grass. The Plate looks like this:

The plate consists of a 10 mm thick MDF plate topped by a 10 mm styrofoam plate (this makes is possible to have structures which are up to 1 cm deeper than the basis height). On top there is a layer of grass. You can buy grass at a cheap price at ebay. To glue the grass to the plate, I use a 1:1 mixture of Ponal Holzleim and water. This allows you to spread the glue all over the plate before it is dry. As a colour, I use wall paint, this is quite cheap. Alternatively I used spray colours, unfortunately they are quite expensive (but easy to apply).

This is the basic construction of the terrain plate. One problem left to solve is to prevent the movement of the plates. If you would use the plates like they are now, they could move and there appear gaps. Therefore I had to think of a simple principle to have the plates to lock to each other. On the bottom side of each plate, there is a triangle at each corner which pokes out and a notch which locks to such a triangle. The triangle and notch look like this:

I use a wooden bar of the size 20x10 mm which is cut into pieces of the lengths 4 and 2 cm. The long piece fits with the long edge to a diagonal of the plate to have the corners to coincide. The short piece has to fit on the other side of the diagonal so that its other corner coincides with the edge of the plate.

If you fit two plates together it looks like this:

Respectively for 4 plates:

As a next step, I plan to put magnets on the bottom of the plates so the plates will stick to each other. Currently I have to wait for the magnets, as soon as they arrive, I will report the progress.

If you already have constructed 3 plates, the gluing of the bars is quite easy. You just have to place 3 plates in the shape of an L and fit another plate to them. Now you can simply glue the bars into place.

Tabletop terrain - basics

(Deutsche Version) You do not necessarily need a terrain for tabletop games. Usually a carpet or table is also suitable. Unfortunately, this does not look that good and also tactical depth is missing, given by obstacles, hills, rivers and others.

To improve the look, you can buy a cheap gaming mat which come in different looks like grass, desert and several more. Alternatively, you can use a felt mat. To improve the tactical depth, you can use terrain pieces which you just have to place on the mat (e.g. hills or a forest).

To achieve a higher level of good-looking, you could think of building your whole terrain out of one piece. For someone who has a lot of space this is suitable, otherwise you should ask yourself where to store a 1.2x1.8 m big plate which even has a sensitive and rough surface.

The optimal solution is now a modular gaming table. There exist several companies which sell them like Ziterdes, Citadel or Kallistra.
The terrain pieces of Ziterdes and Citadel are quite alike, both consist of 60x60 cm plates which can feature hill corners. Citadel is much more expensive than Ziterdes, both have little diversity (there are hill corners, for the plates of Ziterdes there are also rivers but that's all), in addition, the plates are quite big so there are only few alternatives of how to combine the plates.
Personally, I like Kallistra, the terrain consists of hexagons which can be combines like in The Settlers of Catan. There is a wide range of hexagons like rivers, hills, bridges and even modular castles. Unfortunately, Kallistra is designed for the 15 mm scale, this means that 28 mm figures would stand on very small towers and walls. This is the only reason why I didn't buy the terrain from Kallistra, whoever does not need a fortress can use the Kallistra terrain.

With all the possible systems not being suitable for me I decided to build my own terrain. The basic principle is similar to Citadel/Ziterdes: I use plates which can be combined modularly. I decided to use a edge length of 20 cm to have more possible combinations. My terrain is designed to have several different aspects like the Kallistra terrain: Hill corners and edges, lakes, high plateaus, fortresses and maybe even sea. In the next posts, I will explain how I built the terrain respectively how you can build the terrain (and spend not that much money). To have a comparison, I want to show some basic prices of the terrain.

Ziterdes: A 60x60 cm plate (painted and some grass on it) costs 28 €, if you buy a set of 6, 22 €. Calculated for a 20x20 cm plate this is about 2.4 €.

Citadel: The 6 plate set (unpainted, no grass) costst 230 €, this is about 38 € per plate respectively 4.3 € per 20x20 cm plate.

Kallistra: A set consisting of 21 plates covers 90x120 cm and costs 50 pounds, with grass 75, this is about 60/90 €. This results in a price of 2.2/3.3 € per 20x20 cm plate.

To have a comparison: For one 20x20 cm plate, I spent about 85 ct, adding grass will result in about 1 €.

To summarize everything: The price to cover an area of 180x120 cm you have to spend:
Ziterdes: 130 €
Citadel: 230 €
Kallistra: 120/180 €
home-made (my terrain): about 54 €