Tabletop Terrain Modeling

Well I ended up buying a few more miniatures for Strange Aeons last week, but I haven't actually painted any of it yet.  I've cleaned them all up and based them all, so they're ready for painting sometime soon.  But in order to actually play a game, I needed some terrain for my agents and lurkers to fight over.  So I made some.

I've always wanted to make my own terrain, but didn't really know where to start.  When I started playing 40k a few years ago the starter box came with a bunch of pieces of a crashed spacecraft.  That stuff looked pretty good when it was all painted up, so I bought the "How to Make Wargame Terrain" book and read it through.  Then I picked up a few small scenery kits but never bothered to do anything with them; they just sat collecting dust on my shelf.  Last week I was digging through my box of scenery bits looking for things I could use for a Strange Aeons game and found the rock making kit I had and thought, "what the hell, let's try it out!"  So that was the catalyst for all the stuff you see below.  Oddly enough, I didn't remember I had that how-to book until AFTER I'd built everything except the temple!

I started out with the intention of using the rocks I'd made and just building the little mountain with the waterfall & little pool on it (in the upper left corner).  But after I was finished with that I had tons of cast rocks left over.  Since I already had the styrofoam and cutters out I just kept going.  So I've ended up with a mountain, a temple, two 2" high stepped hills, three smaller 1" high hills, and four smaller terrain bits.  The trees are Woodland Scenics trees that I picked up on Sunday when I went to buy grass flocking.  I ended up with the trees and foam, but forgot the flocking!  Oops.

The temple just popped into my mind while I was building the mountain on Sunday.  I remembered seeing a really impressive jungle temple on a website years ago (albeit much bigger than what I ended up building). I thought that having a little temple for my cultists to perform sacrifices and summoning rituals on would be fun.  They're difficult to see in the photo, but there are five cultist figures on it for size reference, as well as the altar and a sacrificial victim in the middle there.  The temple will also be suitable for Chaos Daemons, Necrons and Chaos Space Marines for 40k games too, so hooray for versatility!  The whole thing from design to construction took me somewhere around 3 hours.

All the scenery you see in the pictures was built over the course of two evenings...probably totalling around 8 hours of construction time.  Funny to note...I still have some of those damn rocks left!  The is still a lot of work left to do, but it should go pretty quickly now that the main construction is complete.  Painting and detailing everything will probably take me another two or three evenings to do.  I'm pretty happy with it all so far, especially so since I've never done this before.