Ruins of Carpathia

Shattered Temple

The piece I'm most proud of is the shattered temple. Several years ago GW released a piece of terrain similar to this, but something about it didn't sit right with me. Perhaps it was the giant skulls all over it, or the fact it was clearly a Chaos temple which I found a bit too limiting. Either way, it was recently removed from their store, so I figured I'd make my own. In the end it sorta went in its own direction. You can see in the WIP shots that I intended it to be a Chaos temple as well, but in the end I went for something more generic. The ruins around the edges sorta just happened. Initially the piece was going to be completely surrounded by rock, but while building it I figured that wouldn't make much sense. I wanted there to be a sort of ruined chapel around it, but that would have been a LOT of extra work if I'd made the chapel from scratch. Then I had a brainwave. I've had those old plastic ruins since waaay back in 3rd Edition 40k, sitting around in my boxes doing nothing. So I dusted them off and used them here. I had more ruins than would fit on the temple, so I used the rest to make some scatter terrain ruins as you can see below.

The Ruins

These are some fairly basic scatter pieces to block line of sight and movement, and so on. The pieces on the left of the picture are the rest of the 40k ruins. Initially, all of these plastic ruins had the walls at right angles. But here you'll notice I changed them slightly. I simply sawed one of the walls off each piece and shifted it around the pillar by 45 degrees. I much prefer them this way. One of the ruins has a tree on it. That tree had its base cut off as it was going to be used as part of terrain piece I made years ago, but it never got finished, so I added it here.

The pieces on the right came from another set of ruins GW produced years ago. They were made of a sort of hard foam, mounted on a base and sprayed grey. They looked VERY production line, so I hacked them off the base, rebased them and repainted them. They've had a very previous iterations. First they were part of a jungle board I worked on, but when that went by the wayside they've sorta sat on my shelf doing nothing, so it was time to fix them up.

The Hills

What set of gaming terrain would be complete without some hills? These I made a few months ago as an experiment to see what I could make out of what I had to hand. It was the middle of the night, and suddenly I had the sur to make some terrain; something new, and this is really what started me on the road to making an entirely new board's worth of terrain. As you can see in the temple pictures above, I made the rock faces out of polystyrene. I'm sure many avid terrain-makers dry-heaved when they saw that in my WIP shots, but honestly I like the result. Most of the styrene isn't even visible in the finished pieces because I only use it as a sort of skeleton for the cliffs to give them their shape, and covered them with exterior filler. Its very easy and cheap to achieve, and the beauty of it is I didn't need to order anything new. When I order something, it usually arrives a few days later when my enthusiasm has waned, but by just using what I already had I was able to keep the momentum going. 

Another piece of advice I'd give to someone making things like this: don't over-plan things. Sometimes you spend ages planning something and by the time you start the actual project your gusto has gone, or maybe things don't work out as you had planned and that can be very disappointing. That's half the reason it took me so long to finish my current desert cliffs (they're still not all finished, though). With these new hills, I just sat at my table and cut up the polystyrene into cool-looking shapes. No measuring, no planning, just cutting and gluing down, using cocktail stick to pin the pieces together. I used models to check out the rough size each piece would be compared to the miniatures, but that's about all the planning I did.