Scatter Terrain - Walls 1

A Broken Heavy Wall option for Modern or Futuristic tabletop games

I like skirmish wargames and scatter terrain is always good for the table to help break up line of sight and give your minis something to hide behind. Those eagle eyed readers may have spotted some grey wall sections being used during a previous Stargrave game here. The walls in the photo were an early build and paint job where I was trying them out to see how well they would work. They worked well enough for my needs, now all I needed was some more.

I managed to get some 1 inch thick polystyrene insulation for cheap (and when I say cheap I mean it literally fell off the roof of a car, ended up in bits on the road, and was gifted to me for crafting, thanks Karl!). I cut these up into rough broken wall like sections, adding buttresses to look like some sci-fi fortification style walls which had fallen into disrepair. My Proxxon did a great job of slicing through the polystyrene giving all the bases a nice flat edge allowing them to stand reasonably upright on their own.

I really just glued pieces together until it felt right. After I got a few big sections, I wanted to have some smaller more decrepit sections of wall, as well as a few rubble pieces which looked like they came from the wall itself. With regards the amount of pieces to make, I have found that one of the under bed storage boxes filled with scatter terrain fills a 4ft x 4ft gaming space quite nicely, and still allows room for a few hills or buildings.

I didn't want any bases on these pieces as I wanted minis and other scenery to butt up against them easily and I wanted the walls to sit as flush to the ground as possible. With this in mind I decided to strengthen everything by sticking the polystyrene sections to cereal box card, and then cutting off the cardboard tight against the wall. This worked out really well as those rough bobbly ends of the broken wall sections now had something reasonably sturdy holding it together. A light smatter of a mix of wall filler, mod podge and paint covered every surface to hopefully stop the polystyrene from bobbling apart when handling.

I know I wanted these to look like abandoned sci-fi fortifications so for the colour scheme I wanted blacks and greys to make it look a bit like concrete, but also look a bit like strange sci-fi building material. I am not totally convinced with my paint job, but these are finished and playable and do exactly what I wanted them to do.

After a base of mid grey and several heavy black washes followed with a grey over brush I finally got the approximate colour I was looking for. A few more passes of over brush with a lighter grey and several dry brushes from grey to white soon had the piece looking good – if a little bland. A final black wash with a grey tinted white to pick out the detail had the pieces ready for embellishment.

I decided that if these were exterior walls falling into disrepair there might be plants growing on them, so a quick addition of some green ink to look like slime or lichen, a few bits of green flock and clump foliage and we had a final product.

These do look great on the table and I hope these inspire you to try something like this yourself.

J