Corvus Urban Two Floor House

So in addition to starting over with new survivors and zombies, I'm also starting over with buildings as well.  The last time I mostly used cardstock buildings, a lot of which were reinforced with foamcore.  This time around, I'm 3D printing most of them.
This is the Urban Two Floor House from Corvus Games Terrain.  It's less than four dollars for the file, and comes with a removable roof and two floors.  There are not, however, actually floors to the building.  You would need to make those out of something, say the aforementioned foamcore.
First building done!  Thanks for reading.  Comments welcome.

River City Table, Part 2

From my last post, I build a second half of my 3' by 3' modular table using an identical technique: a 2' by 4' piece of MDF board cut into sections, painted, covered with grass paper, and then assembled.  I made a slight variation in the layout for diversity's sake.

When the two pieces are put together, they make a variety of permutations.

Now I could stop here (and may take a little break for a few days) but I've been considering adding additional detail: sidewalks, etc.  What do you think?

River City Table, Part 1

I've been thinking for a long time, maybe over a year, about creating a small gaming table upon which to play All Things Zombie or other modern-ish game.  For my previous ATZ campaign, I played on an old 4' by 4' table that I made for Mordheim ages ago. It's big, a bit unwieldy, and is pretty uniformly green.

What I wanted was a 3' by 3' square table which would come in two halves (18 inches by 36 inches), and have built into it roads, sidewalks, etc. on which I could arrange buildings.  I considered getting a pre-made mat, but those are expensive and I could never find exactly what I want.  Printing out a cardstock table would offer lots of two-dimensional detail, but would cost a fortune in printing costs (and also be two dimensional).  So I decided to make my own.  I'm pretty crafty, but regardless my plan wouldn't be complicated.  After a lot of sketching on the mist-covered door of my shower stall, I finally decided to move on my plan.

So I thought I would share it with you, step by step.  I'll be building the first half, just to see if it works before I build the second.  Here's the stuff you need for the first half:

• a 2' by 4' MDF board
• black spray paint
• green grass-textured paper (the kind you use for model train layouts)
• wood glue
• spray adhesive

First, get the guy at Home Depot to cut your MDF sheet.  You want to cut one foot off the short end, then six inches off the long end of the large piece, then cut the small side piece in half.  This will leave you with four pieces:

• 18" by 36"
• 12" by 24"
• 6" by 18"
• 6" by 18"

If that sounds unclear, here's a helpful photo of the pieces.

The large piece will make up the base of the table.  On the big piece, spray black on the part where the road will go.  The road will be about six inches across.  Here's a photo of how I wanted it to look.

Now, take the 12" by 24" piece and cut a piece of the grass paper to make the shape.  Spray adhesive on the piece and carefully lay the grass paper on top of it (weigh it down with some odd pieces of plywood) and let it dry for several hours.  Do the same for the 6" by 18" piece.  Save the last piece for the next half of the project.

Attach the two grassy pieces of MDF to the base around the painted roads, creating a layout like I've shown.

Now you have a roughly three-dimensional layout that's pretty inexpensive and easy to build.  I'm going to basically do a second one in a similar fashion to finish up the table, plus add some additional detail, as you'll see.  Stay tuned, and comments always welcome!

Our House, in the middle of our street...

Continuing my build-up of my table for the upcoming All Things Zombie: Final Fade Out campaign, I've added a new house.

It is the "Raised Ranch House" from Stoezel's Structures.  What I like the best about it is that the building is made with in the intent of using foamcore to reinforce the walls and floors.  What do I not like?  The biggest thing is the roof, which is almost exactly flush with the side of the building, rather than having it hang over the edge slightly like real roofs do.  But it is pretty cool with a fully detailed interior including a two-car garage, and for the low price of $5.00.  Morever it includes several different color exteriors so you can make different homes that won't be completely identical.

Note: I didn't put the exterior steps on the building because I find cardstock steps particularly fiddly and I can make ones pretty easily from Hirst Arts blocks.

Another Armory

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm bulking up my campaign's material.  With that in mind, I built a second building from the World Works Games Mayhem Armory, this one looking more like, well, an armory.

The Armory

So I decided to try to build a cardstock building with an interior, using World Works Games' "Mayhem Armory" set.  It's not build to have foamcore walls, however, but instead is some sort of "TerrainLinx" set up where the walls are made of folded-over cardstock.  I didn't pay too much attention to how the whole Linx thing worked; I figured I would just adjust the set-up to accommodate the foamcore walls.  It was a little trickier than I thought, for one thing the interior walls are strangely shorter than the exterior ones.  But here's the final result of my first effort.

Not super-great, but a good learning experience.

Abandoned Building

I decided I really needed to add to my terrain collection for River City, the locale of my ATZ campaign.  Plasticville buildings are okay, but aren't that cheap.  I've seen some nice work with cardstock, but I don't have a ton of experience in this regard.  So I'm easing into it with some easy scenery projects for World Works Games.  For $3.50 you can get the "Abandoned Building" which is good for making simple "outer shell" buildings."  Rather than just use cardstock I built a box with some foamcore I had lying around, painted the corners black, and then just glued the panels right onto the box.  Easy as pie, and a good way to "bulk out" the city.  I also bought the Mayhem Armory with the intent of using it to make up some stores as I get more confident with the craft.

TV Repair Shop

This is the second in the three free cardstock buildings available from Microtactix at the Wargames Vault and elsewhere.

The building has a recessed doorway and roof, the latter of which gives a "lip" to provide cover should one need it.  Like the other Microtactix buildings, the signs are separate so that you could build duplicate buildings to flesh out your scenery.  I have considered the possibility of reinforcing walls with foamcore to make the buildings more durable and to prevent warping.

What's nice about cardstock buildings is that their construction is not time-consuming.  This small building was built within an hour, probably more like thirty minutes.  With all cardstock construction you really need four tools: an X-acto knife for cutting and scoring, a metal ruler (don't use a wooden or plastic one--I had to have a chunk of a finger stitched back on because of that mistake), a self-healing cutting board, and a glue pen like scrap-bookers use.  The glue pen is useful because the glue shows up blue but dries clear, is easily controlled,  and has little water so that it prevent warping.

Stinky's Pizza Place

Click to enlarge

A while back I was trying to figure out the best solution for creating the urban landscape for my ATZ campaign.  There seems to be four schools of thought:

1. Professionally made 25/28mm terrain.  While there are lots of fantasy and sci-fi ranges out there, modern ranges that are not Middle Eastern "adobe" are hard to come by, not to mention expensive.

2. HO or O Scale railroad terrain.  HO is really too small for 28mm and looks better in 1:72 or 15mm.  O Scale is also expensive, and really the terrain is made for static placement, not to be transported or moved.

3. Scratchbuilt.  I can actually do a fair job of this, but it is will either be quick or attractive, but not both.

4. Cardstock.  A lot of people go this route, including Vampifan from Vampifan's World of the Undead.  I've used cardstock terrain in the past with fantasy, and there's lots available out there.  With that in mind, I made my first piece today, "Stinky's Pizza" by Microtactix.

Microtactix's pieces are more cartoony than WorldWorksGames, but on the upside this particular piece is free and comes with separate signs so you can make up several buildings with different names on them.  This particular piece is also free from DriveThruRPG, making it an even better deal.  It isn't large, but I'm a believer in the "small terrain is better" school of thought.  Four 3" buildings look better on a table than one 12" building.  This set prints out on one page of cardstock, including both the signs and a dumpster (and a crummy looking cardstock delivery boy I won't be using).  Microtactix actually has three free buildings, each with separate signs so one could really do a nice start to a layout without laying out any money beyond the $15 for 250 pages of cardstock that will last your forever and the ink cartridges (probably the one downside to cardstock terrain, aside from general flimsiness).

If you have any experience or tips with cardstock terrain, feel free to share them.