I have experimented with many ways to do terrain over the years. I now feel that the following best describes the techniques 'mastered' over several years. All our terrain building takes place in the garden since many noxious gasses are produced and you get bits of polystyrene that has a static charge and sticks to anything it touches. Plastic fumes are HAZARDOUS so don't breathe them if you can avoid them by using a cheap mask. We now use the 2 inch thick expanded polystyrene building sheets that are about 6 foot by 4 foot (they take two people to carry from the builders merchants because they act like a huge sail in the slightest wind). For bases that will be dragged around shows we make up wooden frames that have fixing clamps to ensure no gaps on the table and glue the polystyrene into the base. Deep cuts are made by slicing the building bats with a knife heated in a blowlamp, then glueing the bits so that the chipboard base shows - for deep riverbeds, ravines etc. The bats can be carved with a hot knife to get lesser features but they end up a bit ragged. We have tried using a power sander - very gently but it does make a terrible mess, hand sanding is better. The ragged carvings are easily sorted out with - my Black and Decker hot air paint stripper, mostly on the cooler setting. This is easier to control than the blowlamp that we used to use. All the ragged bits just melt away into little lumps. With practice you can just melt the surface of the polystyrene and that produces a fairly hard but brittle shell. Then sand off by hand any bits that look too delicate. We then use a couple of coats of Polytex with the gritty bits in it, as opposed to the smooth stuff. You can mix other colours or pigments into the texture paint if you like. When dry a light hand sanding takes off all the high spots. Then paint and dry brush until the terrain looks how it's supposed to look. The same procedures apply to hills ridges and other bits that we use but I don't bother with any kind of base. I just use lumps of the building bats and shape with the Hot air gun. It's sometimes difficult to stand figures on the edges since they are not so gently sloping as other methods but it doesn't impede our games. Things we have found to be a bad idea include: Making terrain boards that are too big to fit in our cars. Using sand/PVA glue mix all over the terrain - it gets very heavy. Making games bigger than 12 foot by 6 foot when assembled. Good ideas include: Making drop-in terrain modules with say a village or other feature. Making little holes for commercial trees with wire trunks. Then putting a small dob of red paint on so you can find the hole again. Back to Frontline Vol. 2 Iss. 3 Table of Contents Back to Frontline List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2002 by Rolfe Hedges This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com