Games and Terrain

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

I picked up Armor Grid: Mech Attack for myself in January, and so far I rather like the system. However, I need to work on making some more terrain to keep things varied and interesting.

How do you tend to represent terrain in games? Is there a set of dungeon tiles you wold recommend, or a good website for crafting buildings from paper?

While we're at it, lets try to make a good list of encounter locations that can really add to a scene. Like inside a circus themed casino, or an animal shelter with 300 dogs running loose.

[Onix]

The only terrain that I simulate is when I play Mobile Frame Zero. It helps that I have a huge bucket of legos handy.

Besides that I just draw maps and we use our imagination. I don't have the room to store terrain.

I saw some cool sci-fi terrain molds at gen-con. Just fill the molds with plaster and glue the individual units together to make passages and terrain.

What about taking legos and adding terrain elements to them so they can be reconfigured?

Vulp has been working on making tiles that look pretty cool.

[vulpinoid]

Building terrain is always a fun project around here...after playing a variety of genres of miniature games, we can cover a table in an urban environment (medieval, western, modern, post-apoc, various stages of decay), we've got various landscape types available (swamp, jungle, grassland, desert, rocky waste, ice, mountains, rivers). Once you add in signature pieces like mayan/aztec, chinese, norse, russian orthodox, and japanese religious structure, we've pretty much got most popular genres covered from a terrain perspective. We don't have much purely alien world/exotic stuff, but there's always going to be room to expand.

Every now and then, when I want a specific set piece in a game... a great battle, a run through the ruins, an awakening of an elder god/kaiju, something specific that would just take too long to explain...I end a game just before that point, then start it up the following week with a fully laid out table. Some game systems interact with terrain far better than others, some get houseruled into a more mini-friendly format, for other games we completely shift gears (playing a mini session of mordheim in the case of a warhammer campaign).

We're working on modular hexes at the moment, and a separate unique island integrated with a model train set (roughly 3 metres/10 ft square)...but those have been long term backburner projects that have frequently been bumped back.

...like I said, terrain is always a fun project around here...actually, maybe it's an obsession.

[koipond]

With the powers of my mind.

Seriously, I only like terrain when I'm playing a mini game. Other than that it's like "um ... these mini things get in the way!"