Ruined Building From Foam-Core Posterboard Because scale is much less an issue and these terrain features tend to be modular in and of themselves, they’re the perfect place to start if you’re wanting to start down the scenery crafting path. It’s remarkably easy to make some basic terrain features, including rivers. With larger pieces of styrofoam or to create a more mountainous feel to your terrain (perfect for creating cave entrances), it’s as simple as cutting the rough shape and glueing tissue paper with a watered down mixture of white glue. Making fantastic hills is as easy as cutting some insulation foam into hill-like shapes and finishing them with paint and static grass (available at most hobby stores that have model train supplies.) For basic rolling hills, 1″ insulation styrofoam is the perfect scale to start. Things to pick up: styrofoam insulation, foam core poster board, tissue paper, white glue, paint and some cutting implements. Using $20 of materials from craft and hardware stores, you can make scenery for a 4’圆′ table in a pinch. The same basics apply: be mindful of scale, finish all the pieces with paint and texture (static grass or sand), and make sure the pieces are modular for the best versatility. Using those fundamentals and a slightly bigger budget, you can put together a lot of terrain. Hills & Streams From Styrofoam and Cardboard You can watch the process start to finish in video here: The keys to having great terrain is as simple as making sure the scale is right (hence why you want to use thin sticks rather than wide popsicle sticks), the pieces are finished (painted and based), and that they’re modular so they remain versatile. It also helps reinforce the basics of terrain building. It’s a great starter project since it requires less than $5 in materials (including glue and paint) and you can make a whole lot of them quite quickly. The best part of making these is you can do them in shorter or longer lengths and do them in large batches so you can have a small stash of fences and use them as needed. Step 5: Apply a basing material and paint (I mixed paint into some coarse pumice gel and applied it, but you can glue some sand down and paint that in a pinch.).Step 4: Apply watered down paint or wood stain to the fence.I used a plastic base, but you can use sturdy cardboard, poster board, or corrugated plastic. Step 3: Glue the fence to a base structure.Step 2: Glue them into a fence-like structure with toothpicks as crossbeams.Step 1: Take some wooden sticks (I used soap stirrers from Michaels) and cut them to scale (about 1″ tall).Gifs of all the the steps are in the gallery below (and are linked) but it’s quite simple. Versatile fences can be easily made using wooden coffee stirrers, super glue and paint. Here are some of the easiest things you can make to dress up your table for the next gaming event.
What’s remarkable is this small upgrade is both easy and cheap to make, mostly requiring minimal materials that you could find in any kindergarten craft bin (styrofoam, white glue, cardboard, tissue paper, paint and wooden sticks). One of the best ways to help gaming immersion, whether that’s for an RPG campaign or some head-to-head wargaming, is to have fantastic looking tabletop gaming terrain.