Cult Of Games XLBS: What Are Our Wargaming Terrain Essentials?
November 16, 2025 by crew
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Happy Sunday
Happy Sunday! Big Lee’s YouTube weekly discussion topics are thought provoking and well put together; good call for an indie of the week.
Green and brown felt cut into irregular shapes is all you need for forests/rough ground
Well I acquired a Bambulabs P1S last week exactly for terrain…. it has been printing terrain items eversince…currently creating a Motte and Bailey for Barons war
so … how bad/visible are the print lines ?
And how much time did it take to print the biggest item you’ve done ’til now?
(please tell me it’s horrible so I won’t be tempted 😉 )
They are virtually invisible. The longest print I have done so far is 10 hours and that was a hefty piece with lots of supports. Most things are 5-6 Hours. But I have had it running almost 24/7 since I got it 🤣 only a couple of failed prints and they were user error rather than machine failure.🤣
PS1 are awesome, I have printed so much stuff I need to move house
It’s Sunday!
Great topic 🙂
Terrain essentials is definitely a topic that needs exploring in detail.
A gaming mat is nice, but not really essential.
Buildings and scatter terrain help theme it to a specific era/setting.
oh … and whatever you do : DO NOT use L-SHAPED cardboard
I saw that kind of ‘terrain’ at a recent convention that featured a 40k tournament and it made me want to puke.
Sure, it’s portable and easy to store.
But it looked absolutely horrible and didn’t make me want to play a game.
I recorded a similar video yesterday talking about this same topic lol
@brennon “maybe Cornish, or Welsh, or Scottish. Somewhere in England these walls exist.” You’ve never lived up to the stereotypical Englishman than this Ben… none of those places are in England 😉
I’ve been thinking about “essential” terrain recently because I’ve been wanting to get a city table on the go for Cyberpunk Red Combat Zone. I’ve gone with cardboard buildings for easy storage but the thing that is going to really sell the table is the incidental scatter terrain. You can make any buildings look more real with random scatter bits. Most of them can be used in multiple settings as well; boxes, crates, chain-link fences, benches. Need something more specific? Terminals, phone boxes, public transportation. Not necessarily in the first ten things you should make/buy for your terrain collection.
yeah, add a satelite dish or an airconditioner … and suddenly that ancient building is ‘modern’.
add a few neon signs and you’re going to get a more sci-fi / cyberpunk style.
If only you could add/remove grafitti as easily.
So what you really need are generic buildings that look like they could have survived multiple eras without looking too weird. Maybe use magnets to add/remove features ?
What about linear terrain? Hedges, walls, fences, sandbags, barricades, etc. break up line of sight, give cover and effect movement.
Also a set of place-on dirt roads/ tracks can serve from pre-history to modern and fantasy.
Cut up bits of carpet tile can serve as rough ground or woodland areas with trees on top.
A bag of small gravel can be used to mark out terrain edges and a bag of lichen can provide temporary hedges or bushy areas with out any scratch building.
Oh, also, cut up door mats make great wheat fields
Happy Sunday
Was at a class reunion yesterday. Had some beers. And some shots. Comments will be few from me today.
46:30 *inaudible cursing noises* *audio crackling* *fuse blowing sounds* THEM LINES ARE BAAAAAD! @brennon @avernos
1:15:00 Fire! Flame on! Burn them all! (especially the quickly 3D printed terrain!)
Must have terrain: Trees, hills and may big Rocks. And a green mat. But that is just for starters. The minute you say “I want to play game X” you’ve set yourself what terrain you need.
Question: do I fire up the broch for TerrainFest 2025 or do I leave that for spring clean?
but the reason I asked the question is when you say “I want to play game X” then you should be able to play with the terrain you have, it’s that ubiquity that I’m interested in.
and yes broch
why not both ?
use it for terrain fest … and then continue during spring clean 😉
That’d be cheating!
building a Broche for Gerry … that’s bribery 😉
@brennon If you want to get a quick easy to digest overview of the Zulu shields, Wargames Illustrated issue 365 had an illustrated article from Zulu expert Ian Knight giving details on the Zulu shields and regimental co-ordination.
Another quick approach to getting you going for terrain is the A Song of Ice & Fire Miniatures game starter sets all come with flat carboard terain to represent, copses, walls, ponds, rivers, whilst not as aestheticlly pleasing its easy to store and can cover a wide range of terrain features at very low cost.
I imagine there’s plenty of pdf cut out printable terrain pdfs folks could get on the interweb these days.
IIRC Legion of the Damned Centarius was featured with a Legion of the damned in WD 195.
I remember he was sold for either at giant day or apocalypse 100. To mark either the 50th or 100th store being opened. But I’m damned if I can remember which. Of course I could check the white dwarfs I suppose
Great topic.
Having recently joined a club, and now playing more games i feel i ought to expand my available terrain.
Over the years i’ve watched a lot of the Vlogs and videos where various terrrain was made, but can’t remeber specifics to go back and find them again. It would be great to have an article or place on the site where these were collated into a list that we could look thro for reference or ideas.
e.g. i remember a video of of someone (i think Lloyd) making cliffs out of blue foam? but wouldn’t know where to start searching for that
Trees and Forests, rivers, swamps, walls and fences. They are what I would say are my “essentials” for terrain. Personally I don’t see the point in hills and they always look a bit out of place to me. Anyone who lives in or around hills will probably be able to tell you how big they are. I live in the Pennines in the North of England and a hill is enormous. You might fight an entire battle on just a small segment of a hill, and so from a wargame perspective, you wouldn’t see the hill in any way other than the battlefield itself would be a slope. What people refer to as hills are really just knolls and again, in reality, knolls don’t generally offer a great deal of height, personally I prefer to large rock formations to small hills
Good show and interesting topic
Essential terrain in my mind is a mix of,
terrain that you can see across, but not move across.
Can’t see across or move across.
Can shoot into or out of but not through.
Stuff that slows you down or speeds you up.
What those actual elements are really depends on what you play.
Trees, roads/tracks, rock formations and linear terrain of some sort to start with a then small scatter pieces themed for the setting.
Larger things like buildings and castles are more situational because a lot of the times they are just line of sight blocking impassible terrain pieces. Ruins would be a better option than complete structures.
I don’t tend to use water features that much. I find rivers can create choke points and bottlenecks unless they have multiple crossing points, but the. It starts to look unnatural.
I’m also not a fan of hills, which are always too small.
Thanks for the Button a mention and congrats to the other button winners.
My best terrain investment ever was a 3×4 desert mat and a bunch of desert spire type hills I got from an etsy seller. It takes minutes to set up and works for almost all of the games I play.
I originally bought it for Gaslands, but a desert is so universal that I’ve since used it for Dead Man’s Hand, 7TV, Shatterpoint, Star Schlock…even Doctor Who. I’ve probably got more hours of game time out of that small investment than all the other terrain I have combined.
Hi COGz an OTTers 👍
Gerry doubles up
That’s the hight ground manover Justin
Great show guy’s 👍