HOW TO FIND AND MAKE SCENERY

You’re putting on an event, and you’ve decided to take the plunge and use Coalescence as your means to do so. Now you need to focus on the battlefield and how you can populate it quickly and easily. After all, if there is one hugely improved feature of the Warhammer Age of Sigmar game, it’s that Terrain features heavily and is something to be celebrated!

Terrain needn’t be a worry or a factor that should put you off however. But you do need to consider several factors, and in this post we will try to break down these factors and give you some tips on how to get over the hazards out there.


Gaming surfaces

You have tables, but now you need to cover them so that the battlefield looks inviting to play on.
Decide what table size your battles will require: full games of Age of Sigmar often need a 6’x4’ (183cm x 122cm) table, while smaller games may need only a 4’x4′ table. Warcry games need even less space, as each battlefield is always 30″x22″.
Think about whether your event is better served by big but fewer tables, or more tables of a smaller size to fit more players in the same space.

The budget way: for your first event you could buy large chipboard sheets and laid them on top of folding tables. Paint them green with regular emulsion paint from your local DIY store.
The visually detailed way: nowadays, of course, there are several manufacturers of battlements printed on soft rubberised mousemat material, or even vinyl. This makes for a vastly superior gaming surface but comes at a cost. For your first event you really don’t need to worry about this as it is purely an optional extra. It is definitely worth talking to your friends and gaming colleagues to see if they would help you by loaning you their mats/gaming surfaces.


Terrain

The starting point here is to document your own personal collection of terrain. For your first event you might only have access to your own terrain (generally you might have roughly enough to cover one 6’x4’ tabletop).

It is worth pointing out that a lot of the events run in the UK ask each player to bring a selection of terrain with them on the day along with their army (usually the request is for a minimum of 5 pieces). This way you can circumnavigate the need to have your own vast collection waiting for tournament use.

However, for me personally the terrain is the thing that I get the most hobby enjoyment from, and each event I help to run is an opportunity for me to push myself to create bigger and better terrain pieces. For some examples of the types of extreme you can go to it is worth visiting the Realms at War (RAW) tables HERE. As you can see in the photos we really let our imaginations run wild and made bespoke tables for five of the Mortal Realms.

Great examples and tips on bringing narrative terrain can be found in the Narrative Creator Class at AoSShorts, by such masterful NEO hobbyists like WarbossKurgan, Adam Trunzo, and many others.

Small scatter terrain can easily be built using everyday items leftover in the house as well as clipping every last item off those old unwanted model sprues. You never know when you might want to adorn a piece of terrain with spare weapons or cuts of meat etc (the Giant kit from Games Workshop is one of my all time favourites as it has a wealth of bits you can use in terrain building).

You will see in the photos in the RAW blog that some of the simplest things were really very easy. The corn fields for example were simply a coir (coconut fibre) mat cut in to rough field shapes. Ruined temple pieces were made from offcuts of plasticard cut to look like flagstones with old plaster wedding cake pillars. The sky really is the limit