A village built next to ruins on a 4x6' table
Since I’ve got six players in my D&D game and it was getting hard to fit around the table, I set up my 6′x4′ plywood sheet on top of the gaming table (an old dining room table) to increase the space. But minis abhor a vacuum so Saturday night I decided to set up my ground cloth and bunch of terrain just for kicks. I’d been thinking about using all my ent/treant/tree monster minis in part of a larger woods set up anyway and the end result is above and below.
The ruins are from the Games Workshop LotR games, as well as the first Heroscape set, and the ruined church is from a White Dwarf magazine. I wonder if they put free card stock terrain in the magazine these days.
The fields were made for war gaming terrain, but are large enough to still represent a reasonable garden patch or the edge of a farm. The rows of fencing are also from “Battlemasters” and I use them to represent cultivated grape vines.
The graveyard (which really ought to be nearer the ruins and church) are a combination of things, including some lego-like castle blocks, Halloween village tombstones, and the sarcophagi and statues I posted last week.
Here’s a slightly better picture you can click to see more detail. (A few things are already out of place as my five year old was naturally fascinated with the whole thing.)
A shot from the side. Click to enlarge greatly.
The buildings are mostly from the old Games Workshop Warhammer set “Terror of the Lichemaster,” which was designed for a set of skirmishes leading to small battle for the town.
The haunted woods.
The woods contain all my treemen minis, as well as most of my pine trees and deciduous trees. My daughter really enjoyed searching for the “monster trees.”
The keep is constructed from parts of a toy castle and various bits of cardboard and plaster all attached to a tower from the Milton Bradley “Battlemasters” game.
The Donjon.
The gatehouse, lightly fortified.
The gatehouse to the village has no supporting walls, so I placed some stakes and mantlets nearby to suggest it has been hastily fortified. The buildings will have to serve as part of the defenses of the town.
My daughter Riley couldn’t wait to try out the set-up, but she told her mom that she was afraid she’d break my figures (I guess I really drilled into her how fragile they are). She brought one of her fairy action figures and we selected a number of plastic D&D figures to fill out the the complement of characters and monsters.
"Can I play?"
I set up a mine entrance on one of the hills and laid out a dungeon made of tiles and bits from the Heroscape set for doors, and we played various adventures for at least an hour and a half. She even helped pick up, and really enjoyed that because she got to examine everything more closely.
I took a bunch of pictures during the game but they are currently trapped on my new phone, which does not have an easy way to transfer files to a computer. Maybe I’ll post them later — by the time we were done, the board was covered with stuff.
Maybe next time we’ll use dice too.
I want you to adopt me. That looks like a heap of fun.
Oh my gosh, your kiddo is so cute! That’s awesome that she wants to hang out and game with her old man. I love it when my sons show an interest in minis and gaming.
[...] I’m pretty confident that there will no more than one more ‘pirate invasion’ session and then things should probably go back to dungeoneering (which is a lot easier to preapre and run, with all the built-in limitations on where you can go and what you can do!). I guess the players might decide to embark on wilderness exploration too, now that they’ve captured an airship, which would be OK too — stocking wilderness hexes might be pretty fun. And it would be an excuse to whip out the terrain models. [...]