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All Mordheim buildings have something in common: they are more or less destroyed. The comet that hit the city reduced most if it to rubble, which is sad for the city, but has one distictive advantage for a tabletop gamer: first, it look cool and second, in a ruined environment it is much easier to move ones figures around since more areas are reachable.
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| | Ruined bell tower
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| | One side is intact
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| When I was invited to a game of Mordheim I thought, bringing along a new terrain piece would be greatly appreciated. I have built two bell towers so far, I must say I like this building very much. The narrow floorplan and relative height makes it so practical on the table. I decided to make a ruined bell tower for any skirmish style game.
So, my assuption that bringing along a terrain piece would be greatly appreciated was true - BUT: did I win? No! I was second of three. Poor orcs, managed to assault the tower for nothing... except for the fun of it, which for orcs is quite much...
A check in the trays of casted pieces revieled that I did indeed have enough to start right away. Wow. Usually I have to cast for days to get enough pieces. So I made a plan. Two sides of the tower would have collapsed to allow easy acces to the interior. There should be at least 3 platforms to put minis on and a system of ladders to get up or down. Sadly, there is not enough room for stairs in the tower.
After finishing the plaster parts I took a large pliers and let my aggressions flow. The result was some damage to the towers structure. *g* Then I glued it all together and let it dry. The interesting part in this projekt was that this building did not entirely consist of one material, I wanted to add wooden structures, platforms, ladders and support beams. This should add to the ramshackle feeling of a ruined stone tower that had been repaired to be used as an observation post.
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| | A ruined tomb
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| | Debris provides cover
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| After the great success of the ruined bell tower I anted to build a new Mordheim syle structure. This time it would be the gothic tomb. I like the structure very much, I wanted to add a few damaged areas and some collapsed parts. I chose the tomb since it is one of my favorite buildings (I built three of them now) and I wanted to add just a few subtle changes.
I build a plain vanilla Tomb and broke one corner off, those parts were glued on the floor as debris. For the roof I made a wooden frame and broke off some parts of it. Then I glued the roof tiles on. I left the decorative rim away, I feared the weigth would crush the roof. The wooden beams were painted brown and drybrushed with a light cream color. The rest of the structure was painted like the the other, undamged HirstArts tomb.
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| | Ein verdorbener Brunnen
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| I like the design of the HirstArts fountain very much, since seeing it on the website I wanted to build one for myself. Too bad I just don't like the center part, so I kept postponig it further and further. Then the idea of using plastic figures for the center part hit my mind and I was off digging in my boxes to get enough parts together...
The lower part is exactly like the one on the HirstArts website, the upper part is a toilet paper roll with top and bottom from the turret mold. First I wanted to put a Jedi statue on top but changed later for a mummy since all the figures on the sides are skelletins and zombies - and one Goblin. The fountain should have a sinister and corrupted feel with far too much Wyrdstone inside. (In fact I brought it to a game where the gamemaster coincidently had a scenario up with a corrupted fountain and a demon living inside...)
The waterspouts are this silver wire, painted and covered with gloss varnish.
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| | Temple of the Dragon Goddess
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| | Temple of the Dragon Goddess
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| The temple should be the first structure being built using the fieldstone mold. We needed more ruins for our Mordheim table and so I decided to build some pieces of a larger ruined building. While assembling the first piece I got hold of the HirstArts fieldstone dungeon and I added some pices more or less intentionally. One led to the other and alltogether to the Temple of the Dragon Goddess.
The pieces until now are: entry area, sacrifical pit, thwo side-altars, a row of columns and a bell tower. These pieces can be arranged in different relative positions and allow a maximum of flexibility and reusability.
I plan to do more parts, I still need some sort of a main altar.
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| | Front view
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| | Back view
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| Did I mention that I like the Belltower? No? O well, this is the fourth I built so far and I still like the design very very much. This time I wanted to make something special and built one using only fieldstone and accessory pieces. Almost all pieces of the original tower have complements on the fieldstone mold except for the large round window, which I substituted with two small arches windows, like the curch I saw in Carrick-on-Shannon (IRL)
Since I plan to use it as a Mordheim table piece it has to be easily accessible and yet somwhat different to the other tower I built. So I collapsed one wall completly and made the two adjacent walls in ruins.
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| | The wizards tower
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| | The damaged side
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| | The top room
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| I wanted to build a towerlike structure for our Mordheim table and still had some octogonal parts to spare so I just grabbed the box and started building. Without a particular plan I just stacked bricks on top of each other leaving one side open - this side would have collapsed. It is inportand with buildings as large as this one to leave plenty of room for the gamers hands to manipulate the miniatures, a lesson dearly learned with the Greek Temple.
In the next role playing sessein an idea struck me to build an extravagant and wider top atelier than planned earlier. This was the time the tower was dubbed a wizards tower. I built the roof rather spontanously, I couldn't decide between a crellenated top and a roof, so somehow I built both. Looking back this was a rather awkward decision, next time I'd better choose one path and stick to it. The balcony on the lower part of the tower was attached to give the structure some more weight in the lower stories. I am really surprised how easy the balcony fits I would have expected more troubles here, since I really had no plan for this part of the building.
We use the tower often in our Mordheim games, where it is really liked by snipers and archers. The lower balcony is a good place for a sharpshooter, a sniper in the upper room has opponents shiver. The building is easy to use and has no flaws when handling it in game play. It is a bit tilted in the upper levels, this is a result of it being built "on the fly".
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| | A two storied house
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| | from above
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| Originally, I wanted to build Bunratty Castle. I played around with some bricks and build about one quarter of the basement before I abandoned the project because of various reasons. The structure was lying around for over a year now and I thought I could as well build a Mordheim ruin from it. I wanted to make something with a different first floor so I used the small brick mold for those areas. Painting the stories in different colors also adds to the effect.
I like the structure very much and it is often used in games since you can hide very well and archers have well shielded shooting places. Learning my lessons from previous buildings, I made less archer-spots on this one preventing a "machine-gun-nest" effect.
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| | Another house
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| | from above
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| Looking at the tomb mold pieces I wanted to make a structure with a decorative large arch. When I realized that my Mordheim table needs more than churches, tombs, bell-towers and temples I started to build plain houses. In this house I made an elaborate front side, this would have been the side that pointed to the street, so everybody could see the nice decoration. The model "rested" some time and later I added the decorative roof bracing and the sheeted roof tiles.
This model is different from the others in the respect that it has a decorative floor incorporated. I wanted to test how this would turn out in the gameplay. Until now, it has shown good results and didn't disturb gameplay in any way. The model has its drawbacks in the topology department, it has far to omany windows allowing lots of archers to be deployed there. This cumulates in somthing like a "machine-gun-nest" effect, where attacking troops are shot at in any direction while having trouble themselves reaching the house. This gives the defending player quite some bonus.
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| | A statue
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| | He must have been a great warrior
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| The staue was more or less a test for the new gothic molds from HirstArts. I made a small ornate tower based on the HirstArts Chessboard corner and put a statue on top. I had a Obi Wan Kenobi Jedi Spirit action figure lying around and put a spear made of toothpicks in his hand and glued a plaster door to the other to act as a shield. (Yes, I made two shields after the statue inadvertably fell to the ground, this happens all the time...)
I like the paint job, I went back to the 3 colors drybrushing method, it gives the best results.
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