Greebles Galore

After playing a few games with my strange gangs, I felt the terrain wasn’t really matching the vibes of the figures. Considering that the terrain in question was supposed to be my generic, one set fits all games terrain I didn’t want to change it. So that meant making some new stuff.

Terrain is actually a big consideration for wargaming, especially skirmish level gaming, and it can often feel like an afterthought. I’ve too often plonked down some L shaped ruins at random and thought it was the fault of the rules that the game wasn’t interesting. But in reality that poopy experience it was probably down to bad terrain and bad terrain placement.

I don’t have much wisdom in this area though, so put any nuggets in the comments. But what I have gleaned from years of gaming, is that ground floor should mostly block line of sight, and upper floors be more open. So that’s my mantra.

I started with a corner of an old Age of Sigmar starter set box as the card was decently tough, and began gluing whatever crap I could find to it.

I haven’t really greebled before, and if you haven’t done it before I’d highly recommend it. It’s like doing a puzzle but you get to decide what bits fit where.

Greebling is adding little details to things, like those random panels of techno-junk you see in SciFi or Post Apocalyptic movies.

My greebling did get a little out of hand, but all for good reason:

I think the aesthetic I’m going for here is a generational one, ancient structures that have been added to repeatedly, so the deeper you go into a wall the further back you go in time. People didn’t clear away the previous civilisations junk, they just modified and built on top. I hope it works… the paint job will be covering a multitude of sins. I’m also leveraging a bit of a bio-mechanical theme with dinosaurs and bones, animal parts, even babies. I think over time the machines almost become living creatures themselves, maybe predatory, snatching what they can and replacing their own damaged parts. Biology often is a system of pipes anyway.

One of the cardinal sins of greebling must be the use of Lego as Lego bricks are so universally recognisable. I’ve done my best to hide the Lego-ness of those areas, but I’ve still got a little way to go in that area.

I’ve also raised the piece up on some wooden cubes, so I can have pipes, cables and supporting beams jutting out from underneath, I hope to hide the edge of the individual pieces and have them blend into the gaming surface itself.

I’ve even started on the board using old sprues:

I’m really enjoying this process and am looking forward to building more!