Here at Goonhammer historicals we play a LOT of systems. It’s one thing storing minis, but bulky terrain takes it to a whole new level and we all have finite space. We’ve assembled our collective powers to call out the kits and building types we get most play from, and the systems we play them in. For those of you looking for strict historical and architectural accuracy – you will not find it here. This is designed to be thematic, pragmatic and hopefully useful to as many systems and players as possible.
Games Workshop Lake Town House: Scir_Waeter
This 28mm set was designed for GWs Middle Earth strategy battle game. I managed to get a pack of three on offer somewhere and it’s been one of the best terrain investments I’ve made. The highly detailed kit fits together beautifully, and there’s enough small variations that each of my houses feels part of the same settlement, but not identical. The end panels of the house are double sided, so you get different curtains, or shutters to taste. There’s a bunch of lanterns, gables, shop signs, outhouses, baskets and fishing gear in the kit, and the boardwalk alone is a lovely way of creating a simple dock setup.
Parts of my final build have been a deserted old hamlet on the shore of a lake for Silver Bayonet, and a local dock for Bushido. They’ve been farm houses in AOS, taverns and shops in Frostgrave. The assembled buildings are robust and hollow, so most of the pieces for the boardwalk and boats fit inside the house for storage.
The boats have carried pirates and shore parties depending on the system. The design is timeless enough that they could feature in a modern day setting too. Even the houses don’t look too out of place in a modern day or 20th century Euro-ish setting. Plenty of older houses are still standing across Europe that don’t look too dissimilar. I even expect the boardwalks to see play on my Infinity table. It’s not as cheap as an MDF equivalent, but it’s a great kit and has been well worth the investment.
Warhammer Hills: Lenoon
Look, we all need hills. We have all cut them out of polystyrene, sealed them, accidentally melted them and then accidentally destroyed them by putting them back in their storage box too vigorously. That’s where excellent hard plastic hills come in. The Warhammer hills have a number of excellent properties for Historicals play – they are massive, absolutely huge – 16 by 10 inches, and just about as tall as a 28mm miniature. They have no skulls on them (a bonus compared to most Warhammer terrain!) and crucially, they’re scale agnostic.
As a mix of flat plain, slope and rocky outcrop, there’s a lot of options here at multiple scales. At 28mm they work well as slight rises, rocky outcrops that give you just enough line of sight blocking to function well as a terrain piece. At 6mm they’re significant elevations, worth fighting over and dying for. At 3mm they’re massive, landscape defining features – though I’ve painted mine for my Egyptian board, they’re going to double up for replaying Austerlitz (with the ahistorical caveat that the battle is being fought in the dead of summer). They’re also very, very robust – hard plastic, with a solid varnish spray I’ve subjected mine to the dreaded toddler test and they can survive being thrown down the stairs, let alone hastily put into a storage box, with nary a scratch.
Teddy Bear Fur Fields: Eccentricbear
Yep, you heard me right – teddy bear fur fur fields! These work an absolute treat and require very little work. Essentially what you do is go on eBay or a fabric store and find some teddy bear fur in a golden yellow/brown colour (this is a very easy to find colour). Make sure to get an appropriate length – something with hairs around an inch works fine and in 28mm will look like standing corn. Once it ships, cut it up into field sized pieces and shapes with scissors. This is all you need to do!
If you want to, you can add some further refinements – for example, you can alter the colour by combing in (yes with a plastic hair comb!) some paint, such as a little green or buff, or you can trim some areas down in length using scissors or a (human) hair trimmer to give the impression of corn that has been harvested.
One of the great things about this terrain is that it is entirely flexible, so you can drape it over any hills etc on the table for an effortlessly natural appearance. If you want to go whole hog, you can actually make an entire teddy bear fur gaming mat for your table – which is about as realistic looking as it gets – but that’s a different article!
Doormat Tilled Fields / Vegetable Plots: Ilor
While we’re on the topic of fields, you can make tilled fields from common doormats. A quick Google search for “doormat ribbed brown” will get you in the ballpark, but honestly you can probably go to any hardware store or DIY home improvement store (Home Depot, Lowes, Home Goods, etc) and find them on the cheap. What you’re looking for is a doormat with long lines of alternating raised and recessed weave. Just like the teddy bear fur described above, it can cut it to the size or shape you need. Big pieces can stand in for tilled fields, smaller pieces placed next to hovels or houses make for great vegetable gardens.
You can leave your pieces “as is” for a freshly-tilled field or garden, but laying down a little bit of flock or static grass or clump foliage along the raised bit gives a nice green-and-brown look of stuff growing in nice, neat rows.
Whether it’s a garden outside a Roman villa, a Saxon hovel, or a house in Normandy, this is a bit of terrain that is effectively timeless and will be useful for pretty much any historical game you want to play.
Printable Scenery Forest Cart Tracks: Variance Hammer Eric
This one is admittedly a 3d printing STL, but Printable Scenery makes very good models – often, STLs for historicals don’t do a lot in terms of considering printability in pursuit of “Exactly this one Hotel in Carentan”. In contrast, Printable Scenery files tend to be easy to print, support free, easily resized (many of their files come in solid versions which makes printing at 15mm and smaller easy, something I wish more designers did), etc.
But let’s talk about the forest cart tracks. Made up of some long and short straight sections, an S-curve, a few turns, a Y-shaped split and both a T-junction and a proper four-way crossroad, these, these are exactly what it says on the tin: dirt cart tracks. Dirt, ruts, and that’s it.
What’s great about this is the flexibility. There’s no hints as to historical time period – broken wagon wheels or the like. The printed pieces invite about as much effort as you want to put into them. A base coat of brown and some drybrushing will do nicely. Or you can break out various soil weathering powders, put static grass or the like in the raised bit between the ruts, play with mud and water effects in the ruts, etc.
Once done, they can be used everywhere. A dusty track leading your Vikings up toward a waiting monastery? A well-travelled road through Sherwood Forest on which to set an ambush? A path for your Dragoons to follow as they search for their enemies somewhere in Spanish Holland? A side track leading into a French village that will make for slightly better going for your Shermans? It works for all of these. It’s the foundation of our club’s boards – first, the road goes down, and then we start coming up with the why. It’s been used so heavily I’m printing a whole second set in 15mm.
Treadwheel Crane: Lenoon
It’s a specific terrain piece, but one of the nice things about historicals is that once something is built, it’s sometimes built for quite a while. A treadwheel crane is a chunky set of scenery that will work for you in virtually any context from the Romans to the 20th century. It’s a pretty simple concept – a big treadwheel attached to a crane boom that can lift anything you need lifted. They were used in construction, trading, ship loading and unloading all over Europe and the Middle East, first in the Roman period and then “rediscovered” in Western Europe in the 13th century.
They work nicely as terrain pieces because they’re a lot of fun to make (get the Sarissa kit – so nice I’ve built it twice), take up a good amount of space (impassible terrain) but still let you play with line of sight because, well, it’s a crane. Perhaps it can be shot through but not moved through, an interesting wrinkle on interacting with terrain in a different way. They also provide a sense of life to a board. They’re a signal that something is happening – a ship may be loaded or unloaded, or a building is under construction. They show a place as active, rather than a set of buildings with nothing going on. Pair it with a ruin and you’ve got a ready made story – what is being re/built? Why? What happened to it? Who’s rebuilding it?
They also persist – cropping up in all sorts of places for centuries, being lost and refound, picked up and moved, reused and repurposed. Like a lot of good, useful infrastructure, it will fit in anywhere as either tool in use or a historical curiosity.
Printable Scenery “The Farm” & French Farm House: Variance Hammer Eric
Yes, another 3d printing choice, and another one from Printable Scenery. I did say I liked them.
“The Farm” and the separately sold French Farmhouse provides…well, a fairly complete small farm, with a two story Farmhouse (there’s also a ruined version), a large barn, a guardhouse, an entry arch, high walls, and a second smaller barn or shed. There are both interior playable versions (a favorite hiding spot for any number of skirmisher units) and solid versions that improve printability at smaller scales.
While not quite as timeless as a dirt road or treadwheel crane, there’s a broad swathe of history for which this type of building looks at home in the French (or more generically European) countryside – and that swathe covers many popular eras, including Napoleonics and both World Wars. The core strength of the set is its flexibility – need a single building? The Farmhouse will do well. Need a fortified compound for an attacking side to try to take and hold? Break out the whole set. Need just a couple scattered buildings to serve as points for objectives, to mark out a deployment zone, etc? A couple barns and the house make for a nice small, dispersed farm. A few of the walls and the gateway arch can suddenly create a choke point in an otherwise open board. It’s just a wildly flexible set, and if you’ve got a 3d printer and are just starting on your hobby terrain journey, a strong place to start.
Anything with a Pantile Roof: Ilor
Eric’s mention of Printable Scenery’s farm got me thinking about what makes that set so timeless, and it’s the roof. Clay roofing tiles have been in constant use for literal millenia. From early Roman times to the modern day, clay tiles are cheap, durable, fire resistant, easy to replace, and can usually be made from locally-obtained materials. The concept was common throughout the Mediterranean, and the Spanish further carried it into the New World with their conquest of Mexico and the American southwest. Similarly, they are used all over East Asia.
As a result, you can find them in loads of different time periods or locations. I have home-made MDF buildings with pantile roofs that I have used for Gangs of Rome, Blood & Plunder, and Operation Husky (the Allied invasion of Sicily in WW2). They would be equally at home in North Africa and would be perfect for the Napoleonic battlefields of the Peninsular War.
Plastruct offers sheets of pantile roofing in several different scales, which you can either order online or buy from pretty much any hobby store that sells model train accessories. These are simple to cut to your desired size with scissors and paint up extremely easily with a quick dry-brush. The set comes with an additional bit you can use for the ridge tiles. Scratch-building your own buildings out of cardboard, foamcore, or MDF is easy, and even if you’re using something like a pre-fab MDF building, giving it a pantile roof can greatly expand the timeframe in which it will fit in well.
Renedra Ramshackle Church/Barn/House: Cronch
War tends to be quite hard-wearing on the lands it is fought over, leaving settlements destroyed or abandoned. For 28mm buildings that are ruined but still recognisable, rather than an L-shaped stack of bricks, I don’t think you can really do better than the trio of ramshackle buildings offered by Renedra. These hard plastic kits retail at around £20 each, which is very reasonable for how much use you can get out of them. They’re simple to build and easy to paint – my example church below was a single colour through the airbrush, two different green washes dabbed on, and a gentle drybrush.
Ok, sure, *technically* these are not period-agnostic models, and are definitely most reminiscent of 18th-19th century American structures, but their ruined nature means they slot in well for quite a wide variety of eras from Renaissance up to WWII. So they’re not truly timeless, you won’t find them in Ancient Rome, but they are great workhorses to add to a terrain set. Mine are finding copious use in The Silver Bayonet at the moment, and they’re sure to remain useful for a wide range of games in the future.
Renedra do also sell a wide range of other buildings of various eras in hard plastic, as well as a multitude of accessories like tents and fences that are generic enough to use over a broad range of settings and really add some flavour to your boards.
Cotton Wool and Electric Tea Lights: JellyMuppet
One of the few inventions older than war is fire and fire makes smoke.
A bag of cotton wool and electric tea lights fits well into the terrain for any battlefield in any era of wargaming. You can buy both of these on amazon or in any big supermarket for dead cheap. For best effect, spray the cotton wool itself black and pull on it a bunch to get different textures and densities. The tealight then lights up the smoke from below, and gives it a lovely 3D flickering energy.
We use this relentlessly at the Goonhammer Open for Horus Heresy, to cover burning buildings, artillery strikes and craters. It is really useful for turning area or scatter terrain like craters into line of sight blocking terrain. We even have one regular battlefield being made up of a few pieces of plastic and resin scatter terrain, and then all the LoS blocking stuff is cotton wool from an exploded Titan In Heresy, we sometimes spray it blue, red or green to act as phosphex markers or graviton collapses, but you won’t see any of that on your Napoleonic or Ancients battlefields (although it could be used for some colourful Greek Fire, perhaps?).
Wrap Up
Have any suggestions for something we missed? Please leave a comment below with your take on generic terrain!
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
