Modular Urban Board Project Log 8: the End Result

What is an adult? Ordinarily I'd say it's a person of any age who has both empathy and responsibility. What is an old person? I'm starting to suspect it's someone for whom the passage of time has become frighteningly fast. As a child, the timescales on which adults do things seems like watching an ent moot deliberating over whether to sack Isengard. All of which is ambling its way to the conclusion that I have spent about two months making an 8-part series on producing a modular urban terrain set for Warhammer 40,000, and those two months somehow stretch from now (the end point) to May 2021 (the start).

Why did it take so long?

Primarily because in 2021, almost all my terrain projects were solo efforts. Since then we have learned the value of team play, and that's what finally got this large and repetitive urban project to bear concrete fruit.

6'x4' of modular paving

Ooooo, paving. Mmmmmm, beige. It feels very, very good to have got this done, since drybrushing lots of beige isn't wildly thrilling, but having a fully rendered modular board absolutely is. With fixed layouts you could add nice touches like drains and curving road corners, but this system is simple enough to carve and incredibly flexible to lay out.

Here's the whole lot, including the surplus parts (we did excess so that we don't have a Tetris puzzle every time - you just lay out what you want):

 

Once again, the crew of Deep Space Nein have got results. (For the uninitiated, Deep Space Nein is the name we give the terrain painting group in the Beard Bunker, first founded while collaborating on our Boarding Action terrain. It is split further into 'Creative Corner' [freehand detail fetishists] and 'Crayon Corner' [big drybrush appreciators] with much skub and raucousness among the latter, and scholarly quietude in the former.)

I inched very slowly towards 4'x4' of paving, doing little bits here and there. The last 2'x4' was done from near-start to total finish in a day via the medium of deploying four other nerds. These days we barely do terrain any other way.

Twelve 2x4 sections of Sanctum Administratus

This was finished some time ago, but with the Beard Bunker running on emergency power during our switch to monthly posts, this vital news has remained in the posting queue. But at last, all 12 of these sections are now complete thanks to locking in the colour scheme. Having the scheme dialed in also allowed the crew of DSN to grunt out the painting in relatively short order.

Each section is either intact or a ruin, and is one half of a floor. Any two halves can join with any other half, making a total of six single-storey buildings that can be stacked on top of each other to make taller structures.

Sadly I don't have a photo of everything together on one 6'x4' layout, but here's a 4'x4' layout I put together shortly before we finished the last of the paving, so you can see just how huge these structures are when you stack them:

One of the key requirements of stacking the sections was to avoid any midair doors, and this was achieved by adding an inset on the intact walls into which we clustered the doors, so that they always open onto flooring, and to suggest the industrial function of side doors (possibly into two elevator shafts running up the front of the building, not that we had the ability to show that on the inside) and two doors leading into the main structure. It's always a challenge with Citadel kits, as the nature of being on a sprue means that you always end up with surplus doors and have to figure out what to do with them. 

Among the features of these modular sections is one chunk that has a balcony:

The front railings aren't glued on, so when they're popped off the balcony can be integrated into a longer walkway:

Note that the flooring of the balcony has been painted to match the scheme of the Sector Mechanicus terrain, tying the two disparate terrain sets together somewhat.

Put it all together and you've got claustrophobic streets for my Space Marines to patrol. And it only took four calendar years.

Speedy, subjectively speaking.

Where next?

We already have more terrain awaiting us in the Cairn of Opportunity that will complement this stuff brilliantly - some of the Kill Team ruins, and a giant job-lot of Sector Imperialis terrain. But that's tomorrow's task; for now, it's time to admire that which we have wrought.