Empire Buildings

The guys at Games Workshop have out done themselves with their latest terrain kit, Skullvane Manse. The Tower of Sorcery, Dreadfire Portal and Eternity Stair are all examples of the direction being taken with Games Workshop terrain of late. The kit offers hobbyists a host of options when it comes to building unique terrain. In the latest What's New Today post Dan takes a look at some features of Skullvane Manse as well as gives some pictures of some very unique terrain pieces. As usual original commentary is below with my own thoughts in purple italics...

There really is nothing quite like a great-looking battlefield covered in Citadel Miniatures and terrain. When I play my battles, I live by the philosophy of 'the more scenery the better', no matter how impractical that may become. I'm finding that the tables at Tin Soldier have too much terrain for my current lists. Going through the process of rethinking how I plan on playing my Black Templars. But I agree with Dan the more scenery the better. A Warhammer 40,000 battlefield is not complete unless it's covered in city ruins, defence turrets, barricades, bastions, craters and the like. Similarly, I always try to fit a small hamlet onto a Warhammer table, a couple of hills, maybe an alpine forest region, and something suitably impressive like Witchfate Tor as the table centrepiece. But now there's a new scenery piece on the block - the towering edifice that is Skullvane Manse, the Lair of the Astromancer. Like a lot of our recent products, we've also made a 360˚ image of it, so you can see every angle of this massive structure, from the top of the observatory to the milk bottles on the doorstep. We did have a bit of a job fitting it in the photography booth though - at 14 ½ inches tall, it was a pretty tight squeeze! Click this link to have a look at the 360˚ image.

Dave Andrews has put in some serious time on this piece of kit - from the rocky outcrops to the broken brickwork, every millimetre of this scenery piece is covered in detail. I'm a big fan of the ruined bridge that juts out from the side of it - it suggests that the building was actually much larger once upon a time, but has fallen into disrepair. It is certainly very full of character and skulls.

If you check out November's issue of White Dwarf, you'll see that there are actually quite a few a whole heap of applications for Skullvane Manse. Because of its size, it could easily be used as a multipart building - perhaps a Haunted Mansion combined with a Wizard's Tower - or maybe even use the battlements instead of the observatory to create an Arcane Fulcrum. There are a lot of exciting possibilities in this set (I'll stick this one on my Christmas Gift List too, I reckon).

The thing is though, our scenery range is far larger than most people expect. Skullvane Manse is only the tip of a very large iceberg. Rather than show pictures of our scenery kits (which you can see in the product pages anyway), we thought we'd show off what people in the real world have created using our wide range of terrain pieces. Enjoy!

Gavin Clarke sent us a couple of shots of his Watchtower, outhouse and Warhammer Chapel. All of these kits come as part of the Fortified Manor set - a great way to get a sizeable amount of scenery for your table. We especially liked the little outhouse that Gavin built into a couple of wall sections. Gives a bit of flavour to what would otherwise be a boring barrier. Something to keep in mind for possible projects in the future. It turns a small building into a great piece of defensible terrain.

We loved the colours that Gavin used on his scenery - especially the blue slate tiles on the roof of this Chapel. I suspect an airbrush was used to get that even coat of light blue. We also really liked the chipped, cracked paintwork too, which really gives the impression that this building is part of an environment, and that it has suffered years of wear and tear.

We're not sure if this is his real name, but Uncle Oswald uploaded several awesome buildings to our Flickr pool a little while ago that we knew we had to show off. This merchant's house was built using a combination of two Warhammer Chapel kits and one Watchtower kit. They were combined to form an L-shaped building with a ruined, burnt-out roof. Uncle Oswald originally made the piece for use in games of Mordheim. To create the appearance of a burnt out building have a look at this overrun empire outpost.

The clever thing is, once he'd finished building the merchant's house, he had several off-cuts left over, which he used to make the ruined shell of a second house. Small bits of wood like coffee stirrers and matchsticks are perfect for representing ruined beams and broken floorboards, while small pieces of plastic are perfect for making broken roof tiles. I like the wooden fence that was put together. Adds even more character to the building.

Disclaimer - Images taken from Games Workshop website without permission and will be removed if requested.