For my first “series” I’m going to be looking at Solo skirmish gaming with Frostgrave.

Roughly, November 2023, I took the plunge and bought a copy of Frostgrave 2nd Edition by Joseph A. McCullough, and was hooked!

Table top scenery/terrain is not something I have really done before, not unless you count the “pill box” I made for Rogue Trader era W40k. Back then I was inspired by an issue of White Dwarf and set about looking around the house for things that looked like they might work as sci-fi buildings and decided that an empty yogurt pot would be great. A coat of primer and a coat of grey paint later I had a pill box/habitation unit. I decided it didn’t look as stone/concrete like as I wanted so I struck on the idea of covering it in something gritty, and not finding anything used some cat litter, fresh, I hasten to add, and another coat of grey paint.

Of course what I ended up with was a thing that looked like a yogurt covered in cat litter as a gaming buddy at the time quite rightly pointed out! So apart from miniature bases I didn’t really bother much more with terrain.

So starting on Felstad project I was determined to at least make something that I would not be totally ashamed of. And this little corner of a ruined building was the result.

It was a test piece built from scraps of XPS foam and odds and ends from my basing box, the first bit of my version of Felstad was born and although it wasn’t amazing I was fairly happy with it. The snow effect was some snow powder/flock I found on ebay.

Small crumbling wall model for Frostgrave wargame

What followed was a bit of an obsession. I spent a lot of the winter building ruins, experimenting here and there with different products and ideas. Mainly I was was using the XPS foam from an The Army Painter GameMaster Dungeons & Caverns Core Set, which I’d bought and only tried two tiles from.

What I found so inspiring about building for Felstad, was that it was a ruined city covered in snow. Which meant that if a bit of a building went wrong – I could just break it off and it would just add to the ruined look. Also you can cover up a lot of errors with snow effect. It turned out for me that broken things were fun and my sort of shabby wargame chic works ok with the ruined city aesthetic.

What is different now compared with the mid to late eighties of course, is that tutorials are so much easier to find. There are so many inspiring blogs and YouTube channels to help with wargaming projects. Black Magic Crafts and Geek Gaming Scenics are two I watch from time to time.