Warhammer Terrain Guide

Terrain For Your Warhammer Tables

Everyone always needs more terrain. That's just a fact of life playing Warhammer. Whether it's Warhammer_40,000, Age of Sigmar, or one of the specialist games, you'll want to adorn your battlefield with terrain of some sort. Some amount of coverage is necessary for all games, and it's always more interesting to fight over something worth fighting for than an empty field. This article will be a general, non-comprehensive guide on ways to decorate your table with scenery to make for a more exciting battlefield.

Your Game Surface

The first step, of course, is choosing the table itself. Your choices here are mostly determined by where you play. If you're playing at your FLGS, odds are there are already a few tables there along with some terrain, and you're just looking to spruce up your battles. If you play at home, or at a clubhouse with friends, you have more options for developing your battlefield.

The first choice to make is what sort of surface you'll play on. The simplest choice is the cardboard game boards Games Workshop has been producing as of late. Included with specialist games like Kill Team and Warcry, the terrain sets for each, and the Realm of Battle sets, these boards come printed with two aesthetically different looks on each side. Their main advantage is that their size, 22x30", matches up with the board size used in Kill Team and Warcry, as well as the new board sizes used in the 9th edition of Warhammer 40,000. The downside is that these boards are somewhat pricey and usually made in limited runs - so if one isn't available now, you might not be able to get it at all. The exceptions are the Moon Base Klaisus set for 40k and the Blasted Hallowheart set for AoS, which are consistently available and have four double sided boards each, plus a bit of terrain.

The next option is mousepad material mats. Available with a wide range of designs printed on them and in a wide range of sizes, these mats are easy to store rolled up and unfurl right away, so you can get started putting terrain on the board. This material is also quite forgiving if a model is dropped on it.

Another option is to use the "Realm of Battle" plastic game boards that were produced by Games Workshop in the late 2010's. In addition to the vanilla Realm of Battle board set (which was the only one to feature a bespoke carrying bag and connector pieces to hold the tiles together), there was also a 40k-themed set called "Sector Mechanicus" and an Age of Sigmar-themed set called "Shattered Dominion." Each of these sets is comprised of six 2' by 2' square tiles with unique details, allowing you to create a fully-sized 6' by 4' game board. Additional Realm of Battle tiles were produced in resin by Forge World; these depicted everything from fortresses to industrial centers to Necron tombs and more. In any event, all Realm of Battle gameboards are OOP as of early 2021, meaning you'll either have to go to places like Ebay to find them (at prices even higher than they were at retail) or be lucky enough to have a friend or FLGS that already has them. While a fully-painted Realm of Battle table is a beautiful centerpiece, they are rather inconvenient to transport, somewhat heavy, and quite expensive. For these reasons most players tend to prefer the convenience of the rubberized and/or cardboard surfaces mentioned earlier.

The last option involves making your own table (or table top, at least). The options here are nearly limitless, but obviously involve a bit more work. A good way to give some texture to a gaming surface, and one often used at FLGS, is to paint the table surface with house paint and a roller, toss some coarse grained sand on to provide grit, and apply another coat of paint. Colors of paint can quickly establish a terrain type, and you can make the board visually interesting by mixing different colors together - patches of dirt among grass, for example.

Choosing Your Terrain

The options for actually making terrain are split into two major categories - scratch building it and buying it.

Scratch Building

There are nearly infinite options for building terrain at home, and hundreds of guides available online. Some common methods and materials are using hot wire cutters and foam, cut up cardboard, scraps from old model kits, and the like. As there is so much advice available, we won't go into detail here. But simply searching "scratch building terrain" plus a couple keywords like "Snowy" will give you a host of ideas.

Buying Terrain

When it comes to buying terrain, your options are a bit more limited. Game companies, especially Games Workshop, regularly produce terrain just for miniatures games that help establish scale and aesthetic. In addition, other companies produce items that are eminently suitable as Warhammer terrain. A few quick highlights

-Mantic Games produces a line known as Terrain Crate. While intended more for TTRPGs, it can provide some nice features and details. As of this writing, the first wave is available on store shelves, and the second is expected to come out sometime in late 2020.

-Warlord Games produces a range of terrain for their own games that works well with Warhammer, thanks to the similar scale they use. There are plenty of options on their website, some made of plastic and others of laser cut wood. Special attention should go to their Ruined Farmhouse and Ruined Hamlet sets, which provide for a very nice burnt-down or collapsed home.

-Aquarium fixtures are very often good sources of terrain. Rocks, weird skull-shaped mountains, giant mushrooms, and a huge array of plastic plants are all excellent sources of non-proprietary terrain, and they're broadly available. The one downside is that, aside from multi-packs of plants and such, these terrain pieces can be as expensive or even pricier than GW terrain. Keep an eye out for good deals on Amazon and discounts at your local pet stores.

-There are plenty of minor companies out there that produce terrain kits, some old, some having just been born on kickstarter. Quality is variable, so do your research before you invest in a whole battlefield's worth.

-Various model companies produces items for model train and railroad layouts, and across the industry they have a wide range of high quality and useful products makes them especially useful when working on your terrain. Plus you might think about the adding an actual train as either terrain or even a small diorama. However your quickly run into an issue of scale: Model rail roads run there scale off a letter code which refers to the distances between the two rails. Which means you can have models of different official 'scales' running on the same track. For example an "O" scale model and an "O27" model are very different scales since "O27" is at a small scale to make the model overall shorter so it can better go around tighter radius corners. On the other end an "ON30" model runs on "HO" track but there scaled for narrow gauge engines and so are considered "O" in scaling making them look a lot bigger. To cut this story short, this author at least is of the opinion that you want to go for "S" gauge, ON is too small, and O might be slightly over sized for 40k when compared to existing terrain, (and keep an eye out for On30 narrow gauge this author has yet to get a wagon to do a size comparison). However "S" is a bit uncommon so O might be the best option, plus O tend to be done by Lionel and there three track system looks pretty fitting for 40k. However Even if you think that model train terrain pieces are often the wrong scale and too modern-looking for Warhammer, they're still a great source of flocks, water effects, molds for making rocks, and other similar tools. Also as an aside: if you want to add smoke, sound and light to a tank model, train companies already have all those ready almost off the shelf if your willing to put in some work.

Buying from Games Workshop

So, let's get it out of the way. Buying terrain from GW is rarely cheap. You can sometimes get a lot for your money if you're buying the big box sets they occasionally put out, but in general, if you're using GW terrain, expect to lay down a big chunk of cash for your table.

That said, GW terrain has a few major selling points to it. The first is aesthetic - naturally, terrain produced by the same company that makes Warhammer will fit perfectly with Warhammer. The second is quality. Despite what some say, GW terrain tends to be extremely high quality, extremely detailed, and in some cases, extremely customizable. The last and most important feature of GW terrain, however, is intercompatibility. Especially in the 40k line, the more GW terrain you buy, the more interactions you'll find with it.

GW kits are all standardized in a few key places - their walls and floors all work in intervals of 5", meaning a Sector Imperialis building and a Sector Mechanicus structure have the exact same height on each level. The plasma pipes they sell are also the exact same length, allowing them to serve as columns or to run exactly along a given floor segment with no excess, and nearly every 40k terrain piece has properly sized mounting points for the plasma pipes.

For another example, the Galvanic Servohaulers set contains a flatbed trailer that's designed to carry the large crane included in the set. However, that flatbed also has the exact grooves needed to carry a Munitorum Armored Container, or the Genestealer Cults' Tectonic Fragdrill piece. The Fragdrill even includes a small tow point designed to go on the back of a Goliath Truck and connect to the trailer, letting the truck tow around any of these three things.

More recent kits of course stray from that 5" floor height (since most infantry can barely move an inch after ascending or descending making climbing or descending multiple levels awkward), like the Battlezone: Manufactorum/Command Edition terrain floor interval is at 4" while remaining fully compatible with other imperial kits, the Warzone: Fronteris kit, which expands upon Moon Base Klaisus kits has a mix of 2", 3", and 5" terrain pieces, the former two of which can be combined to make a 5" building, also compatible with previous imperial kits, and the Ork terrain for Warzone: Octarius which reaches 3" in height with the two doubled up main structures allowing for a big rectangular building of scrap (4 instances of the same corner can also be combined into a building with a square footprint if you're into that). Nothing of this is cheap of course, but if you're made of excess money, time, and space you can make a sweet interconnected landscape.

Building Your Battlefield

You probably already have a theme in mind for your battlefield. You might want to make a frozen cityscape, where spilled oil mixes with snow in the streets, or you might want to make an idyllic forest, ripe for burning down and blasting through. Once you've figured out a theme, you'll want to pick an appropriate play surface, and then collect or make terrain that matches your goals. Any terrain piece can work with almost any theme, and the most important thing that makes it work is a paint scheme.

Painting Terrain

Painting your terrain poses, in a lot of ways, less challenge than painting models. The details are often less finnicky, and you rarely have as many different colors or materials in such a small space, so the main challenge is picking an appropriate color scheme that matches your goal. In general, you want your terrain to work with the color scheme of your main board. Treat it like you would treat the color scheme on a single miniature - the board's surface will be your primary color, and your terrain pieces should have secondary colors that contrast well against it. For example, if you're building a snowy board, your primary color will be white with a blue tint, and you'll want to pick some extremely dark blue colors for scenery pieces such as rocks and buildings. These will immediately draw attention to the eye, but since they'll also be blueish, they will still register as "background". Remember, miniatures are the star of the show, so it's best to stick to relatively simple color decisions for your terrain pieces. Learn to use neutral colors such as greys and silvers, and they'll help your battlefield feel natural.

Another helpful source of inspiration for colors is photos of the terrain type you're building. Simple image searches for meadows, forests, or deserts can yield plenty of inspiration. Along with photos, art from various games can be great for inspiration.