Mordheim Ruined House

It’s been a little while since the last post, but I’ve been busy, this time not only painting but also building. Over the last few weeks I’ve been playing Warhammer Vermintide 2 with some friends, and the game’s environments have tapped right into my nostalgia for the first wargame I ever played, Mordheim. Playing the game made me want to build some Mordheim terrain even though I have no real plans to play Mordheim any time soon, but when I get inspired I like to act on that inspiration!

There were a few directions that this specific inspiration pushed me into:

1. I wanted to build a house
2. It needed to be half-timbered
3. It needed to have elements that pushed it from historical looking into the warhammer universe, i.e. skulls, weird motifs etc.
4. I wanted to build it from scratch rather than use my 3D printer

That last post is interesting, I’ve had a filament 3D printer and I’ve printed a ton of terrain with it over that time, enough for a full table for Bolt Action, Star Wars Legion, Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game, and a lot of pieces of post-apocalyptic scatter terrain for This Is Not A Test. It’s been really nice to have, there are a ton of great free and paid models online done by amazing artists, and it’s produced some very nice looking tables.

Building tables for Mordheim was my first serious foray into terrain-making, and back then I mostly used cardboard as the material of choice, cutting out shapes and assembling them into the ruined streets of Mordheim. I think playing Vermintide triggered 1) a want to build something in the world of Mordheim, and 2) a nostalgia for building terrain from raw materials.

I built the main structure out of foam board, which is nice and easy to work with. I then cut a balsa wood plank I had into 7mm strips to build all the timber frames, and into sections to represent the floors. I carved board shapes into the floors with a knife. The tiles were traced onto a sheet of foam board with one of the cardboard sides peeled off, while the cobbles outside were cut individually from XPS foam. To texture the outside walls I used tile grout, for the inside walls I used plaster filler. The stone details in the walls were lifted from a variety of bits, the sun face for example is from the old Warhammer 8th edition templates, using thermo plastic molds.

Overall I’m happy with the results, and really enjoyed the process, so I can see myself building more when the inspiration strikes again. Maybe one day I’ll again have a full table of Mordheim terrain!