Why you (yes, you!) should invest in terrain
Hey there Faux-Folk!
I have been relatively quiet for the past 12 months so in case you don't remember me, I'm Lance; also known as Dangerpants online and on various discord servers and longshanks where I also have been quiet.
Obviously the past year has been a tumultous time for Malifaux, hence my absence.
I'll be honest; I'm still grieving the game that was, and haven't yet found within me the strength to embrace the game that now is. I have no doubt that I will, I'll just take my sweet ass time getting over myself. However the joy of playing miniature war-games is that they aren't just a game; they're a hobby, so I don't need to be actively playing Malifaux to be engaging with it.
Which leads us to the topic of this article.
Working through your hobby backlog pile of shame. Terrain and why you should invest in it.
So. First of all. I understand mini-wargaming is already an expensive hobby so I sure as hell am not trying to shame anyone who can't afford the extra financial or temporal expense to be investing in something that is unlikely to be on the table every game. Personally I come from the priveleged position of being in the same meta as Azahul (you'll find articles on this very blog by this gentleman) and I by dint of this privelege I have been able to take advantage of the fact that he has a problem. Like, seriously that man has spent so much GD money on the most beautiful boards you can imagine.
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| These are just three examples; he has I think four other boards? |
In the long long ago before I fell in love with M3e back in 2020, I was ambivalent towards terrain. I'd come from warmachine/hordes where (at the time) clean board state was prized above cinematic and dynamic tables, so all terrain was represented by 2 dimensional templates, which I was fine with. Before that I played warhammer fantasy and whilst there were what I considered at the time interesting terrain rules, they were mostly a gimmick.
The biggest barrier to caring about terrain though was the expense and the effort. My philosophy at the time was the models you spent money on were models you got to play with. They moved around the board and rolled dice and scored victory points, whilst terrain at it's best just sat there. Also if you had enough terrain for multiple boards, you probably weren't using it every game which felt like a waste despite the fact I never applied the same logic to the minis I purchased that didn't neccesarily see table time every game.
M3e was the first game I played where terrain felt like it mattered. Some of this may be because I became so obsessed with the game so quickly I was playing a lot with a very small pod of people. When a meta is small with people just starting out in the game with limited models, having varied table options is one of the few things you can do to keep the game fresh.
So naturally our small pod of people all bought mats, and all set about building our small collection of terrain; some of us went a touch overboard (Liam) but even then that ended up paying massive dividends when it was time to start building an actual community and running fulll events rather than a smalll pod of mates flipping cards in an uninsulated garage in 40 degree heat.
But all that's a bit of history, the crux of the matter is why you should invest in terrain.
Here's the hard part. I started writing this because I was working on terrain and the idea of this article struck me, but it's honestly very difficult for me to put into words the sense of achievement of being able to set up a full thematic board on game night and have one of your mates call you a piece of shit because the board was "too full" and it made them have to re-think their standard strategy or even declare a master they were less comfortable with.
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| I definitely got called a piece of shit for this one and I relished it. |
A lot has changed since my WHFB days, not the least of which is an infinite availability of interesting and varied terrain thanks to the advent of 3d printing. This has had a twofold effect; first the barrier of entry to building your own terrain collection has lowered significantly, and secondly it's much easier to build your own special snowflake board without the dissapointment of seeing someone else bring the same terrain; especially when one of the first reasons I had for getting into terrain was to provide different boards to play on each game.
As I've gotten older and expanded my repertoire of games I play, I found that the early excuse of terrain not seeing as much use as models became particularly untrue because in Malifaux you'll only play one crew at a time, but you'll always need to play on a terrain filled table, but more importantly as long as terrain isn't particularly recognisable as being franchise terrain, you can use the same terrain in many different games.
I've played D&D with Liam, and you bet he uses his vast reserves of terrain to make battlemaps more interesting and dynamic. My most recent terrain aquisition is going to be used for both Malifaux (when I have the heart to dive back in properly and not just dabble) and MCP.
So we've established that 3d printing has made terrain more accessible, and terrain can get more use than individual models and be used in multiple game systems, but the other and final barrier (from my perspective) was the painting process.
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| Yes, yes I know that those of you who use an airbrush don't need to read this next section |
Painting terrain is much different from painting our little combat dollies. It's all larger obviously, but also will often have flat surfaces that are difficult to paint smoothly with the kind of brushes we use for our normal dudes. It can be intimidating as hell.
The first few times I tried to invest in terrain, I purchased pre-painted but that stuff is expensive as hell. Next I paid a friend to do some airbrushing but that was still expensive and I had to wait and it wasn't *really* what I wanted. I didn't get any 3D printed stuff until 2024, and when I got it, I had to figure out how to paint it and once I did, I had an absolute blast.
My first lot of self-painted terrain I learnt about sponge painting. Yeah it's pretty much what it says on the tin.
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| 2 years later, I stilll love looking at these. |
You just get a particulary porous sponge and go nuts. It's an especially good technique for more natural terrain because you don't need to be accuract because nature is messy.
Just recently I got another batch of terrain (the stuff that will be for MCP as welll as Malifaux) and due to the sheer volume of it, I instead thought I'd try going with spray painting it, and I'm not unhappy with the results so far.
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| small detail work done with brushes of course |
I'm getting to try out a variety of techniques and unlike models, it doesn't really matter if it doesn't look perfect. No-one is inspecting terrain too close.
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