Mordheim

I have been working on my collapsed tower for some time now. I’ve gotten a couple comments mentioning how the roof of the tower, which fell four stories and crashed into the ground, is not destroyed enough. This is how it looked when I first create it:

That obviously is not a roof that fell four stories, so I decided to fix that. Here is the process I took to destroy my perfectly good Mordheim Roof.

Then I glued it bent the detached section and glued it back into place:

Now I just have to do a little bit of detailing to make it fit in perfectly.

I hope you have a Happy New Year this 2008!
Ashton Sanders

Since my last post about adding bases to buildings, I’ve done a lot of thinking about it. I’ve compiled more points, and put them below:

Good Things About Using a Base on Your Buildings and Terrain:

1. Stability: With a base, you don’t even have to worry about the stability of your large building. Just glue it down.
2. Debris and Junk: Read the Rest of the Post >

Over the last week, I’ve been trying to create a system to create small Mordheim roof tiles that look good. Most scratch-built Mordheim buildings these days have 1/2″ to 1″ wide roof tiles which translates to 2.5 – 5 feet wide. Which, by the way, is completely ridiculous. After lots of fiddling with different types of material for my roof tiles, I tore off my old Mordheim Roof and created a new one from card stock.

This is the process I created to make the Mordheim roof tiles:

1. Cut a strip of card stock 1.1 cm wide.
2. Cut slits along one side to create the different tiles.
3. Then I cut off the ends of most of the tiles to give each tile a different length.
4. Then for to show wear, I bent the tiles and chipped the corners of every other tile.

Here’s an image of the different steps:

As you can see the completed strip has as much character as I could think of adding (without paint). So I went ahead and cut up almost an entire 8×11″ piece of paper and glued them down on the roof of my competition building:

Here’s the other side:

Note the two holes I added to create the leaky roof. I think this came out looking very well. I only have one row of tiles along the peak of the roof to add, and This section of roof should be done.

The only short-coming with using card stock is that it will soak up the paint and become wet. Hopefully it won’t “melt” together and loose it’s shape.

More to come,
Ashton Sanders

My latest work has been on my Competition Entry for TerraGenesis.com.

I have a couple of minor details to work out before completing the construction phase of my project and moving on to the painting phase. One of the biggest problems I’ve faced is getting the roofing tiles to work. In almost all pictures of Mordheim roofs that I have seen, the roofing tiles are about 1/2″ wide. Which translates into almost 2 1/2 feet wide in Mordheim size. There is no way that most buildings (even in fantasy) would have roof tiles 2.5 feet wide! So began my quest for smaller roofing tiles.

I got a deck of mini playing cards for Christmas and cut those up into rows of roof tiles. This is where I ran into my problem: The playing cards were so laminated, paint wouldn’t stick to them. I tried everything I could think of, and asked for help at the TerraGenesis forum. Unfortunately nothing could solve my problem until I realized I could find a similar material that wasn’t laminated: Card Stock. I even had a couple sheets in my laptop bag!

I cut up one row of roofing and glued it down tonight. I’ll be adding and update about it tomorrow.

Enjoy,
Ashton Sanders

I’ve touched on my thoughts on Adding a Base to Terrain and my last two buildings have not had bases. As I mentioned probably the biggest Con of not having a base is the difficulty of keeping the entire building supported. This is especially true for my entry into the TerraGenesis Fallen Over Competition.

Here is the latest picture of my Entry:

As you can see, I’m going to have to create a lot of supports between the roof of the tower, the rubble and the main building. All I had connecting the two was a thin sheet of Styrofoam, so this is what I came up with: Adding support beams under the foam.

1) I cut out slits under the connecting piece of foam. I cut out enough space for two sticks to be sticking halfway out, and for two sticks to run parallel for extra support. (I did this we a fully extended (flexible) razor blade. The flexible aspect allows me to rub the blade horizontally across the bottom of the foam creating a perfect hole. See picture.

2) I cut out small slits in the bottom of the roof and the bottom of the main building; just big enough to slip in the Popsicle sticks.

3) I glued in all of these supports with Elmer Glue.

4) I am also planning on adding some supports to the top of it, in the form of fallen debris between the separate sections. They will look like they are just leaning on the main building (or roof), but they will actually act as additional support. You can see a good example of this in the first picture above.

Good thing foam is not too heavy. I think these supports will be enough to hold this terrain together.

Here’s a picture of the glued in support beams:

Enjoy,
Ashton Sanders

Another site that I’ve been lurking on for a while is TerraGenesis. Great site full of endless resources. I first found this site when I was looking for board creation ideas. I found this page with a great Mordheim Table Idea. I then found that they hosted a new two month, terrain competition every month (so there is always two competitions available).

They came up with a perfect competition for a Mordheim building called the “Fallen Over Competition.” I started a for a Mordheim tower that fell over. I will be posting some of my thoughts and progress on it here as well.

-Ashton Sanders

Finally the roofing contractor was called out to finish roofing the church. I’ve seen a number of different types of roofing tiles in Mordheim, and I decided to try this style out and see how it goes.

When I was making the building, I added a couple sections of triangle board to the corners of the roof to use as the roof’s “foundation.” This is actually what holds it all together. I added some wooden cross-beams to the inside for some realism. (Made out of Popsicle stick splinters.)

Then it was time to create the roof tiles. I didn’t have any really plan, so I went with my gut: I cut out a rectangle of a Bed, Bath and Beyond box that I had lying around, and cut it into 3/4″x 1.5″ strips. A lot of them came out with slightly different dimensions, but I guess that’s what happens when you hire the least expensive roofing contractor in the business. (I’m doing it practically for free.)

After cutting the tiles to size, I proceeded to glue them down with a good helping of Elmer’s glue. You can see the progression of adding the tiles to the right.

You can click on any of these Mordheim pictures to see a larger image.

I tried to make most of it look as professional as possible; except for some of the edges where the tiles needed to be destroyed or missing. I think I did a pretty good job of breaking, removing and destroying this Mordheim Building’s roofing tiles. One thing I realized after I had completed this roofing project is that some of the tiles should be curled up at the ends. I did that after I took the pictures, so you’ll see that in the next couple posts.

I did the other side of the roof as well, except I only did a before and after picture. You can see those here:

Before:

After:


I hope other Mordheim roofing contractors find this useful. If you know of any easier/better way of roofing Mordheim buildings, let me know.-Ashton SandersEDIT 12/9/07: Looking back on these tiles, I should have made them much smaller. At 28mm, these tiles are almost as big as a human… =/ They look fine when you’re not comparing them to anything, but I wanted to add a fallen tile to the debris on the floor and realized it was too freaking big; it looked like a door was sitting on the floor.

More to come.

In my daily perusing the Internet, I came upon a website with lots of good content (and web ranking).

Terra Genesis has a new terrain competition that starts every month and lasts for two months. So at any given time, they’ll have two competitions going at the same time! Then all the visitors vote on the best completed submission. If you like to create Mordheim or just plain miniature terrain, Terra Genesis is a great website community to get hooked up with!

Right now, they don’t have any good competitions that I could build a Mordheim building (or terrain) for, but they should have another Competition starting on the 10th (of every month). I’ll see if I can do anything for the next competition.

I’ll keep you posted,
-Ashton Sanders

Today I worked on framing the windows. I even decided to start framing the large circular window.

For these windows, I just cut a Popsicle stick into lengths of 1″ and 1/2″ and then cut those pieces into three (lengthwise). This gave me nice, thin and short pieces of wood to use as framing. The circlular window was framed with 1/2″ lengths with slightly slanted edges (to make the circle).

You can also see in this picture the gray boards I put in place for the roof. They will be used as the foundation to add the roof tiles too.

Here’s another side view of the destroyed floorboards.

As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that this building only has one entrance/exit. It very well may not be used very much because of that. I think the best handling would be to make another entrance/exit on the front. I could destroy a portion of the front side of the building, or I could possibly make a second story deck on the front. That would create a door that units could come through. It would also add the character I was looking for to the front of the building. Yea, I like that idea a lot. Let’s see how it goes.

-Ashton Sanders

(continued…)

This is my second building that I am creating for my Mordheim Board and this is my second post. I’m calling it my Mordheim Church. It isn’t going to have a (playable) ground floor. Instead, the second floor has collapsed down upon it in most places. Here are a series of images as I go through the process of creating a destroyed wood-panel floor. You can click on an image to enlarge.

The idea is that a piece of the meteor crashed through this building, and destroyed the back wall. This also caused the second story floor to collapse down onto the first floor to create a sort of ramp. This will create an easy way to get up into this building from one side only.

Now to begin construction!

The first part of creating the floor was easy. I first cut the rounded ends off of 50 Popsicle sticks to use as Mordheim-sized floor boards. Then I cut seven of them into 1/3 and 2/3 sections. I glued the floor boards into place in a staggering manner:

Full length, 1/3, 2/3 and then back to a full length board again. This is a pretty normal construction method for normal houses. It makes the floors look nice and space the “seams” out so they aren’t so noticeable.

I will also mention that before I put any board down, I ran my sharp knife over the edges of it to give it a beat-up look. That’s a trick I learned from a Terra Genesis article on preparing wooden beams for Mordheim. They used balsa wood, as it’s a lighter wood and easier to cut/work with. I use Popsicle sticks cause it’s 1/20th the price. =]

I added some crossbeams from a stick to a firework that a friend had left at my house (after launching the firework of course=]). I added three crossbeams. One is still intact at both ends, one is broken only on the left side, and the last has completely collapsed.

No Base! I had discussed whether to use a base or not for my Mordheim buildings. Probably the biggest reason to use a base is to make it easier to build the building (and add rubble to it) without it falling apart. I took this as a challenge to build this building without a base! All of the destroyed Mordheim floor boards are glued together to create a firm, invisible base that holds it all together. So even though it looks like all those boards are about to fall to pieces, they are actually quite sturdy.

Now that I have finished this part, I have a little more wood framing to do for the windows and roof, and then I’ll be doing some final touches to make it look realistic.

More on it’s way!
Ashton Sanders