How is a terrain board made? The Edoras battlefield build log

Plenty of you have already seen the Lord of the Rings terrain board that is one of the ornaments of our club, and you have probably asked yourselves how the project came about. This exhaustively thorough series will give you a look behind it, and answer not only the How but the Out of What and the With What as well. Along the way we will show the techniques, materials and tools we used while building it. So, a little late but all the more enthusiastic for it, we proudly present part one.

Part 1: Choosing the theme, and the technical details

But (!) before we throw ourselves into cutting and painting, we first have to settle what kind of terrain we want, and how big.
A little background: several wargames can be tried at our club, and one of the most popular is the Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game (MESBG from here on) — a wargame played with miniatures drawn straight from Tolkien's world and the Lord of the Rings films. That world inspires a lot of us, so we wanted to pay it some kind of tribute. And what better proof of our enthusiasm and our skills than an evocative and ambitious (and other high-flown adjectives) terrain project. Better still: a board we could actually play the game on. Then we raised the stakes further by deciding to exhibit it at the 2nd WarGameCon in Budapest.

So, armed with that motivation (and no small amount of dread), let us start by laying down the technical facts:

• In an average MESBG game two armies usually face each other, their size set in points, most often somewhere between 600 and 1000 points.
• With that in hand the rulebook tells us how large a battlefield such games need on average — in our case 48 x 48 inches.

With the specifics settled we could get into the planning. The club already owns the terrain pieces the game needs, which makes populating the board with buildings, walls, fortifications, ruins and so on much easier. Those pieces are mostly built to a Rohan pattern (the people of Rohan are a nation of horsemen living on the plains of Middle-earth), which narrowed the choice of theme for us nicely. After a not very long discussion we settled on a simplified version of Edoras, the capital of Rohan.

And since one can never be too ambitious, why not make our first club diorama harder for ourselves with a few tasteful challenges — variation in height, hills, cliffs — and why not build in a river running the whole length of the battlefield while we are at it. 🥲 We began with a physical mock-up of the layout:

The mock-up with the terrain pieces on it (banana for scale)

After that we drew up a digital plan with the relevant measurements, in the professional design software known as MS Paint:

The digital "blueprint"

That covers the theme and the technical details of the board. Next time we will go through the materials and the tools we used to build it.

Follow the site or sign up in the app — the next part of the build log is coming soon.

Thanks for reading! 🙂