Age of sigmar & terrain

[Aegisgrimm]

Over the years I have played several different games that had little to no depth to their terrain rules (last being Confrontation: Age of Ragnorok), and in my various home games it always ends up being this for things like woods:

Woods count as difficult terrain for purposes of movement, however that type of movement may be covered in the particular game (either capped at a minimum or halved, usually).

When firing into woods, targets inside count as in cover.  Melee is unchanged.  Models, inside or outside of the terrain element cannot draw line of sight through more than 6" of woods.  Regardless of thickness, an element of woods completely blocks line of sight to any models on the other side.

That's usually it.  I usually only add AoS styled rules to terrain elements for a scenario reason, not randomly or for every piece all the time like it seems to be suggested in AoS.

[someone2040]

9 hours ago, JontyGoesGaming said:

That download is fantastic work, great job - will try and print out and take it to the club tonight.

I think you're right about keeping it simple. The 8th edition tables with different types of wood, river etc were very evocative but it felt like overkill rolling for every one of them. I would rather have a simple rule for most scenery, but then a characterful set of options for whatever the key terrain piece was on the board or in that scenario- so for instance,  a battle to control a river crossing could have more depth and fun if we needed to roll to see what its effects were (blood, souls, light, icy water, aetheric ur-gold current etc )

Hope you and your club mates enjoy it, and let me know how it goes. I'm going to try and get people using it next meet up for my group.

I agree that the 8th edition rules are perhaps overkill. Many things end up as being "A Building + Some extra rule" and in Age of Sigmars case, I think we already have the 'some extra rule' in the Mysterious Landscapes table, or more unique rules on each warscroll, but we don't necessarily have the former part "A Building". This I think largely comes down to boiling the rules down to 4 pages and putting all the detail onto the warscrolls, an approach that sadly has meant that terrain is treated pretty simply out of the box, but has plenty of flexibility if you actually use the warscrolls or other flavourful rules.

9 hours ago, inunn said:

I think this is great, I especially like that it doesn’t feel like house rules because so much of it is just gently extending rules that already exist to cover general cases. I think it would be great if the next version of the core rules had something like this at this level of detail. Or maybe it could be included in the GH as supplementary to all three ways of playing.

Yeah, that was certainly the point! The only rule I didn't copy from an existing warscroll was the one for Difficult Terrain. It also turns out, that's the one I'm least sure about, as I haven't tested it at all. If it turns out to bog down units too much, may just restrict it so you can't run through the terrain (That's how GW played rivers in 8th edition).

I don't think we'll ever get something like this in the core rules, I think the 4 page thing is still a big 'win' in GW's eyes and they're unlikely to change them anytime soon. But certainly would be happy to see this as a supplement for play. 

Personally I think in Matched Play, I'd just use something like the cheat sheet as it's simple to learn and memorize, but it's only a single pager if you need to look something up quickly. Alternatively, in open/narrative play, you may wish to use the cheat sheet for majority of the terrain on the board, but use the warscrolls for terrain that ends up being a focal point of the scenario (Such as Realm Gates or a Dragonfate Dais).

[Menkeroth]

As I'm very fond of castles and the like, I've got such stuff. It's not yet finished and you can either build several small ones or one-two larger. Anyway, looks decent and can become great terrain if done right.

 

[Arkiham]

3 hours ago, Menkeroth said:

As I'm very fond of castles and the like, I've got such stuff. It's not yet finished and you can either build several small ones or one-two larger. Anyway, looks decent and can become great terrain if done right.

 

is that image bad? my malwarebytes is blocking it 

 

nvm uninstalled program 

[TheOtherJosh]

1 minute ago, Arkiham said:

is that image bad? my malwarebytes is blocking it 

Image seems to work fine on mobile.

but given that it is pointing a cannon at the viewer. It might be considered dangerous.

It also might be that the source site is ibb.co?

[Menkeroth]

15 minutes ago, Arkiham said:

is that image bad? my malwarebytes is blocking it 

No, works just fine.

11 minutes ago, TheOtherJosh said:

but given that it is pointing a cannon at the viewer. It might be considered dangerous.

exactly!

11 minutes ago, TheOtherJosh said:

It also might be that the source site is ibb.co?

Aye, it is it.

[The Jabber Tzeentch]

Some of the best games of AoS I've played are the ones with the most terrain and using the warscroll rules for them if they had them and rolling for mysterious terrain if not. 

Here's a few photos of the sort of tables I play on.  The warhammer world village table is excellent fun when all buildings are garrisonable! In fact I think having more garrison buildings only makes the game more interesting and tactical. 

[Nick in York]

On 08/09/2017 at 5:33 PM, The Jabber Tzeentch said:

Some of the best games of AoS I've played are the ones with the most terrain and using the warscroll rules for them if they had them and rolling for mysterious terrain if not. 

Here's a few photos of the sort of tables I play on.  The warhammer world village table is excellent fun when all buildings are garrisonable! In fact I think having more garrison buildings only makes the game more interesting and tactical. 

These look great. But... where do I place my wyldwoods?

[Stevewren]

I've been beavering away on plenty of terrain for Warhammer Achievements at Blood and Glory this year. I've been focussing on making a lot of pieces that block Line of Site as this seems to be a real issue with the game. Big pieces are pretty easy to make using things like polystyrene and especially Expanding Foam which is my new favourite thing! I'd like to see more events that have a real focus on making unique scenery and tables as it really brings the overall standard of events up, however I can fully appreciate that doing it for the bigger events would not be practical. Storage, particularly in the UK i Imagine is a real issue! 

We used some of my terrain at a 700 point event last week: 

 

[Runicmadhamster]

On 9/2/2017 at 9:28 AM, TheWilddog said:

I really think that the next big push will be with 3D printed terrain.  I think we are years away from 3D printing effecting miniatures but the tech is ready to rock out some terrain right now.   I have a buddy with a 3D printer and he is cranking some nice stuff out.  Here is a sample from a company selling 3D printable terrain files: https://www.printablescenery.com/

This stuff is getting pretty crazy.

I have a friend who has a lot of printable scenery stuff, its really impressive, even more so when fully painted and based.  It makes gaming at his place a joy, and a highlight of the week.

I just backed their current Kick Starter, and while most of it is Sci-fi Gothic themed stuff, there are some nice bits in there for fantasy, namely a Baga Yaga style walking hut.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/printablescenery/rampage-gothic-3d-printable-scenery-building-syste#

 

[meet.the.doctor]

Great topic,

Good terain makes your army look better on it. And the more you have it the more interesting the game looks.

But on the other hand too much complication creates confusion and I've noticed that sometimes during tournaments people are trying to go so fast that they don't pay much attention to terrains. 

Anyway here is my Aqshy themed table. Still WiP.

i was using some terrains from minimonsters.eu . 

 

[Captain Marius]

Thanks to everyone who has shared terrain pics, this is the most inspiring thread on TGA! Im off to scratch build some new terrain!

[Arkiham]

21 hours ago, Captain Marius said:

Thanks to everyone who has shared terrain pics, this is the most inspiring thread on TGA! Im off to scratch build some new terrain!

Good to hear, many people seem to shy away from terrain, you rarely see people uploading custom terrain or wip painting terrain.

 

It's sarge part of the game and should get it's time in the spot light

[Mr. White]

I've shared some of these before, but here's my Chamon themed terrain:

 

[someone2040]

Been focusing more on my terrain recently after I finished up painting my Freeguild General on Griffon.

Assembled my Magewrath Throne that I've had for years now (Since it came out for Storm of Magic really). My Balewind got a paint job a while back. Happy enough wit how this one turned out, I might get back to it (haha... yeah... ) and add some moss and stuff later to make it look a bit more rundown.

The other thing I'm happy about is I finally painted my Citadel Woods that I've had for even longer. A while back I noticed that at our club, we have a 'ash world' style board which is one of the boards that sadly, while looking cool, doesn't have a lot of suitable terrain for it. That and the 'slate world' basically is a board (Although the ash world has a more interesting board with lava running through it) and the terrain for it are just random scatter rocks. Previously we've chucked ruined Mordheim buildings on it just to break up the terrain a bit.

But it got me thinking that there's basically no area terrain we have suitable for the lava/ash world, and what would be suitable for it. So I thought a burnt out forest might look cool. This isn't strictly for that board (the basing, being a tad brighter is more suitable to my home board), but I think I really like how it turned out. Certainly not as cool as the pictures I was using as source material, but think it turned out pretty well.

For my next one (Yeah, the one I bought at the same time but haven't gotten around to assembling!), I do want to try go for something pretty different though. Something along the lines of the really filled out Sylvaneth Wyldwoods (Unlikely to paint it pink though!). For the terrain people out there, any tips or tutorials on how to get that look? I seem to recall a White Dwarf maybe having a tutorial on how they did this, but maybe I'm misremembering.

[Aegisgrimm]

Yeah, I really need to get around to doing some more urban terrain now that I found a nice game mat for it, which I found at this year's  GenCon- a company called Smirking Dragon has a small selection of 4x6 fabric tablecloth maps, which are unfortunately gridded out for RPG games.  One of them is really nice though, with the grid simply making the entire map into aged paving tiles.  I really need to get some larger/more complicated buildings than the papercraft ones I have already to fill it out and make it look like a section of Hammerhal for skirmish games.  A couple squares of parkland to put my forest trees on to be "urban woods" are also in progress.

[pastorpaint]

Great topic!

I'm a huge fan of building and working on terrain. I have found great use out of the cardboard corners that some electronics and other goods come packed in. (It's not exactly cardboard, but I'm not sure what its called. It's like a pressed paper product, which can take a lot of shapes.) This has the advantage of being really easy to work with. Wood filler for gaps. A little mdf for a base, some paint, and its good to go.

I'll try and post a picture of something.