40k Terrain 2 Infinity Terrain

40k to Infinity

Bullocks what do I do with all of this old shit? 

        So you have decided to make the jump to infinity because doing the bidding of the emperor has finally started to take its toll. Unfortunately it seems like every table you ever played on, as a 40k vet, has been the ruins of some great civilization. Cities, outpost, industrial parks, military compounds... Everything in ruins! Why the heck did everything have to be destroyed? Hasn't anyone ever heard about rules of engagement and collateral damage? I mean if I were attempting to take a place over or protect it I would want it to stay nice. Not the armies of the 40k universe! "Is that a house? Looks like great cover for me to put my tank inside!" Anyway back to the business at hand. What the hell do you do with all of your post apocalyptic destroyed cities? Well use them of course. I understand the the fluff behind infinity is vary clean and crisp. That these special units are supposed to be running around in areas accomplishing missions to avoid open war... Who's to say that there are never cities that fall in the future? 

          Tommy here is in a movie that is way out in the future! Flying around in bubbles and shooting flying attack drones. Nobody ever told him he was supposed to be in a world that was well taken care of. Elysium is another great example of cities that have seen better days while still having the technology that would suffice for the infinity world. Think about the hunger games, one of the major cities could easily be the Capitol while distric 12 could be your post apocalyptic ass 40k terrain, before or after it got bombed I mean come on distric 12 has always been a shit hole! Panem, PanO what's the difference? The Matrix, some of the areas from Startrek, Titan A.E., Starship Troopers Buenos Aires after the bugs hit it the list goes on and on...      

So if you have spent hundreds of dollars and countless hours of your time on elaborate terrain for your 40k tables don't throw it away! Come up with a reason for it to be there. What if a faction bombed a growing colony for (insert reason here) and wanted to plant evidence that a rival faction did it while at the same time the innocent faction is trying to prove their not to blame? What do you think the aftermath would look like if the Combined Army came for a visit and decided that they did not need the inhabitants but only their resources? What about an industrial accident or natural disaster? All you have to do is allow your terrain to make sense and it will have new life. 

Add a few trees to this table and this could be the location of a last stand against the hostile inhabitants of Aireadna. All of your hard work and effort need not go to waste you simple have to think about it a little differently. Hell you may even find new ways to use your old terrain and spring a little life into that old table.  So this wasn't all just going to be a rant about moving from 40k to Infinity, I do have a little terrain advice to add to the mix. A few of the guys at my local shop had seen the Fifth Element table I made and started asking me about where I learned how to make terrain. I told them that I started in high school with 40k and that I made terrain out of things I found around the house. They were very interested in cheap terrain ideas because they did not have a whole lot of money to spend. One thing that I always looked for to make ruined buildings was packaging foam like the stuff you find inside of an electronics box. I decided that I was going to make make a set for a warhammer kill teams league we were starting up. 

 I started making this before I started writing this blog and never considered making a tutorial out of these photos. Instead of doing the traditional step by step I am going to talk a little more about theory. When ever I make ruins out of packaging foam I generally look at it first and think about what some of the shapes look like i.e. it looks like a door or window fits here and if I break this piece off it would make a nice concrete wall. Sometimes I will put my mini on it and see how he looks in different areas. Next you just break chunks off. I generally have an idea of how I want it to look and aim for that but at the end of the day the parts you break off will determine the layout of the finished project. You can also chose to keep the foam together sometimes and because of the shape it tends to look like pill boxes and concrete bunkers. 

 

We have some 40k players at our local shop and just because most 40k terrain is all ruiny and skully does not mean you have to play on tables like that. One of the guys just came back from filming with miniwargaming and decided he wanted to try his hand at making a batrep he like my infinity terrain so much that he decided to use it in his video. 

Main point of this article is that you should play with whatever you have, just play! If you have ruins and are playing infinity come up with cool scenarios that would cause you to be in such an area. Hell if you have a badass train set that fits 28mm then play on that maybe you landed on an underdeveloped planet that is just coming to age, some of the planets in the Firefly universe still use horses. 

 

Well I have wanted to write about this for a bit now seeing as is was brought up as an excuse of why some people didn't want to play because they didn't want to replace all of their terrain. I also needed a filler until I finish up the spaceship. 

 

You are only limited by your imagination! -Chad-