"And they call it a mine. A mine!"Inspired by Fëanor, the mighty elf's "Of Rocks and Mithril" Moria terrain (
http://www.one-ring.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=683), I've been busy preparing new terrain for our LOTR group's upcoming kickoff game for the year. The theme? Moria!
The idea is to focus on twisty caves and corridors, along with dangerous walkways far above the near-bottomless abyss. Since most of our SBG battles have taken place on battlefields with plenty of room to manuever, this should make for an interesting challenge.
The new battlefield lies deep under the mountain...
To accomplish the effect I'm aiming for, I decided to make a series of modular cave 'islands' that will then be connected by a modular pillar-bridge system. To this end, I began cutting 2 layers of 2" pink foam stacked atop each other (4" total height) to form what will eventually be the modular caves.
With the help of a hotwire foam knife and my wife, the foam can be shaped into a nice jagged, curved, cave-like texture.
Here you can see our steadily growing stack of caves. The top 2" of foam has been carved out to form the cave's passageways.
Meanwhile, underneath the bottom layer of foam we carved hidden channels for some electrical work. These caves will eventually have flickering LED torches!
I especially loved Feanor's well placement in his caves; here I'm testing how it will look in our setup.
This took longer than expected to get working, but now we're cooking with fire! The torches are made from LED bulbs with the flames sculpted around the bulb with hot glue.
A sheet of plain black paper forms the abyss... for now
The LED torch and cave shapes make for some awesome visuals.
Sneak preview of the currently WIP mines... Dry ice may or may not be involved...
Stay tuned! Our first gameday is in a couple weeks, so this terrain will be ready by then one way or another. I still need to texture and paint everything, as well as build the pillar-walkway system.