Building 3D printed scatter terrain for wargames
With Throne & Ash, not only can you use the SystemHEX design to build sprawling castles, you can also build amazing 3D printed scatter terrain perfect for wargames. In this article, we’ll show you how to turn basic walls, buildings, and ruins into immersive and engaging boards for skirmish wargames, like Mordheim, Malifaux, and Star Wars, and larger games like Warhammer Old World and Warhammer 40k.
If you’ve been following the Throne & Ash campaign, you’ll probably already have what you need to build scatter terrain. But for those of you getting started, here’s a list of Throne & Ash products perfect for building scatter terrain that we’ll be using in this article:
- Castle Walls & Angular Walls
- Ruined Castle Walls & Ruined Angular Walls
- Castle Steps & Ruined Steps
- Low Walls
- Ruined Low Walls
- Barracks
- Ruined Barracks
- Keep Tower
- Ruined Keep Tower
- Ruined Oval Bastions
- Ruined Queens Quarters
- Ruined Wattle & Daub Tower
- Ruined Wattle & Daub Living Quarters
- Most Castle Grounds Items (trees, barn etc)
You don’t need it all, and personal preference matters, but building more variety is always more engaging when it comes to scatter terrain in wargames.
Here, we’re combining pieces of ruined walls, low walls, and angular walls to make small ‘chunks’ of ruined scatter terrain. We use the fully ruined wall ends to keep the ‘chunks’ separate and easily move around. They also make for convenient terrain to climb with all the exposed ruined bricks. With this, you can quickly whip up a board of ancient ruins and easily change the layout between games.
You can swap out wall chunks for ruined bastions and circle turrets, adding more variety and platforms for models to fight on.
The ruined buildings make for great scatter as well. You can attach a connector and some ruined wall ends to create scatter buildings, which can be easily moved around and add more playable areas. Some like the Wattle & Daub Tower, add verticality too, perfect for Mordheim.
On top of buildings with wall ends added, you can have them entirely standalone by adding buttresses, ladders, and stairs. These are even easier to scatter around and make for great places to explore in a town-like environment.
In fact, you can make a board out of entirely ruined scatter terrain. This is the kind of board you might expect on a Warhammer or Middle-earth table, with larger terrain blocks for concealing troops and breaking line of sight. Here we’re using just the bottom floors and ruined levels to make multiple smaller scatter pieces alongside the larger Ruined Queens Quarters, where you can imagine a key objective might be held.
Adding pine trees into small clusters gives your board a bit more life, which is especially good in skirmish games where tight spaces make for really engaging fights. They can be great for ambushes and hiding in too.
And there you have it. The variety of scenery we can get when building 3D-printed scatter terrain with Throne & Ash is huge. As you can see with some minis added, there are many ways to utilise the various pieces, like climbing snipers into towers, cavalry charging across the flat areas between trees, tight sword fights in doorways, and a classic leap of faith in battle.
Hope this has inspired you to build 3D printed scatter terrain for your wargames and explore other ways you can use your Throne & Ash models. Happy gaming!