Infinity Terrain – Prepping for Campaign:Paradiso on a Budget
I decided back in December that I was going to film all the missions in Campaign:Paradiso. My only concern was terrain, until Modest Magic created this.
A few weeks ago, I made mention in an article that terrain quantity is one of the barriers to entry for Infinity. It’s not a huge hurdle and it’s not an insurmountable one either. It’s just something that new players should know. Back in January, I decided that I wanted to do a lot of battle reports covering all of Campaign:Paradiso and to that end I knew that I wanted to be able to introduce a lot of terrain to make the boards feel a bit different between battle reports. I needed to find a way to do it quickly and inexpensively.
Before I continue with this article, I want to stress that this is not attempting to be an advertisement piece. There are ideas floating around on the interwebs on how you can construct terrain at an inexpensive cost. Full disclosure: I am not getting a commission on sets of this terrain being sold. However, this terrain is designed around ideas that I came up with. Other articles on BoLS talk about how other hobbyists constructed their terrain, I’m relaying how I made mine. But if any of these steps sound like something you’re interested in, Nick over at Modest Magic has put these terrain kits together and will be selling them soon.
I wanted to create a handful of rooms that were explicitly described in the Campaign:Paradiso rule book. With this in mind, I sent some early design diagrams of what wall segments I was hoping to build.
I wanted there to be a defining line that crossed all the walls to provide a look and feel that the walls were meant to be together. These details, based on paint scheme could then provide a low tech construction (when painted dark) or provide a futuristic look with lighter colored walls and the blue fiber optic looking colors running along the walls. I knew that I needed door ways, I wanted some walls to have built in ladders, and I also wanted an area that looked like it was an LCD screen/console that could be hacked. My first attempt at making the walls myself with the tools I had at my disposal created two issues:
1) Took too long.
2) The design elements were not as clean I was hoping for.
With my Powerpoint jpg in hand, I contacted Nick at Modest Magic about what I was looking for. A few days later, Nick was ready to show me what he was able to produce.
Beyond the walls segments I requested, I was hoping to get 2 inch polystyrene cut so I could create walkways similar to the those I constructed earlier out of floor boards and polystyrene.
Nick persuaded me that the 2 inch polystyrene was unnecessary. To illustrate his point he constructed a walk way made out of nothing but 1/2 inch polystyrene, then put two paint cans directly on top of the walkway.
