Cheap and Fast Large-Scale Game Terrain and Structures

So, your last game session ended with the party at the beginning of a new location: a dark dungeon, a sprawling fortress, a soaring tower, or something even more exotic. You want them to get a sense of scale, of the scope of what lies before them, but when you look at the options online the price is just too much, and the DIY solutions seem way too complicated and demanding for an amateur. What to do?

First, remember that amateur just means unpaid! It has NOTHING to do with skill! Check the definitions yourself; nowhere in amateur or professional is skill or capability mentioned. The word we are really looking for is novice, which is just the first step of the journey to expert! So let's take that step!

In this Instructable we will cover the tools, materials, and methods needed to make large scale game terrain with a novice's skills/tools and without having to go half-rations of instant ramen to pay for it! In each section, we will also mention optional methods of construction that may require extra steps or materials, but could be worthwhile depending on individual skills or resources. Remember: this Instructable isn't about just making a small house; rather, it is about teaching the techniques to accomplish your own projects!

For supplies, we only need seven things: cardboard, something to cut it with, something to cut it straight, something to cut it on, something to write with, and glue and toothpicks to hold it together. But lets get a little more specific!

Core Supplies

Raw Corrugated Cardboard: Keep those Amazon boxes! If you need more, many stores have massive recycle containers for the cardboard their goods are shipped in. Always get permission though, otherwise it's theft! I get most of mine from the Halloween store I work at each season. Furniture and appliance stores can also have a lot of large boxes. Your raw resources are just a few phone calls away! Remember, corrugated cardboard is the type with the spaces in the middle. We want cardboard with at least one clean side (no graphics or labels on it) and is as wide as possible relative to the corrugation (see pictures for examples).

Glue: Standard white glue works fine, but I find Eileen's Tacky Glue to be the best for strength/time/durability.

Cutting Tool: An exacto knife will work, but honestly at the scale you may be working at something a bit more comfortable will be better. A utility knife is the way to go. Avoid regular knives and scissors, they just aren't suited for cardboard.

Cutting Surface: MDF board makes a great cheap cutting surface, but even a chunk of 2x4 can work. We need something to make long straight cuts on. Don't cut on your table or floor, as you can permanently damage it!

Writing Tool: Pencils work just fine, even crayons can serve, but a good permanent marker will be your best friend. Be warned, large scale projects can drain multiple markers dry!

Straight Edge: This can be a metal straight edge from the hardware or craft store, or even just a ruler or yardstick. It could even be another piece of cardboard. All we need is a straight edge for making straight lines.

Kitchen Skewers or Toothpicks: Usable with cardboard or foam floors (see below), these can help immensely in both assembly and storage. If you plan on gluing it all together, these aren't necessary, but they still help.

Optional Supplies

Paint: Spray paint can make a world of difference in making your creation look good overall, and acrylic craft paints can help you add details that really make it pop, but these are expenses and extra steps! (See the Painting Step below for more details and examples!)

Christmas Wrapping Paper: Ever notice that many wrapping papers have a 1" grid on the back of them? With a little glue, or even just a few peices of tape, this can save you a lot of time and pen ink!

Styrofoam sheet insulation: A sheet of this from the hardware store can make your dungeon and castle floors a lot more "solid" feeling, and is easily shaped into things like stairs and such. The 1" thick sheets will be best for these projects.

Okay, we know what we need, now we need to know how much. Lets get some basic ideas of what we are making written down for reference! For this tutorial, I'm going to assume the usual scale for 28mm miniatures, which is 1 inch = 5 feet. As an example, I'll show how to design and build a small house.

So, on to the first question: Do we already have a drawing of what we are making, such as from a published adventure? If so, great! If not, lets make one! We just need to know some basics, like height, width, and depth. Sketch it out, making notes of the floorplan's dimensions. If you aren't confident in your freehand drawing skills, Tinkercad can provide a convienient and free option for visualizing your idea! By changing the scale setting to inches, we can easily get our measurements as we design our structure.

The example house is 8 inches wide by 9 deep, with an inset corner 2x5. Any decent 10x10 chunk of cardboard will suffice. We need 3, preferably 4, of these peices, for the Main Floor, Floor Base, Roof, and possibly a Roof Support.

Second question: How deep/tall is it? A usual floor of a dungeon/castle/building for human occupation would be 10' from floor to floor, so 2 inches deep (if you are using foam for floors, this will be different, see the Optional section for more). If the idea is for something more expansive (perhaps the residents are large creatures, or it was designed with a grand scale in mind) then we adjust accordingly: 20 foot ceilings would mean 4 inches of cardboard, and so on. The example house will be standard, 2 inches per story.

WARNING: If you are using a published source, you may encounter your first "???" moment here, as adventure designers sometimes forget to take the thickness of walls/floors into account when describing structures. For example: how thick are the floors in a 3 story building with 10' ceilings that's 30' tall? If you answered zero feet thick, you would be right, but obviously that doesn't work in reality or in miniature!

Third question! How big is our perimeter, our outer wall? Our shape might be complex or simple, but all we have to do is count up the sections of outside walls and we get our number! I recommend writing this math process down, it will help later when its time to bend our walls into shape. Look at our picture of the Main Floor: I would write down 9+8+4+2+5+4 = 32. If we have multiple floors, we may need multiples of this outer wall (consider if the outer wall changes based on the floor).

A very important step in this method is adding for Outside Corners. We need to add 1/2 inch for each outside corner to allow our floor/next floor/roof to fit inside the wall and help give it shape. So if our outer wall was a square, we would add 2 inches. In our example house, there are 5 outside corners, so we add 2.5 inches to the 32 we already have. 34.5 inches total for our wall!

So, you now know how long and how tall your outer wall is! We need a strip of that size, and second strip of the same length but 1/8 inch shorter. This will be our liner, which enables easy splicing of the walls and our second floor/roofs to sit inside the walls.

Now that you have exterior walls calculated, lets consider inner walls. This adds an extra element of complexity, but really can make the visual stand out. That said, if you don't want to do inner walls, no problem, just skip ahead!

Inner walls should be cut at 1/4" shorter than the outer walls, as they will be sitting "on top" of the floor instead of wrapping around it. Measure your walls in straight lines or simple bends, and add 1/2 inch if the wall touches the outside wall. We are going to put an inner wall in our example house, coming off of the 2" long outer wall section and going to the opposite side. That makes it 7 inches, plus 1/2 for each of the ends, for a total of 8 inches.

CRITICAL POINT: CARDBOARD ORIENTATION

As mentioned before, we want cardboard that is image free on at least one side, and is as long as possible against the "grain" of the corrugation. The corrugation is the wavy lines inside the two outer walls of the cardboard. You may have noticed cardboard folds easily in one direction and poorly in the other? We want the "easy fold" direction to be our Up and Down, and the "poor fold" to be Left to Right. This is very important, as we will be using the "easy fold" effect to create our corners on the walls. Make sure when you draw your walls that if you were to look at the top edge of them, you would see the corrugation.

We should now have some measurements and maybe even a few lines drawn, but lets finish drawing our cut lines. We should do our floor/roof pieces first, because they are almost always larger than walls. First, find or make a straight line on the up/down direction. Measure and mark the corners of that side of the floor piece. Now, grab something with a 90 degree corner, like a box or sheet of paper. Use that to start the next line of the floor shape. Continue measuring and making your marks as needed. If you are using a printed out map, just glue it to the cardboard.

As mentioned before, we need a few parts for the floor and roof. After cutting the Main Floor, use it as a guide to make a slightly larger area for it to rest on, preferably about 1 inch larger on each side.. This, the Floor Base, gives us room for the walls to rest and be anchored to.

Trace a version of the floor that is 1/8" larger on each side; this will be our roof.

OPTIONAL ROOF SUPPORT: You can use a copy of the Main Floor as a support for the roof. Trace the main floor on the cardboard, making sure the corrugation is rotated 90 degrees from the roof piece. This alternating corrugation, when glued together, will grant the roof a lot of strength.

For our walls, we can make marks down one side of our cardboard of the appropriate height (2" outer walls, 1 7/8" inner liner, 1 3/4" inner walls), then make matching marks on the opposite side. Draw lines between the marks and we now have a wall strip. Make strips for your outer, inner liner, and inner walls.

You may find your outer wall is longer than your cardboard. No worries! If you need 30 inches and only have a 20 inch wide section, just cut another 10 inches out of it. With the way we assemble the outer walls, splicing more in is easy.

Once you have your marks, you are ready to cut!

SAFTEY FIRST!!!

This can not be repeated enough.

I've made mistakes that I don't want others to repeat! Utility knives are fantastically sharp; keep your fingers out of the path, preferably behind the knife if you can. A slip can make the knife travel further than expected, so make sure the new destination isn't in you by avoiding cutting towards yourself. Angle the work so you cut past yourself if you slip.

Using your straight edge, cut out your floor and roof pieces. Cut your wall strips.

Now, cut the wall strips to the measured lengths (32 inches in the case of our example house). Try to keep a nice 90 degree angle on the cut, but don't stress about it, we can hide tilted cuts in the corners.

WALL STRIP SPEED BOOST: A cutting pattern could be made, so that you can place the pattern against the edge of your cardboard and cut on the other side to get the proper width of your strip. This is easiest done with a strip of MDF. Using cardboard for the cutting pattern isn't advisable as you can easily cut into your pattern and lose your straight line.

WALL STRIP TURBO BOOST: A table saw. Yeah, you heard that right. In the case you have access to a table saw, you can save a lot of time by setting the saw's guiderail to the measurements of your strips, stacking several layers of cardboard, and sending them through. Make sure to use all the available safety features.

With that, we should have our parts cut! Take care handling them, its always possible to get papercuts from cardboard. On to the next step!

Now comes the fun part: making the functional pieces from our cut-out parts!

Let's start with our floors and roof parts. Glue them together (check out my glue technique in the photos), making sure to leave the overlap we designed. Sandwich them with some weight (those heavy rulebooks work great!) while the glue dries so they don't warp.

Now for our Outer Walls. Offset the end of the liner (the less-tall one) to the main outer wall by any amount, it really doesn't matter. Keep the bottoms flush together. If your cardboard has pictures on one side, this is the perfect time to make them disappear by making sure they both face inwards and are hidden. Glue the inner edges together and keep pressure applied. Again, heavy books are great for this, just be careful to not leak glue on your books.

After a few minutes, you can take them out and start folding the corners. If you have a seam in it, that makes a natural first corner, but you can really put them anywhere. The best way to make a outside corner is to deform or split open the corrugation of the inner liner so that it can easily compress on itself when folded. Likewise, do the same with the outer layer for inside corners.

CURVING WALLS: Circular or curved walls are easy to do; after all, a circle is just a shape with an infinite amount of corners! While infinity is out of reach, the corner method I've described can be repeated down the wall to create a curve. Try it and see!

Make your way around your floor, folding corners where needed. Once you get back around, seal the loop by gluing the offset ends of the outer and inner layers. Hold it for a minute or so with fingers, use a small clamp, or sandwich with a book like before.

If you plan to glue your inner walls to the outer walls or each other where appropriate, you may want to skip forward to the Anchoring step for the outer walls and then return. Otherwise, simply deform the corrugation at the corners as before, test fitting against your walls and floor as needed. If you do plan to glue them to the outer walls or each other, split the extra half inch we added to the end with your utility knife (see picture), open it up to form a "T" shape, add glue to the top of the "T" and press against the outer wall (see picture). Repeat this as needed for the inner walls of your structure.

Now comes the part we've all been waiting for: putting it all together!

Take your completed first floor. Your outer wall should fit around it snugly; if its a little loose, don't worry, but if its too loose or tight you might need to trim or splice it.

Now, if your outer walls are a shape with no inside corners, we should be fine and dandy, but if it's more complicated, we need to anchor the walls. This is where the skewers/toothpicks come in. Be mindful of safety when working on this step to avoid pushing a toothpick or needle into your leg or finger.

Place your walls where you want them and slide a toothpick down through the corrugation and push hard enough to make a hole in the floor base. You want the hole to go all the way through, so you may need to pick the project up off the table. Make these marks on either side of a corner and about every 6 inches or so on long walls.

Carefully cut a toothpick or skewer in half and push it up through the bottom of the base through one of the holes. You can apply a little bit of glue to the bottom of the toothpick just before you push it flush with the base if you want to leave these in permanently, or you can leave them unglued to make storage and transport a little less pokey (if a little more time-consuming to set up).

From time to time, put the outer wall in place; the corrugation should slide over the toothpicks and be kept in place. Don't worry about it if a toothpick doesn't line up right; just remove it and reset it a little further down the wall. If using foam as a base, you can simply put the wall in place and then shove a skewer of appropriate height down through the wall and into the foam directly.

Glue or toothpick your inner walls as needed. Your roof/second floor should now fit snugly within the top of your outer wall, resting upon the inner liner and walls. If you want a little more support on your outer walls, you can glue small peices of cardboard to the base on the outside of the outer walls, sandwiching the walls between the floor and the small strip. Avoid gluing directly to the wall if you want to be able to disassemble.

If you have a second floor, skewers or toothpicks can be used in the outer wall and floor just like before. Repeat as needed to reach desired stability. If you want to glue the skewers permanently into the walls, I recommend doing it so the unglued section is pointing downward into the wall beneath, rather than up into the next layer, because the upward pointing skewer is just going to, well, skewer someone trying to move a mini during play.

At this point, we have a structure: floor, walls, roof. But we need it functional for the game! As mentioned, this Instructable assumes the use of 28mm scale miniatures using an inch based grid system. If your needs are different, adjust accordingly.

Take your floor and roof pieces and, using your straightedge/ruler, draw a grid on them. This is one of the more tiresome parts of the task. There are some cheats that can be taken, but if cost efficiency is the goal, you may need to just invest the time. Drawing a grid is similar to when we drew our cut lines for the wall strips: use a ruler to make marks every inch down all sides of your base (remember our 1/8th of an inch offset on the roof). Then connect the marks on opposite sides using your straight edge. Connect the lines, then rotate the part 90 degrees and repeat. Obviously, if you glued a printed map or the gridded wrapping paper to it, you're already done!

If you have rooms, you likely have doors, and knowing where they are is important. You can draw them on the walls, cut out door shapes from cardboard and glue them on, or even cut them out partially from the wall itself, using the corrugation to make a hinge of sorts.

At this point, further decoration is entirely in your hands. If the structure is going to be a single-use set that will likely just go in the trash afterwards, its perfectly fair to not invest much in making it fancy. That said, a little bit of decoration can go a long way.

FAST GRID CHEAT TECHNIQUE: At a home and garden center, you can buy small rolls of metal fencing with a 1 inch grid to them. Cut free a section of this fence about 2-3 feet by however tall it is, and carefully flatten it out. If you give your floors a solid black base coat, you can then place the fence over it and use a lighter color of spray paint to "fill" the squares. Using white results in greyish squares with faint black lines between them; browns, greens, and other colors can work for other terrains. This trick does cost a little, and requires using spray paint (not always an option due to ventilation/mess), but if you are planning on doing a lot of gridded surfaces, this can really save a large amount of time.

PAINTING TIPS: Spray paint can make painting large areas a lot easier, but there are some tricks to it. I find it takes less paint overall to do a coat of black followed by a lighter version of the desired color. So black + light grey = dark grey. Permanent marker usually works just fine over spray paint for things like doors, but if not you can draw the doors on regular paper, cut them out, and glue them where they need to be.

That is it. The end of our short journey! You now have the techniques to create all sorts of structures for your games! See the next chapter for some examples of what can be done, and may your games be great!

I hope this Instructable gives you some new options for making terrain that helps bring your games to life. High detail "immersive" terrain has its role for sure, but sometimes its great to truly understand the adventure's scale and be able to visualize the three dimensional aspects of an area.

The videos show two of the builds I have created for the Order of the Amber Die, and the pictures are of other builds using the techniques for my home games, from castles to creepy hedge-gardens to pirate fortresses. As I build more, I'll add them to this gallery.

Thanks for coming along and may you have great gaming!