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I've had stints in the past where I spent a bunch of time building Warmachine terrain, and I've had mixed results, but I'm starting to feel the itch again, so I thought I'd start a discussion here about terrain.
Lots of folks have different opinions about 2d or 3d terrain and which is better, but the two key features about terrain that interest me personally are what its mechanics are in gameplay, and how good it looks. Most of my ideas and observations in this post will be about either how cool a terrain piece may look, or how its rules can affect play.
I'd like to categorize things to organize my own thoughts. This is likely to be long, so I'll include some headers on the sections to make skipping around easier.
BUILDINGS AND OTHER OBSTRUCTIONS
This is probably the largest single category, and as such I'll try hard not to say too much here because it could easily be an entire article. A couple of the more interesting things about buildings specifically is the ability laid out in MK4 rules for a building to use sculpted stairs or ladders. If you end your movement within one inch of a ladder or stairway, you can then place your model anywhere within one inch of its other end. This allows for some fairly interesting and cool terrains, where your model may be able to climb to the top of a wall parapet. However, this type of feature is far more likely to be used in casual play, since it creates so many janky rules questions - how high vertically can my melee attack reach?
And once you introduce ladders and stairs, you introduce elevation, which allows for another seldom-used mechanic in warmachine: falling. When's the last time your model has been pushed off a ledge by a thunderbolt shot and suffered fall damage?
Buildings also have the ability to be both habitable and/or destroyable, but the community has largely abandoned these mechanics, and my bunker and guard tower both sit and collect dust.
The ability for buildings to look good is one of the things that really interests me about them. I think of the time I created a burned out Khador building and glued on propaganda posters I found in a google image search, printed out very small. That piece came out excellently. I've also seen terrain pieces online featuring stucco or lit windows which look just phenomenal.
FORESTS AND TALL GRASS
That new 3D printed kickstarter that everyone is talking about has a tall grass terrain piece that consists of tall grass toppers. I really like that idea, and even though I'm likely going in with friends on that kickstarter, I may try to build some tall grass toppers myself. Being able to remove the grass when your models need to stand on the terrain really helps, and I like that idea better than the cut-up doormat material we always seem to use for tall grass.
SHALLOW WATER
One of the simplest terrain pieces to make, I generally just cut out an oval of balsa, paint the center blue, sometimes line the edges with clay, dirt, or grass, and then glaze over the center with acrylic gel gloss to make it look like water.
TRENCHES
Trenches have been done so many ways, from simple to elaborate. Honestly, given how difficult it can be to actually play a game with the more elaborate trenches, I tend to prefer the simple flat ones which leave the elevation to the imagination. That said, it's one of the few terrain types I've never personally built, and I'm thinking that I should give it a go.
HILLS
There are so many hill terrain pieces that are done badly. I'm sure many of you have at some point played a game using a hill terrain with sloped sides and found that you couldn't place your model where you wanted to without it falling over. This is why so many of the more functional hill terrains have mesa-like vertical edges and flat tops. This combines some actual elevation, even if it's only an inch, with flat terrain that can actually house models.
"Hills" don't actually need to be a grassy hill - I built a Khador bunker which functions as a hill rather than being habitable.
I also recall hearing about a "ridge" terrain which was used a couple years back at The Bokur Brawl. It was vaguely ramp-shaped, and was both a hill, and also acted as a wall at one edge. Cool and creative.
HAZARDS
The primary three hazards you'll see are acid bath, burning earth, and quicksand.
An acid bath can be just a green lake. That works. But you can make it any of a number of different things. I created a small pumphouse with a spout in back that's dripping green ooze, and it's got a large puddle of acid beneath it. Industrial waste.
Burning earth terrain can be any of a number of different things. My lava pit is the only one I've created, but there are endless different types of terrain which could function as fire. I've been considering building fire toppers which can be added to other existing terrains. Flaming tall grass, anyone?
Quicksand can be difficult to model. How do you indicate visually that it isn't just dirt? The one I made has a toothpick-mounted sign in the center which comes out for storage. The sign simply says "Danger! Quicksand" and serves as a pretty basic solution to that problem.
WALLS
I've built so many walls. Stone walls from real stone and crazy clue, wooden fences using balsa and speaker wire, even a barbed wire entrenchment I created by knotting 1cm lengths of speaker wire around a longer length of speaker wire and then wrapping the completed thing around a pencil for the spiral effect.
I've often been thinking for a long time about another interesting terrain piece: a wrought iron fence which blocks movement but not line of sight. You can shoot through it, but not walk through it. I think I'd need to make it small so that it didn't become an overpowered piece for shooting models.
RUBBLE, CRATERS, AND OTHER ROUGH TERRAIN
The only truly good crater terrain pieces I've seen are the 3D printed ones. I created a rubble terrain piece once by gluing tiny stones to a 3" x 4" building foundation and adding a mostly-destroyed building wall to one end, but it wasn't perfect.
One bit of rough terrain I've often theorized but never built is a snow terrain piece, which is simply rough terrain. But along those lines, a frozen pond piece might be fun for casual games. It would include a rule that models without cold immunity need to make a roll or end up prone. My thought was that you roll a d6 for any model contacting the ice and add 7. If that number hits the target's DEF, it falls prone. This means that a DEF 13 model would only have a 1-in-6 chance to fall, but that clumsy DEF 10 jack falls 66% of the time.
STORMS, CLOUDS AND DUST DEVILS
Clouds are created often enough by an army's special abilities, but I too seldom see clouds included as terrain. Dust devil terrain pieces just got a tweak in the December update, and perhaps we'll see them more often on tables now. Storms I never see. (models with flight treat storms as rough terrain)
Colored cotton on a base is the most commonly seen cloud terrain, but I really like the 3D-printed topper my friend magnetized to a 3 inch circular base, creating a very nice dust devil. I'm in the midst of creating an irregularly-shaped ovalish cloud which will go into my terrain bucket once it's complete. Smoke is hard to paint well.
COMBINATIONS
Lastly, terrain pieces which are combinations of what's above. A burning forest. A trench full of acid that grants cover but imparts continuous corrosion. You can do a lot here.
I once built a Crucible Guard petrochemical factory with ladders leading to catwalks beside a chemical vat. It was theoretically possible for a ranged push to knock models into the acid. Terrain construction is fun. Creating pieces that you'll want to use every game is the real challenge.
While on a long rabbit-hole doomscrolling session down the google image search page, I found this cool Privateer Press page from 2019 wherein someone built a steamjack workstation during a hobby hangout.
