Taking the Ruined Keep to the Next Level

I finally got some photos of a few terrain pieces I completed over last summer, fall and winter. You've probably spotted them in the background of our fantasy battle reports towards the end of last year!

These pieces started when I acquired the Scotia Grendel Ruined Keep kit, a very nice resin collection of tumbledown walls and ruined turrets. I knew I didn't want to assemble the kit exactly as it appeared in the studio photo (see below), so I decided to try my hand at carving stones and brickwork into blue foam chunks, then attaching the resin pieces on top to create a set of larger, more robust ruined fortress pieces that I could use either individually or grouped together.

It was my first time trying to carve foam by hand, so I just used a ballpoint pen.

This is the biggest piece from the lot: a broken wall capped by two ruined turrets. The whole thing is slowly being overtaken by the wilds, which fits perfectly with my fantasy wilderness setting.

Here's the next piece that came out of that Scotia Grendel kit: a ruined corner turret. This is just the resin piece attached to a larger wedge of blue foam, with stonework carved by hand into the base. The small trees are from a big bag of loose foliage I picked up on ebay for super cheap...I just put a bit of tacky glue on the tree trunks and pushed them into the foam.

The stairs are from one of my Dwarven Forge kits.

And here's the last piece: a corner with two walls and a small ledge for minis. The ledge isn't all that big, and the slope is too steep for most miniatures. Oops! It's still perfectly usable though.

These pieces were not meant to be symmetrical or to fit together in any particular way. I just wanted to make the most of the foam chunks that I had laying around.

It was a good learning experience. In retrospect I don't think the mortared areas between the stones came out quite dark enough to provide good contrast between the gray slabs. Otherwise I'm pretty satisfied.

I still have one circular turret piece and a small archway left from this kit, so there's probably one more terrain piece left in my future. Stay tuned!

-- Patrick, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member