Black Basalt Towers

"Piping their powers from black basalt towers, they loom like colossi, I'm under their sway!" -Darkest of the Hillside Thickets

I'm not a big terrain guy, heh, I'm doing good just to paint my figs half the time! Just look at some battle reports here, the tabletop isn't exactly straining under the weight of beautiful terrain pieces. Sadly, a milk crate full of rounded shapes cut from wood with a jigsaw, then spray painted green is about as good as it gets. Terrain really makes the table though, and makes battles that much better.

Here's my first foray at "giving a crap" with terrain. I've got six little towers of black basalt, carved by hand, probably by human, but who knows? They can be clumped together to form an area of columns, maybe even rough terrain, or placed singularly here and there as tabletop "flavor text". I used a hot wire cutter to slice up some sheets of pink insulation foam. I then stacked little disks on top of each other, carving them up some more. Each tower is approximately 3.5" inches high, and everything's been mounted on 2" steel washers. Painting was nothing fancy, a coat of flat black, a heavy brush of midnight blue, then some dark gray drybrushing. I based them with some coarse railroad ballast and some "gravel", which turns out to my chagrin to be just clumps of dirt. A sprig of foliage rounds it all out. After looking at these photos, I'm going to go back and give the tan rocks a brown wash, and maybe drybrush areas of that ballast with some more gray.


Here's a size comparison shot next to a blurry 28mm sci-fi alien trooper. These could pass for either being carved by hand, or just part of the alien topography.


Here's another comparison shot, this time next to a 15mm trooper. At this scale they really do start to "loom", taking on an entirely different tabletop presence. I like how they can pull double duty in regards to scale also. Really, they could work for just about anything. Enjoy!