When I first started playing miniature war games in 1985, it was with a rule system called “Rules According to Ral”, a simple system whose rules fit on both sides of a sheet of paper. Having an artistic background, I was instantly hooked by all of the brightly painted miniatures, the huge board, and the cool terrain. Cool terrain back then was pieces of green carpet cut out as hill steppes, and chunks of lichen and cheap toy trees for foliage. For years I painted figures, but never really paid much attention to the field on which they were deployed. Green army blankets with cigar boxes underneath were hills, and the cheapest railroad trees I could find (often horribly out of scale) were used for forests, rivers were pieces of blue construction paper, and buildings were nothing more than appropriate sized boxes (for the most part). I then picked up my first issues of White Dwarf magazine and saw how much work was also being put into the terrain as well. I then found myself drawn to making terrain. One resource I used for making buildings was a book that Games Workshop had published with cardboard buildings. Instead of cutting out the buildings, I used them as templates to create my own out of foamcore, balsa wood, and cereal packets. This was my first foray into building terrain that looked nice.
