This Old House

 

This is the Warlord games kit "Ruined Farm House", a single version of the Building in the "Ruined Village Set". For the most part the kit doesn't get a lot of credit for it's elegance. There are a lot of ruined buildings out there but few, have the robustness that represent the thickness of a stone buildings in ruins. 

I like terrain. More so than actual miniatures. Anybody can buy a box of mini-soldiers and paint them up to specification, some with such detail it's lost at arms length but conscription leads to uniformity and homologous detail. I feel the real reflection of the passion of a hobbyist is in the unique quality, the details of the terrain they place on the board. If your a bit of lichen, one stone, and single rock wall kind of a guy cool! Throw some dice and play. The real flavor comes from terrain.  

 

 

I built this as a piece that I wanted to have a story, not just another scattered rock or bush. So I put details in it much like archeology gives clues to it's former inhabitants both original and transient. 

The Idea was to overlap the time lines, first all of the remaining furniture in the house is weather worn and sun bleached. The former owners abandon this residence long before this war kicked off and possibly it has seen two world wars or more of deterioration. The occupation of this place by transient parties can be seen by the carefully placement of an empty bottle on the outer wall and the abandon German helmet on the window sill. The fire place contains fresh soot and ash from recent use. 

The chair in the archway has seen recent use, and somehow managed to escape both bombardment and the fire place. Somethings all occupants value is a nice place to sit after a long trek. 

An Awkwardly balanced lounge picked clean of cushion, Just put there to let the observer think about how that scenario manifested. 

A living tomato plant, a discarded seed or the remains of a former garden?

Several scattered wooden buckets and tubs, not buried by the rubble suggesting the possibly use recently. I also placed some cut tubes of styrene, I painted to look like empty ration tins but the rubble pile did a good job of hiding those in the pictures. 

So how and where rubble falls I find fascinating. It is really not something that most gamers model. I did spend years in Archeology classes, so that is on me. However, I hear it on forums all the time " I can't put my mini's on the terrain if I put that junk all over the floor. It falls over." Your basing it wrong. If the mini is lighter than the base, it doesn't fall over. 

Every part of this model was washed and dry brushed many times over to mute the colors into a blended pallet that reflected the desired aging and bleaching of the environment. I played with the idea of hiding an animal in the wreckage but preferred the defiant structure to feel more ghostly than alive.