A place of power in no time

   For my Lord of the Rings game night, I had to build a themed terrain piece to reflect the scenario and setting straight from the campaign.  Because I was focused on the transition between the Fellowship and the Two Towers, I determined that the Ambush at Amon Hen was the best choice.  There's a couple of reasons for that, and one of them just happened to be that the terrain is easy to build.  This is especially useful if you only have a couple of days and a lack of sharp blades...

  Admittedy, the instructions, templates, and measurements are right out of the Fellowship of the Ring campaign book published by GW in 2005 (these three books are still the best!).  The only changes I made were the columns (I have a few cake columns laying about, so I used them instead) and the statues around the seat (I do want them, but I would need sharper blades to avoid complete catastrophe).  Otherwise, this is almost step-by-step.

  

  The foamboard was not happy and cutting each of the layers to be 4mm shorter for the stairs (did I mention that the measurements are all in milimeters?!) turned out to be a long and error-filled task.  This was three days before gameday and it would now be two days to put it all together.  

  Next was gluing everything together.  This involved some superglue for the pillars on the base and lots of white glue for the foamboard.  That same white glue was then coated onto the base and some other necessary areas for the good 'ol sand-dump!  This was the day before gameday...

  I woke up on gameday with a paintbrush in my hand and a mission to complete.  After priming the models with black spray (I'm out of time, so I'm trying to find the quickest approaches to everything) and then grey spray, I immediately doused the base of the building and all other sandy areas with that coffee brown (the only craft paint brown color we own, and that wasn't ideal).

  Then we went crazy with the white glue and green flock, the white glue and blobs of static grass, and then the superglue for the clump foliage.  

  And finally, I pulled out a cream colour (I wanted white, but my hobby supplies betrayed me often for this project) and drybrushed and dappled around all the groundwork and across all the stone.  It game it that depth that it needed to mostly hide it.  By now, it's time to leave for gameday.  Like, 'wash the brush off and take the terrain to the car' time to leave.  But i finished it.

  This is obviously not the highest quality of work and certainly not what the Emperor would allow me to get away with in his shops, but I was satisfied and my gaming group really dug it!  I'm always excited to build and paint terrain, but getting this one done in just a few hours spread over three days while working on other stuff...  Damn, I'm good!

  Do you have a speedy '3-out-of-5' project that you've pulled off lately?  Do you have a project that you followed step-by-step from a good source and still nearly destroyed?  Comment below (I do read them)!

Happy Hobbying!