One the workbench - dockside buildings

The last Woebetides test game made me realise that I don't have any dockside terrain pieces. As at least five coastal towns are likely to be needed in the game, I thought I'd experiment with making something appropriate.

The problem with building a quayside is that unless you are building your terrain using some kind of modular system, it's not usually possible to have the general land area of the table higher than the sea areas. You're likely therefore to need a step up to the quayside from the surrounding terrain.  

I thought I could probably make this less obvious by surrounding my quay with walls and buildings at the edge of the terrain piece.

I have some sheets of stone-block-textured blue foam that I got some years ago from a Firedragon Games Kickstarter. I also had an off-cut of PVC board that was just a little larger than a single sheet of the blue foam (about 11 inches square). This gave me the opportunity to have a sloping entranceway at the rear of the dock area.

The piece is at an early stage - a couple of sessions' work so far.

I started by cutting the baseboard to size such that it was a 5mm wider on each side than the blue foam. I glued the side walls in place and then built up the buildings, hot gluing them to the PVC base. I then trimmed the blue foam to fit and glued it down. Further trimming allowed for Lego pillars at the front corners.

I cut and sanded an earthen slope to the rear of the base between the buildings.

When the buildings' basic structures were dry (I'd glued them with PVA using map pics to hold them together) I started to add details. 

The roofs are scored, thick card. I've added doors from various thicknesses of cardboard and a laser-cut MDF balcony from Warbases. 

I've also textured the rear slope and some of the walls with Tetrion.

It's not really visible in the pic above but I've extended the gaps between the stone blocks down the front edge of the blue foam and the exposed PVC board at the front.

The next steps are to cut through some more windows, possibly adding (brass rod) iron bars, add more texture with Tetrion, and then paint a little PVA along the bases of the interior walls before sprinkling on sand. I might add a wooden bollard or two along the front edge.

I'm trying to keep the final article suitable for the Woebetides, for Mexico, or for Pavis.