In keeping my bin of junk around for making terrain, I have noticed it's kind of messy. I have gotten into the habit of holding onto everything and anything, and frequently contemplate strange objects I see on a daily basis for their potential as terrain material. My Barney Bag is overflowing onto my bedroom floor. Frankly, I need a couple much bigger boxes.
And as a slight neat freak, who suffers from anxiety when my home is messy for too long, I have seriously contemplated breaking up with my Barney Bag and just taking the lot of it out to the dumpster for my own satisfaction.
But today, I watched this TED talk:
What Dan Phillips does with the homes he builds in Texas is the same thing I am trying to do with the terrain pieces I'm making at home. I am reclaiming those things I usually throw away, looking at them in a different and interesting light, and making something new and original from it. This is innovation at its finest.
At one point, Dan Phillips tells how he has lots of toilets, so he smashed one with a hammer to create a new tile design. There is a lesson in this; this is how you should be thinking when figuring out what to do with all those tin cans, 2-liter bottles and toilet paper rolls you saved up. Ignore what it was originally made for, break it down, and recreate it. This is how my aluminum soda cans turned into craters. And that wasn't even what they turned into first....
Sponsored in part by Mountain Dew.
I needed a lid for the 10-gallon tank I was keeping my feeder mice in, and I couldn't afford the one they had at the pet store for $20. So, I set out to make my own. All I needed was some kind of netting and a metal frame. The netting came from the plastic netting bags I had leftover from freezer pops. The metal frame came from folded and stapled strips of aluminum from the bodies of soda cans. In order to tighten the netting over the top, I tied the netting taut with tiny strips of aluminum leftover from when I was cutting the cans apart. After all this I was left with the carefully constructed tops and bottoms of soda cans, and when I looked at them, I saw craters.
Remember that game you played as a kid, where different colored carpets or tiles were different kinds of terrain? For instance, maybe you couldn't step on the black tiles because they were pitfalls, so you had to go across the kitchen on the white tiles. I myself had a childhood home where all of the carpets in each of the rooms was a different color. My brother's bedroom was blue (ocean), the living room was brown (desert), our parents' bedroom was green (grassland/forest), the kitchen was white linoleum (ice), and my and my sister's bedroom was pink (lava). Changing the environment simply by imagining it was different, made it different. We interacted with the world in a whole new way. This is how homemade terrain works; you imagine your junk is different, and then you MAKE it different.
Another great tip from Mr. Phillips here: when you have a whole bunch of something, it doesn't matter what that is, as long as you can make a pattern of it, you can work with it. How this applies to terrain: let me share with you a piece I just started on. At my job, I deal with a lot of boxes, and some companies are pretty meticulous about their packaging. Once company in particular had a box full of a certain toy and, for whatever reason, it was imperative that the corners of these toys not be dented or crushed. So, on each corner of every box, there was a hard, black, plastic cap.
These were interesting to me, and there were a lot of them, so instead of throwing them away, I stacked them up and stashed them in my bag. After playing with them at home for a few minutes, I came up with this:
Do you see it? Soon, it will be a ruins piece. I thought maybe I would make pyramids or building roofs out of them, but none of that seemed to be working. But, since I had a whole bunch of them, I was able to create a pattern with them. If I get enough, I can probably make a whole series of ruins pieces just like this. Of course, it's not going to look like the ruins GW puts out, but who's to say it has to? It can be homemade and still be functional and aesthetically pleasing. Just pick a pattern and stick with it.
When he talks about the Apollonian perspective versus the Dionysian perspective, I think it's pretty clear where we fall in this dichotomy...
Apollonian : GW :: Dionysian : Homemade Terrain
For those of us who play, we have an image in our head of picture-perfect terrain pieces. In fact, if we have our codex in hand, the picture is right in front of our face. GW does make some amazing and beautiful terrain, I will give them that, and when making terrain we all try to live up to their example and emulate their style. But it is not always necessary to follow their mold. The reason they are able to come up with such amazing terrain in the first place, the way they make their molds, is by being innovative and creative. So when making terrain, it's best really to throw the GW molds out of your mind and start from the ground up. Granted, sometimes they offer some great inspirations and supplemental ideas, but that's all they should be when making homemade terrain: supplements. The innovation, the mold, needs to come from you. I have used GW ideas as supplements before (i.e.: the shingled roof idea I got from a GW terrain-making book), but the overall building designs are my own.
Even in Phillips's talk, he references Maslow's heirarchy of needs. Keep this in mind when you're making terrain too. The basic purpose of terrain is to enhance game play: you need to be able to fit models on, in, and around it; it needs to be to a reasonable scale; it needs to stay on the table and not fall over easily; it needs to be secure. How good it looks standing next to a GW-made terrain piece, and how cool you'll look to others using it on your table, is one of the last things you'll need to worry about. Don't let your own vanity hamper your terrain-making experience. If your first few tries are kind of messy, who cares? As long as it works.
And even if you have some failures - and Phillips confesses his own share of flops - you don't need to stop. At some point, maybe you'll try something of your own and end up with a sopping wet pile of newspaper and pipe cleaners and bemoan all the time and materials you've wasted. It's okay. Even if you didn't get what you wanted out of it, it is these experiences that we learn the most from. So pipe cleaners just aren't strong enough for that? Well, maybe then you can try using them for this... Move on, keep experimenting.
After watching this video, I now feel a lot better about that pile of garbage on my floor. It actually put me in the mood to make a rag bag. Which I would do, but I don't have enough disposable time to sew a bunch of rags together by hand. One day, a sewing machine, then, the world...
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