In addition to multiple large platforms up in the trees, The Wild Sheep Chase features a few small buildings where some NPCs dwell, along with an outhouse… so I decided to build those as well. The occupants of these buildings are servants of a person whose concern for their well-being is probably based mostly around making their lives just good enough that they don’t leave for another job, so while these structures wouldn’t fall fully into the “ramshackle” classification, they’re not high-end buildings either. They also haven’t been maintained well in a while.
Load-bearing Foamcore?
I decided to make the structures primarily from dollar-store foam supplemented with some XPS and cardboard. The first step was to cut out some walls. I also made a pair of chimneys out of XPS because even those servants need to keep warm in the winter. (The loose rectangles in the photo below are for a different part of the TWSC build – I just cut them at the same time as these.)
I cut out a door for one wall of each building, then began adding texture to everything with a pencil. I hand-drew in bricks for the chimneys, and for most of the walls I used a ruler to draw in the outlines of wooden boards and a nail to poke in some nail holes. In a few places I made some narrower slats by dragging a metal comb-like thing (sold at hardware stores as some kind of brush cleaner) across the foam surface. It worked well enough that I’m considering buying a second one and trying to snip off every other tine so it can be used to quickly draw in wider boards.
I made the boards in the doors vertical so they’d stand out more when re-integrated into the structure. Then I glued on some thin slivers of scrap XPS as hinges and little rings as door pulls. I cut a small hole in the outhouse door – you need a little ventilation in there, after all! – and wrapped a thin XPS sliver around a toothpick to be hung on the front as a curtain.
Now it was time to glue it all together. I used white glue, but stuck pins in everything to hold it together as it dried. The doors were glued back into the walls they’d been cut from as well.
Ceiliiings, Whoaoaooo, Ceiliiings – !
For the roof of the outhouse I decided a sheet of corrugated metal would look good, even though I have no idea if corrugated metal would have existed in a D&D-tech world. Some corrugated cardboard with the top layer peeled off made a good outhouse topper.
For the sleeping quarters buildings, I decided to glue on chipboard as structural supports and try out the shingle method described in this video.
Because of how thin the shingle pieces need to be cut, this method would be really difficult without a hot wire table. Not impossible for those with a very sharp knife and very steady hands, but I wouldn’t want to try it.
I cut a few 1/2″ strips of XPS and used the wire to cut varying shingle shapes into them. From there, I repeated a process of dragging a wire brush across them for texture, then milling off the top 1/”8 inch or so to serve as a row of shingles. Then I would texture the newly exposed surface and mill it off again, keeping this up until there was an adequate pile of shingle strips. I also cut a thin strip without the shingle shapes, which I would cut into squares to layer onto one another at the apex of the roof.
With some patience and some tacky glue, I worked from the bottom up to apply my shingles. The only place I used hot glue was at the very top of each structure to quickly grip the bent squares which wanted to pull away from white glue before it set well enough to hold them.
House Painting
Painting started of course with the ubiquitous black-and-mod-podge layer. Although, technically, it wasn’t really mod-podge this time. Luke over at Luke’s APS makes his own mod-podge-alike using a clear varnish (that’s not available in the US as far as I can tell) mixed with a thick industrial PVA glue. My black-and-podge bottle needed refreshing, so I decided to experiment something home-made.
I poured some Varathane brand clear matte liquid into my black-podge bottle along with the remains of my “real” coating, then added in a very roughly equal amount of PVA from my big gallon jug of Elmer’s. Squirt in some black paint, screw on the lid, and shake.
Luke had to add water to his because his ingredients were a little thicker and sort of pasty. Mine were thin enough that I didn’t see the need. As I started to apply the new mix to a couple of test pieces of XPS, I found that it covered better than my previous mix, but I think maybe it dries just slightly softer in terms of stiffening the foam it’s applied to. It’s likely this is more attributable to ratios created by my extremely unscientific “squirt stuff in until it looks like enough” mixing methods than it is to any shortcoming in the materials I used.
After coating the whole structures with my home-made mix and letting it dry, I painted all the walls brown with a dry-brush of tan. The corrugated metal was coated in a metallic gray, the shingles in red, and the chimneys in gray. I added a few off-colored bricks to the chimneys and a wrought-iron color to the door hinges and pulls.
A black wash over the whole set helped to mute the brightness of the red and bring out the textures, and a spray of clear matte coating finished them off.
With all the major structures taken care of, there were only a few odds and ends left to tackle on this project.