Terrain - craft shop style

Greetings all,

I have a new appreciation of craft/manchester/sewing shops (Spotlight,
Lincraft, et al - don't know what Yanks and Brits would have).

I have been wandering around these shops with my fiancee every now and
again, checking them out for possible terrain/other stuff for gaming.

They have various shaped hard carboard boxes, for use with decoupage
(sp?) -
basically, for gluing paper to or painting to make pretty present boxes.

Some of these boxes come in the shape of _houses_.

BING! went the lightbulb. Suitably painted and decorated, these boxes
would
make perfect buildings. Also, since the top (roof) is removable, figures
could go INSIDE - which means that games could be played with fighting
going
from room to room inside the one building!

I kicked myself for never having realised this before. Then I looked at
all
the other boxes, and realised most of them could be used for various
sci-fi
type buildings - all shapes and sizes, round, square, hex, long and
thin.
Then I also realised that if you put one box atop another, you had a
MULTI-STOREY building - with each level removable.

I heartily recommend people interested in cheap buildings check these
out. I
paid A$5 for a small building (lengthwise, about the size of my hand -
in
25mm, would make a back yard shed or a hovel). Painted, decorated, I'm
sure
it'll come out nice - so far so good, anyway. When its completed I'll
put
pics up on USG2WS. And since it's cardboard, it's cuttable - cut open
doors
and windows if you want, cut whole ends off in a rough way to make blown
away walls. Insert internal walls to break up rooms. Cut away the roof
for a
skylight or to insert a loft/attic.

Of course they wouldn't stand up against purpose cast resin buildings,
but
for people interested in quick, cheap terrain that actually allows
room-to-room and floor-to-floor fighting, I'd definitely recommend
checking
these out.

Also, I've now removed the remote control from the Trade Federation tank
that I picked up yesterday. The wheels are gone too, so it wont roll. I
now
have a nice hover tank. Sure it's recognisable... but does that really
matter? :)
---
Jeremy Sadler - jsadler@earthling.net
Unofficial Stargrunt II Web Site - http://stargrunt.virtualave.net