The New Zealand-based Australian terrain specialist Zorpazorp is famed for his incredible gaming boards, but he’s really outdone himself with this colossal representation of the Imperial Palace on Terra for Legions Imperialis! Here he explains how he did it.
Zorpazorp: The Imperial Palace on Terra is arguably the single best-known location in all of Warhammer, and to craft an immersive gaming table inspired by the events of the Siege of Terra has long been a massive hobby bucket list item for me. I began work towards that dream last year for Horus Heresy-scale games, but with the launch of Legions Imperialis, my dream of a dual scale Siege of Terra mega-campaign was one step closer to reality.
The first phase of the build was developing a plan to tackle this board’s biggest problem. How on earth do we translate one of the biggest locations in Warhammer to a single board?
I pride myself on creating locations in a really gigantic scope, but the Imperial Palace is not something we can genuinely build in its entirety. The Emperor’s monstrous fortress is the size of a small continent! So after another big listen though of the amazing Black Library Siege of Terra audiobooks, I decided to build a super modular board that could be set up in a variety of configurations to try and capture the essence of the Palace, representing all the major moments of the conflict, from the Helios Gate right up to the Sanctum Imperialis.
Our key features are quite obviously going to be some truly epic defensive ramparts and gates worthy of the Emperor’s Praetorian, and some large city sectors – both intact and heavily destroyed – so we can showcase different parts of the palace that are still safe within the ever weakening aegis void shields, and those unfortunate zones which have felt the wrath of the Lord of Iron.
Warhammer armed me with an absolute mountain of Legions Imperialis scenery kits, including the wonderful Civitas Imperialis Buildings and Spires, the Manufactorum Imperialis, as well as the new Civitas Imperialis Ruins and City Road Tiles that launched alongside the new Legions Imperialis boxed set. However, to capture the grand scale of the Palace I knew straight away that I would be blending a whole bunch of plastic kitbashing with traditional foam carving to make a monster hobby-hybrid of polystyrene and plastic that would make Rogal Dorn giddy.
I started with a fundamental building block of many palace battlegrounds, a really big wall and gatehouse. Carving the core structures out of extruded polystyrene foam to build up the general shape, I then went down to detailing the battlements and bulwarks with plastic details from the scenery kits. This method of bulking out a structure, and then layering detail with different bits from various Warhammer sprues would become a core design philosophy throughout the build, allowing me to stretch the kits as far as possible while also giving the whole piece a unifying aesthetic.
This battlement really started to get out of hand once I started adding “massive” weapon emplacements using non-Legions Imperialis guns from just about every Imperial kit you can think of – from the humble Space Marine Razorback and various Leman Russ weapon spares, all the way up to a Warbringer Titan’s volcano cannon. For the poor epic-scale Imperial soldiers manning the walls, that must be the biggest gun they’ve ever seen!
The Legions Imperialis plastic kits all work really well together. This allowed me to be able to combine multiple kits to build even bigger structures like some of the battlement defences, as well as make large, partially ruined buildings by combining the Civitas Imperialis intact and ruined structures together.
These modular kits just added so much detail and variety to the whole build. To make the walls feel absolutely massive without making the landscape unplayable, I then built a huge trench before them. This continued the walls off my table and down to the floor, before coming back up again like a giant moat crossed by a series of bridges and walkways. This meant the height difference between the city streets outside the wall and the battlements wasn’t overly high, but the walls still looked suitably impressive.
It was important to me that playing on this gaming board didn’t feel like a normal experience, and I soon realised that a high degree of verticality was essential. Individual buildings with a bunch of accessible floors is a good start, and was super-achievable with the modular scenery kits, but I needed the landscape itself to immerse the gamers within the height of this mammoth fortification.To achieve that sense of depth, I created three separate levels of playable area – the large city sectors beyond the walls, the upper city which continues into a dense urban environment at the height of the battlements, and then the undercity down below, a series of gangways and passages that would see some fierce battles. These were all interconnected with a series of elevator access points for some wonderful objective-oriented gameplay.
The road tiles were a fundamental component of these battle zones, getting chopped up and mixed and matched to create the foundation of all three levels of the battlefield. They worked really well when integrated with the plastic kits and added a little bit of extra detail to the foam-carved foundations.
After a fierce painting session – and adding a bunch of extra rubble and detritus – our first sectors of the Imperial Palace are ready for battle! You can see how this board can already create a bunch of varied gaming landscapes to depict battles from the Siege of Terra, and as the project continues to grow this massive wargaming landscape is only going to get bigger. Up next will be even more massive walls, even bigger guns, and of course some truly monstrous armies to do battle across the war-torn surface of Terra.
Thanks for this, Zorpazorp – it truly is incredible work. If this project has inspired you to make your own Legions Imperialis gaming board, let us know on Facebook and Twitter!