Part 3 of Small Table Fantasy Battles: Terrain!
Battlefield
One of the things that make a battlefield amazing is the usage of terrain features. These can drastically change an engagement from a pitched battle over a field or plains to an ambush in the forest or a mountain pass.
In this way the terrain can change the narrative of a battle and (if the setting is agreed beforehand) influence the army composition of the player.
Most tournaments stay away from generating a variety of terrain setups simply because that can cause severe advantage or disadvantage to any of the two (or more) players that are occupying the table.
So, they usually stick to either pre-determined tables that are drafted by the judges before the matches (this is probably the 99% case for tournament games) or have a system in place that allows the players to generate said terrain by themselves (this option is mostly for the people playing at home, not in competitive settings).
Small shameless plug
And by the way, if you have not seen some of our terrain guides, check them out here. They are amazing:
What makes a good battle board?
One of the things that I noticed makes a good battle board is the presence of terrain feature but in such a way that they don’t close up big areas of land, forcing any player to lose time going around them for several turns, but just shaping the “lanes” so to speak of engagement.
Also, there should always (in my mind and preference) be place between terrain features to have at least 2 regiments march shoulder to shoulder. It just looks good not to have narrow passes all over the place, transforming the field into basically heaven for the most armored units, not allowing fast and nimble ones to go around the flanks.
Terrain Size
We’ve all been through old Warhammer games where for example a forest could have been as small as 3 and as big as 7 or 10 inches. Whenever I played my wood elf opponent, I would get 10-inch forests blocking the middle of the table and then he would pop a few more around it (special wood elf terrain rules) so that there’s nobody passing through and he could shoot me from the cover of said trees.
To that end, I want to make sure that no terrain features are closer then 10cm from one another. The exact 10cm figure comes from the fact that it basically allows 2 regiments to fit comfortably in the gap.
Another thing to consider would be the size of the terrain features. Obviously, you would want anything you put on the table to look big enough without being cumbersome. Initially I thought about doing a blanket approach and declaring terrain sizes as being 10x10cm, but there should be some leeway in there especially since we already declared that terrain can be placed only 10cm apart from one another.
So, I think terrain should be different sizes depending on the type. A forest might be more elongated, the same as a lake.
Conclusion?
Terrain sizes can vary, but a piece of terrain must be at least 10 x 10 cm and at most 10 x 20 cm. This allows for some leeway in the shapes and sizes that players have available and ensures the minimum terrain deployed is not a lone tree (I had it happen to me before).
Terrain Types
Certain terrain features can be passed through without any impediment, while some are realistically more difficult to navigate. Going up a hill should be no issue to any unit, and it’s treated as OPEN terrain. A Forest is DIFFICULT terrain for most units (except Skirmishers and/or special forester troops) and finally, a wizard tower is IMPASSABLE for everyone, as the wizard thankfully locked the door and windows so nobody can get in.
I’m not a fan of the magical properties terrain as I’d like to keep it simple enough however I do believe these 3 categories of terrain have to be represented in the terrain generator table.
Actual Terrain Generation
Keeping in line with the Warhammer experience, we split the battlefield in 6 parts, with the sides being a bit smaller than the center, to ensure that no one can block the middle lane easily with a big terrain feature.
Given the size is 80 x 48 cm, we could say that we can split this into 25 x 30 x 25 cm on length and 24 x 24 on width. This way we will have 6 main tiles for the battlefield (3 by 2 split).
Here is a draft terrain list where we indicate the features that we can roll on a simple D6:
1 – Lake – A small body of water – Impassible Terrain
2 – Building – A large and tall building (barracks, tower, castle, inn, farm) – Impassible Terrain
3 – Short Wall – A short height wooden palisade or stone wall – Difficult Terrain, provides cover to units in contact with it (both ranged and melee).
4 – Forest – A medium height light wooded forest – Difficult Terrain. Impedes visibility to units that are in the forest (not on the edge).
5 – Swamp – A smelly swamp – Difficult Terrain. Does not impede visibility, just movement.
6 – Hill – A medium height hill with lean slopes – Open Terrain. Provides visibility to any unit in LoS
While drafting the list I was immediately reminded that Hills provide shooting advantages to any unit on them, and I wanted to make sure I noted this advantage down. However, I also wanted to make sure that units on a hill cannot shoot units that are behind a forest or building, so I added height indicators to the features that do have implications on shooting.
Obviously, you can shoot at units behind a short wall. They will get cover though. You can’t shoot units that are behind a forest, hill, or building, even if you are situated on a hill yourself.
The lake and the swamp pose no issues to ranged attacks, as they don’t block Line of Sight. This is nice as it gives us some terrain features that allow for some tactical flexibility, like parking your archers behind the swamp, in a sort of Agincourt.
Each player rolls 3 D6 and checks the Terrain chart to see what features he can add (Duplicates and even Triplicates between the two players are ok)
Terrain allocation
So how do players deploy terrain after each has rolled 3 pieces of terrain?
Players roll a D6 each and the winner decides if he wants to place the first piece of terrain. After the first player has deployed a terrain piece in one of the 6 areas of the battlefield the second player may choose a different area to place one of his terrain pieces. This continues until all 6 areas have 1 terrain piece. Keep in mind terrain cannot be deployed closer to 10cm then another terrain piece.
And voila, we have terrain generation in a nutshell, adapted to our Small Table Fantasy Battles approach.
What have we achieved today?
Terrain Generation rules with 6 easy to represent terrain features that also have height rules.
Terrain Type rules with 3 types of terrain that has impact on movement.
If you want to read about Battlefield Size, Army Point Cost and Unit basing, go HERE
If you want to know how it all started, go HERE
Thanks and see you next time when we’re definitely going to have a stab at movement rules for the awesome Small Table Fantasy Battles! 🙂
By the way, my Small Table and Battlemat have arrived, so here’s me doing a small Panther versus Sherman Flames of War V4 action with the kid (who is ecstatic to be demolishing me with his accurate long 7.5cm guns).
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