Frostgrave Stairs

 Its been ten years since I have made any terrain out of styrofoam so it was a bit of a learning curve to make these stairs for Frostgrave games. My friend and I have found that having stairs would help models move on top of buildings as it movement intensive. Plus a lot of gameboards seen online, and with official Frostgrave terrain, show ladders/stairs/ramps.

So here are the six sets of stairs I made, with a Mr Freeze miniature (unpainted) from the Batman Miniature game because it was what I had readily available.

Part of the inspiration came, courtesy of a link from a friend, from this youtube video by BlackMagicCraft. 

I started with blue foam, from a hardware store, sliced up with a regular hotwire.

I then measured out steps to climb three inches of height with steps big enough for 30/40/50mm bases. I could have made it more realistic looking but that would sacrifice allowing models of all bases being stable on the stairs. 

To rough them up, I used the method in the above youtube video and got a coffee tin with rocks and shook them up with one styrofoam stairs inside. It was INCREDIBLY loud but I had ear protection. Unfortunately the rocks I used were chalky so I had to wash the styrofoam afterwards. I was not completly happy with the weathering marks on the foam so I used a rolled up ball of aluminum foil and that did they trick. In the future I will use river rocks in the tumbler as they will resist breaking up and create better indents.

This was the result of the stones and aluminum foil. They were then glued using craft glue to sheets of plasitcard I had cut to better stabilize the stairs on the table. The pink styrofoam terrain will be shown in a future post.

I also made a mix of small rocks, craft glue, and dollarstore paint and applied it on various pars of the terrain. This gave rough rubble areas.

After that I painted the stairs and base with black Temera, that I had lying around. It didn't quite cover the blue so I used some black dollar store paint. Unfortunately it was kids window paint and when I started drybrushing grey, the dollarstore kids window paint started to come off and blend into the grey. I had to cover the model with regular dollarstore paint. Then I heavily drybrushed the stairs dark grey then drybrushed it grey. The ground around to was painted dark brown. I then used snow effect powder with craft glue to finish the terrain. I can use these stairs for other games as well, but because they were easy to make I will make more generic ones without snow.

One final note. I used my older snow effect, from GF9, but after a night drying it mostly disappeared. I then picked up some Army Pinter Battlefield Snow and that gave the effect in the picture above. The second snow expanded with the glue where the GF9 one did not. I will still try to find a use for the GF9 product at some point.