Homegrown Jungle

There are a lot of options out there for terrain. You can buy completed trees, tree kits, or totally detailed and finished sections of wild terrain. All of these are good, but there is something to be said for getting your hands messy making your own.

When I needed jungle terrain for my Pulp adventure games, I decided that I wanted to make some of my own. I started by collecting a number of pieces of natural material, having my kids go into the woods near my home to collect interesting looking sticks and rocks. When they had collected enough of them, I put them aside until I could gather the rest of my stuff.

Prowling the local craft superstore, Michaels in my area, I found a number of nice bits in their flower arrangement and garlands selections. What I found are some garlands that resembled green bamboo as well as another that had some leavy foliage on it. There were also a more ridged piece that looked like some sort of evergreen branch with removable sprigs of foliage which in 28mm scale resemble ferns or small fronds.

I started by cutting some randomly oblong shapes out of scrap cardboard (pizza boxes are your friends). Once I had a number of these cut out, I looked at what I had in the way of rocks and sticks and found those that looked the part of tree trunks, deadfalls, and boulders in 28mm scale. These I then arranged on the cardboard into what seemed like natural arrangements. In some cases I positioned the sticks upright to represent large trees. As these are terrain markers and I want to be able to move figures freely around them, I didn't worry about having tree tops (the canopy is WAY up there). Around these, I hot glued some of the length of bamboo-like foliage.



Next time we'll look at fleshing out the terrain with some of the other plastic foliage pieces. Adding ferns and broader leafy greens and such adds to the layering and makes the terrain seem more jungle-like.

Thanks for reading,

-Eli