WARGAMING INSIDE BUILDINGS

Most of Lovecraftian stories involve an abandoned house, a crypt, an old church...

To play Fear of the Dark scenarios I always wanted to play inside buildings: Haunted houses, crypts, museums, dark dungeons, old libraries... And I wanted to take those places to Fear of the Dark scenarios.  

Most of the wargames we play (no matter if scifi, ww2, fantasy, pulp...) take place in an outdoor area: a town attacked by the enemy, a Harbour that is sieged, an ambush in a crossroad... 

That's why, when dealing with Fear of the Dark, I started to think on how to move those wargames inside of houses and buildings. 

I had many available options, but they usually were expensive or occupy a lot of room at home, and I needed it to be cheap and easily storable, and I think I have found a solution that works for me.

Making folding cardboard houses to be easier to store was quite simple, the problem comes when you want to play inside those houses and you want it also to be foldable or easily storable.

I declare myself an unconditional fan of papercraft terrain for many reasons: price, accessibility, possibilities and soooooo easy to store (I already made a post on foldable papercraft terrain that you can read clicking HERE). 

After testing several systems I found the Battlesystem one, the same modular wall and floor system that I used in a Weird ww2 scenario based on an allied raid on a nazi bunker. 

They are hard, really high quality and are storable in very little space ... in short, they are very good for our purposes.

They only have one problem... although they are not really expensive they are not really cheap.

One of the basics that motivates me in the world of wargames is to do everything as cheap as possible because cheap means accessible to anyone... And maybe not everyone can afford to spend 90€ on modular walls and floors to fill 90x90 cms...

So starting from the modular system of battlesystem I decided to do something similar from a cardboard set of worldworks games (quite cheap on their online store).

After a few hours working with Photoshop I managed to emulate the modular system of battlesystem but using floor, walls and doors taken from the papercraft terrain of worldworks games.

To fit these walls together, I took pieces of foam cardboard (10 millimeter thick) to make bases and connectors between the different parts of the houses.

So I printed the walls, floors and doors and windows on cardboard of 200 grams at a cost of approximately 8€, and I also printed a few pieces of furniture to decorate the houses also on the same cardboard.

And finally, after a few hours of cutting, gluing and mounting this is the result ...

This is the result...

Nice looking, right? and as always, low cost...

And most important, disassembled takes up very little storage space, most of the above takes just this small space:

Another good option was done by Room17 with their tenfold dungeon system (if you want a review, click HERE to see a review by Beasts of War).

The idea of tenfold dungeon is to have several "boxes" of different sizes to represent rooms or houses with their interiors, and once you have finished playing you can fit them one inside the others, so that they are stored taking no room at all.

It would be nice to make some designs of 20's house rooms with this system that could be arranged as you like to play with them... Maybe I'll try in a future to do something like that, but I would do some roofs that could be removed to play inside. 

Last option that I see (and the cheapest one) is to use 2D maps, they are not so inmmersive as 3D terrain, but they are affordable and really easy to store. 

We can use Mansions of Madness tiles (if we have them), and there are a lot of 2D maps for free on the internet used for role-playing games. 

I have used 2D maps from Heroic Maps to represent the inside of an egyptian tomb in a pulp game and the result is really good (cheap, highly detailed and easy to store). 

And this is it... 

What's your opinion? 

Which choice do you prefer? 

Do you know other options? 

And as I want this subject to move forward, and I want YOU to start working on this, so... next free  scenario that I'll be making will be played inside a house and it's surroundings, and you'll need a house with at least 4 rooms.