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View Full Version : Where do I get a quality cardstock fantasy town?



ericgrau
2016-07-04, 11:09 AM
I remember a long time ago I found a good online store with all kinds of color cardstock town pieces. Anybody know where I can find that now? I'm still googling around and maybe I'll find it soon, but maybe someone else knows off the top of their head.

I'm more worried about time than cost. I just want a large set of nice color buildings that I can slap together into town features. I've been going through Drive Thru RPG and so far I'm hitting a giant PDF with a black and white town on the cheap. And a few individual buildings here and there. Are rpg players mostly poor below minimum wage hobos who will spend hours assembling assembling black and white buildings but won't pay for color ink?

A place with a variety of color buildings organized and browsable together online would be nice. Or a single large color multi-building package. I can print them or can be pre-printed, makes no difference. Doesn't need to be super detailed; in fact throwing together boxy buildings might be faster and better. Main thing is to get all the buildings I need at once, assemble them and be done with it. Again I don't have time to deal with doing a search for each individual building or other nonsense.

I don't mind paying for prebuilt and plastic buildings too, as long as I don't have to spend hours painting anything. And as long as the costs of dozens of buildings isn't too ridiculous.

Thanks in advance for any links.

EDIT: Found this at Drive Thru RPG. Which is the sort of thing I'm looking for, a color multi-set:
http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/132410/RAVENFELL-Core-Set?hot60=1&src=hottest_filtered&filters=0_2220_0_0_0

But it's only 8 buildings and more is always appreciated.

snowblizz
2016-07-04, 11:44 AM
I'd suggest checking out "Sally 4th" and "4ground". They make lasercut MDF stuff, various historical and fantasy buildings in many scales. Others do them as well. But I don't have my miniature gaming magazine with all the adverts here. If you have more money than time you can get resin houses, fairly expensive I think at something like 40-50 £ a pop or thereabouts.

Depending on what you were looking for you might have searching for the Chainmail buildings, they produced pdfs of stuff, we have those somewher and made terrain for our Warhammer games with those.

Games Workshop a long tiem ago did a book, something like Fantastic Villages or Townscapes, or some such, was a book with building templates, cut out, fold and glue. Though this day and age, you'd scan, print, cut and glue them. Not in the least since the material itself is at least 20 years old.

ericgrau
2016-07-04, 01:41 PM
I really like the 4ground stuff except that it is based in the UK and the site has a 1-10 day handling time. How long is the shipping?

snowblizz
2016-07-04, 03:06 PM
Sorry, no, no idea. But they more than likely use Royal Mail which is reasonably fast. I got stuff sent from England to Finland in 2 days once, but YMMV. Your own countries postal system is responsible for at least half the trip though, probably more so again YMMV.

Keep in mind pound sterling is at an all time low, so stuff from the UK is relatively speaking much cheaper atm. At least until someone adjusts prices:smallbiggrin:. Not everyone does.

Worth checking local game stores. Stores closer to you may stock some items.

ericgrau
2016-07-04, 09:58 PM
Looking at the site some more it seems like the MDF panels involve just as much assembly time as cardstock, maybe more. Do I need to cut the pieces out of the MDF too? Know anything quicker or that doesn't need assembly?

snowblizz
2016-07-05, 12:24 PM
It shouldn't require you to actually cut something out. They way I understood it you need to fit it together, some dabs of glue and it should be good to go.
Essentially like a 3d puzzle.

ericgrau
2016-07-06, 09:43 PM
Maybe I'll try out a couple and time how long they take to put together vs the cardstock. Not printing and cutting out weird shapes plus notches to line it up might save some time.

ngilop
2016-07-06, 09:59 PM
Have you tried This site (http://www.wargamevault.com/product/16716/VyllageontheCheep-COLOR-Buildings-Set-1?src=also_purchased&it=1)?

Its not so much that I'm a poor worthless hobo, as it is I have more important thing to pend my money on rather than color village sets. Would prefer to get the black and white, color them myself. and use that money to pay bills, feed my cat, or go hang out with friends, or buy my homeless sister a bed to sleep on with the last of my income.

NOTE: my sister is living with me now and she was on my old, and very uncomfortable, couch.

ericgrau
2016-07-09, 05:59 AM
Oh they have color too. Cool. I may take a look at that one next.

With the assembly/paint time of some methods, I think the time could be better spent on a minimum wage job, then the money spent on something premade, sturdier and better looking. Which is what confounds me so much. Is cheapness some sort of religion, or is the unemployment rate high among rpg players?

So far I'm settling on color cardstock PDFs and assembling them with tape rather than glue tabs to save time. I may order 1 or 2 MDF buildings and time myself assembling it for comparison.

snowblizz
2016-07-09, 03:34 PM
With the assembly/paint time of some methods, I think the time could be better spent on a minimum wage job, then the money spent on something premade, sturdier and better looking. Which is what confounds me so much. Is cheapness some sort of religion, or is the unemployment rate high among rpg players?

It's a classic case of what we call being "stupid cheap", trying to save money but end up paying more, I'd say. But there's a strong "did it myself" mentality in these kinds of hobbies, recognize it from miniature wargaming too.

Now, it's not an entirely unreasonable stance, can't always easily convert time into money after all.

ericgrau
2016-07-10, 02:12 PM
Cardstock worked well, but next time I'll make extra and taped it to the 2D base tiles to make one solid 3D map to make things less messy and scattered. The PCs were moving so far through town that would have been difficult this time, but I mean for future more stationary fights.

I cut buildings to 1.6" high (8' scaled) so you can still see normal looking walls that don't really obscure the 1.2" high minis. Little trick I experimented with a long time ago as I found 2" walls (10' scaled) make 1.2" minis hard to see. When we need to see a roof I drop in a fully assembled building. If the cutaway is taped to the base in the future I suppose I'll just force the building inside the cutaway.

Kami2awa
2016-07-29, 01:42 AM
http://www.talkwargaming.com/2014/04/top-10-free-papercraft-terrain-sites.html

This may be of help. I've used card buildings in the past, and it's a simple matter of print out, glue to thin card (which can be bought at places like Wilkinson hardware shop for very little, or even cannibalised from cereal packets) with glue stick, cut out and assemble. Assembly usually only takes about 20 minutes. Superglue is good for holding the things together as paper glue is not terribly strong.

Outlay for this would be the cost of printer ink + a few pounds for paper, card and glue (I'm guessing you have a printer to start with ;) ).

WotC used to have some great paper models; however, the site is no longer online. Anyone know a way to access it?

Edit: You can access WotC models here: http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/fpm/archive

kraftcheese
2016-07-29, 08:40 AM
Have you tried This site (http://www.wargamevault.com/product/16716/VyllageontheCheep-COLOR-Buildings-Set-1?src=also_purchased&it=1)?

Its not so much that I'm a poor worthless hobo, as it is I have more important thing to pend my money on rather than color village sets. Would prefer to get the black and white, color them myself. and use that money to pay bills, feed my cat, or go hang out with friends, or buy my homeless sister a bed to sleep on with the last of my income.

NOTE: my sister is living with me now and she was on my old, and very uncomfortable, couch.

Exactly, we don't all have the amount of disposable income necessary to buy something we might not end up using enough to really warrant the price; I mean I don't know how a normal person can afford to get in Warhammer tabletop, for example.