The Importance of Size

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So you’ve had a great idea for area terrain; a typical green forest, valley of rocks, cluster of crystals or maybe some ruins. No matter what you are making, there is a simple rule you can follow to make it look exponentially better. Make your stuff in different sizes. This keeps your area terrain visually interesting without much effort on your part.

As a general rule, we make our area terrain have at least three different sized pieces we can use.  There are a handful of reasons for this. The first is obvious; it just looks better. It gives your terrain more variety in a dead simple way. Just mix a few small plants in with your large trees; your forest will start to look believable.

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But why three sizes? Why not two, or four? By targeting at least three different sizes for our sets, we find that our terrain becomes much more flexible. Any more than that is nice, but it is a diminished return. This is because the small, medium and large sizes we use target some sweet spots. We can mix them together to make nice looking terrain, and we can split them up for different effects in a pinch.

The small pieces should ideally hug the ground. They might have very little, or no impact on the game. They are there to make your terrain look dense, while keeping it easy to place your models. Sometimes, we even take these pieces out of our area terrain just to break up large empty spaces on the table.

Medium sized pieces should give your infantry easy cover, and could even serve as ‘lighter’ cover than the large pieces. They might be able to give a bit of cover to a tank, but never block line of sight to it.

The large pieces should be able to easily cover a tank. They often, but not always, give a ‘harder’ save than the medium sized pieces.