Real-world inspiration

Some inspiration for building and painting industrial terrain for Shadow War Armageddon or the Industrial Sector of the 40k Adeptus Mechanicus »

When you are building your tabletop castle you may get carried away with all the alcoves, plasterwork, gargoyles and other medieval gubbinz. Real castles were often way much simpler than that. »

Horses show a large variety of coat colours, much like human hair. Note however that in contrast to hominids they can have contrasting points of different colour: mane, tail and lower legs ("socks") »

A lot of fantasy and dark SF models and buildings are decorated with parchments covered in blackletter, Gothic script. Is this something rooted in real medieval art? Oh yes! But please use the real historical "fonts" and not a contemporary wedding invitation blasphemy »

"Chillon! thy prison is a holy place, / And thy sad floor an altar" wrote Lord Byron, the father of the Romantic movement (and also the father of the first programmer Ada Lovelace). Whenever you crawl a dungeon in Descent, Dungeons&Dragons or Baldur's Gate, you are retracing the 1816 poet's visit to Château de Chillon on Lake Geneva. »

Fantasy depictions of huge castles usually show gargantuan white walls reaching the skies. Let's have a walk through a real, monstrous castle that never fell to a siege and see what was practical in castle construction »

The 2005/8 Chronicles of Narnia movies? rocky hills were shot in real world Sudety mountains on the Poland-Czechia border. That?s understandable as the rocks there are uncannily shaped and surrounded by mystery as subjects of pagan rituals in ancient times, precious stones and gold mining in the middle ages and as secret uranium mines of the Third Reich more recently. »

An issue pops up from time to time how tall should your trees be in a wargame. It matters gravely for abstract line of sight rulesets but is also important when choosing model trees for your true line of sight game »

Peter Jackson's crew made a great work portraying the Mines of Moria in their movies. If you want to see something eerie similar in real life, you can visit one of the original 12 Unesco World Heritage Sites, namely the Wieliczka salt mine near Krakow, Poland »

Folks at Games Workshop love to put skulls all over anything. We in Central Europe understand their liking. It comes from an ancient Christian invocation: Terminus nulli cedo - The end (Death) bows to no one »