The beginning of a new ork town for the battlefields of the Corvus Cluster. Click on image for larger photo.

TheGM: I’ve fought against The Gaffer’s orks for years, but I never got around to building ork terrain—the fighting always involved the greenskins attacking through Imperial ruins.

But, as I started my ork kopta army, I decided I wanted to build a handful of ork buildings. Not just any ork buildings, though, but greenskin edifices  with a vintage 40K look—the kind you find in photos in White Dwarf magazines  of the 1990s and early 2000s.

My buildings were a spontaneous and quick project, and I forgot to take photographs of the process. But no matter. The techniques are well known to you. I’ll just share a few thoughts of my own.

The building walls were built from foam board that you find at any dollar or office supply store. I cut out some windows with an X-acto knife, glued the walls to create four walls, and added all kinds of cardboard, balsa, wood, and plastic bitz that I had lying around. The roofs were cut from thin MDF board.

I spray-painted the buildings a tan color, then painted the details with a brush, using a variety of colors to brighten the buildings. Orks love their colors, after all.

Mekboy Workshop #1

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In this photo, you can see the tan undercoat, later darkened with a black wash. This monotone base color was brightened by all the planking, embossed plastic, and bitz with which I covered the walls—to give it a properly ramshackle look. Bright colors added to the xeno chaos.

I wanted two floors, with a lot of open space on the upper level (properly protected by barricaded guardrails), so the orks have plenty of room to shoot down at any attackers. As it happens, the second floor can be removed and used as an entirely separate building.

Small building

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Not much to say about this building. It’s just an extra piece of terrain with an orkish theme. It was built using the same basic techniques I just described, but I had fun cutting the skull out of cardboard with a X-acto knife and adding a computerized door using Hirst Arts molds.

Mekboy Workshop #2

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This was the first building I worked on. I had an old Tau Devilfish with too many pieces missing, so I used it as a bridge between the two buildings of the workshop.

There’s plenty of room on the two roofs for orks with guns to blaze away, and I enjoyed adding small chains to make handrails for “safety,” as if the term means anything to a greenskin.

This was a fun little project. I’ve used the terrain already in one small skirmish game and, given that the orks are fighting Tyranids in the former ork empire of Maxilla (the eastern edge of the Corvus Cluster), I may need to add a few more structures so I can lure The Gaffer into testing his ork host against my growing Tyranid army.

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The Corvus Cluster is a Warhammer 40K blog documenting our gaming adventures in the fantastical sci-fi universe of Games Workshop.