To the Manor Born ~ 1

...and some library loot.

If you haven't already seen it, Pete Barfield (aka 'PanzerKaput') has a nice series of posts on building a fortified manor house for Lion Rampant and other medieval era games. This got me thinking about making something similar for my own collection. 

Not having a lot of storage space means I have to condense things a little. I turned for inspiration to the model railway/railroading hobby, where 'flats' and 'semi-flats' is a common method of representing buildings without having them take up large footprints on the layout. In essence the building is shown with only one full size wall, the others are truncated or suggested at.

After flipping through a few railway hobby magazines and looking up a number of YouTube videos I think I have the idea of how to go about making a manor house for the tabletop. It'll be designed to stand on one edge of the tabletop to represent a retinue's sally point.

It's early days so I'm only at the sketch stage at the moment. For construction material I'll use an off cut from a yard sign. For those not in the US these signs are made of corrugated plastic designed to have metal wickets inserted into the corrugations so they stand free in a front yard. They're generally used for yard sales, by realtors, construction contractors/builders and to show political affiliation. It's tough, durable and easily cut. I'm thinking of making the body of the wall and a base out of this stuff, with cardboard for details.

Our local library has its twice-annual books sale this week, so my wife and I scored a few goodies this morning from a well-attended event. The railroad modelling magazines are useful for tips and tricks - even if one dates to 1968! Prof. Ian Beckett's book promises to be a good read on the last Great War battle where the commanders had a chance of conducting open maneuver warfare.

More on the manor project as I find time.