Hello everyone,
I have been playing this game for 2 years now. Started back in August 2017. I wanted to tell my story of how I ended up going from playing on paper maps to very detailed 3D terrain and how I adjusted the game to fit the new terrain.

Here is the link to all my past Star Wars 3D terrain: https://imgur.com/gallery/37vd5Eo

I started off using the paper mats and actually collected every single official map ever made and laminated all of them. Then even got custom ones made and laminated those too. Eventually I started to want more out of the maps and saw some images online of some people's custom 3D terrain they had made for the game and wanted to go that route.

So after looking online for some good Sci-Fi terrain I came across this company called Battle Systems in the UK who sold Sci-Fi modular heavy card stock terrain. I bought 4 sets of it and loved how easy it was to incorporate into Star Wars Miniatures. It was the perfect scale and looked good next to the miniatures.

I soon moved away from paper maps and started making my own battle fields using this new 3D terrain. My group of friends that I play the game with almost every week were excited about the new change as it looked awesome and changed things up. I started making buildings with high elevations with ladders and elevators that could go to roof tops for characters to be able to shoot down at other characters.

Of course one clear issue was how to determine line of sight. That's when I came up with the idea of using small laser pointers. The rule is that the character attacking must have the small laser pointer be adjacent to them and then from there you must aim the laser pointer to see if the red dot could hit any part of a target while keeping your laser pointer adjacent to the shooter. This way we could figure out if someone could truly see someone else from a high elevated area. This soon became my group's way of determine line of sight for anything at any angle and it is still used to this day.

How we determine cover is if any part of the target is blocked by something and the red dot on the laser pointer can't see it but can still see some part of the character then that target gets the cover bonus. There have been some debates over time about things like only being able to see a foot or hand of a character and if that qualifies as being able to shot them or if hey should still get cover if only something small is covered like a single foot or hand etc. I am currently working on developing a new rule for light cover and regular cover to fix this issue but that doesn't have anything to do with the story right now so I will skip it.

We first started playing with this new Battle Systems terrain in mid October 2017 and kept on using it all the way until the end of May 2019. All that time between then I changed terrain layouts every time we got together to play. There was almost never a setting repeated multiple times. It was a new layout each week we played. I would always arrive at my local store an hour early just to set up as putting the card stock terrain together was a lot of work. I always came up with the new layouts on the spot and almost never referenced anything, I just built randomly until I was finished. I did always try my best to keep it fair and never made any one side have a better position than the other but sometimes that did happen or it was rare and it could not be helped as I was no master at making fair terrain layouts, I just made what I thought would look cool. Unfortunately I am not much of a picture guy so I only ever got a few pictures of my terrain layouts and some I just never took pictures of because I either forgot to or did not feel like doing so. But I did always take a picture of my best works so what I do have pictures of are my most proudest layouts and creations.



Now to move on to the present. After having used the Battle Systems terrain for a long time I started to get board of it and also I always felt annoyed that it just didn't look Star Wars enough for me personally. Around this time the new Star Wars Legion game was being announced and cool new Star Wars looking terrain was being made for it and shown with it. This really got me wanting to make something more like that and replace my old terrain with something like that.

I looked into getting Tatooine huts 3D printed for me but did not find any that I liked enough or thought were goo enough to use. They either just did not have enough detail or lacked the ability to either remove the roof and or have a sliding or removable door. I wanted my terrain to be the best and be perfect and match the movies and none of the ones I saw I recognized specifically from any shot in any of the movies. After looking around I could not find any Tatoonie terrain I was happy with and stopped my search for a while.

I then decided I would make my own terrain of the simplest planet of them all, Endor. So I looked online for 3D printable trees and found some and got those 3D printed and painted for me by someone on Etsy. Then I bought a bunker, shield generator, and landing platform from different sites that were selling model kits of those for Legion but I would be using them for Star Wars Miniatures. Once those arrived and I had finished assembling them I handed them over to a local painter since I do not like painting and am no good at it and had no tools for it or the time to do it. I then bought some extra trees from another site that had the option to attached actual tree branches with preserved leaves onto them to give them a realistic look and smell. I also bought plastic grass to make into bushes for my Endor terrain and once the local painter was done with my stuff I finally retired my old Battle Systems terrain for the new Endor map. Since I got all this inspiration from Legion I also thought that I would increase the size of the map to war-gaming standards and bought a custom 6 feet by 4 feet forest map with a custom thin 1 inch square grids printed onto it. All of this together made for one new epic Endor map that I introduced to my gaming group in late May 2019.

Here are some images of the Endor terrain on its first day set up: https://imgur.com/gallery/xzNWY5E

During all of this I was also looking for a Jabba Sail Barge toy that I could potentially use with my star wars miniatures and found a custom star wars toy designer named David who use to make custom Jabba Sail Barges for 6 inch figures and asked him if he could make me a Sail Barge but scale it down for Star Wars Miniatures. He agreed to the project and was excited to work on it as he had never done anything like it before. After a few months he finished it and it came out looking amazing. He made it just how I wanted and made a playable interior as well that could be closed from the outside. There is also a stairway inside that allowed for miniatures to be able to go between the top and bottom. The coolest thing is he made it all from scratch and I am the only one in the world with a Sail barge like this.

Here are some images of the Sail Barge with my miniatures on it: https://imgur.com/gallery/U8omTKy

I was so impressed with his work and saw that he also made some scenery for 6 inch figures like a huge playable Death Star interior for 6 inch figures and other things like that. It was here that I realized he could make my more complex star wars terrain projects that I could not do. So I asked him and he was happy to work on them for me and work closely to make sure they came out as perfect and detailed as I wanted them to be. So I commissioned him for 9 planetary scaled maps, basically booking him for almost a year of work. He told me each set would take about 2 months or so to create.

While I was working all this out and having worked closesly with him on his first terrain map, I was also looking into how I could improve my Endor map as it was starting to get too dull and familiar and I could no longer use my Battle Systems terrain as I had sold all of it to help fund this new Star Wars terrain projects. So I looked for way I could improve the Endor terrain and I came across an Ewok Village terrain kit for Legion by a company called 4ground in the UK and bought 2 deluxe sets from them to add an extra level of play on the field and make the Endor terrain more alive and complex. An issue I quickly noticed with their Ewok village terrain was the lack of ways to get from the ground to the ewok houses and platforms from the top of the trees and I was going to be putting them on my very tall 15 inch tall trees so I needed a solution to this and found a seller on Etsy who made miniature scaled ladders for Fairy Gardens and messaged her and asked if she could scale down her ladders and make them fit my miniatures? She agreed to the project and I shipped her some spare miniatures I had so she knew what she was working with. I told her to make sure most standard miniatures could fit on each step of the 16 inch tall ladders. Once she got the miniatures in the mail she got to work on the ladders and she makes all her ladders out of real twigs and branches from real trees and preserves them and also puts wire inside them to make them sturdy and keep their shape. Of course the large scale and quantity of these custom ladders made them quite pricey and I actually ended up paying more for the ladders than the entire Ewok village I bought but such is the price for perfection. While she worked on the ladders I worked on building and gluing every Ewok house and platform together and making sure they were all sturdy and ready to be played on. I finished the entire Ewok village around the same time her ladders arrived in the mail and everything was ready to improve the the Endor map and make it better than ever.

Here are images of the current and most up to date upgraded Endor map: https://imgur.com/gallery/xv7mawE

And you might be wondering how I keep all of that balanced and not have everything fall over with one little bump or shake. Well I thought of everything and made sure that nothing got in the way of me making the best looking Endor terrain also the most fun to play on terrain. All 20 15 inch trees are held down by super strong magnets. There is one magnet glued and taped to the bottom of each tree and the second magnet is under the mat. These super strong magnets keep the trees from falling over even when someone bumps into it or shakes the table. As for the Ewok village they are held down to the top of each tree by sticky tack. I did not want to glue them on as that would make transporting all this terrain from my house to my local store almost impossible without having something break. So instead the sticky tack hold them in place and there are bridges connecting each platform and house to each other so if any ever get knocked over or bumped into they are still held in place by not just the sticky tack but also by the bridges connected to them by all the other platforms and the strength of the magnets keeps them from falling completely over. Is it still defiantly a lot of work to set up and takes a little longer than a hour but I believe it is worth it. The first game played on this new terrain was on August 17th so it is still fresh and new and I can't wait to keep using it. My group loves the new upgraded Endor and is now finally the proper complex map that I had always wanted it to be.




And now time to talk about what I have planned for the future. During all that time I was upgrading the Endor map David was hard at work on making my first terrain commission, a Death Star Interior map with 2 levels to it. I had already worked out a blue print of how the entire thing would look and its layout and what each room would have etc. He is almost done and is currently working the final 1/4 of the project. It should be shipped out to me by either the end of August or the beginning of September. From all the images he has sent it almost looks like a miniature movie set and I can't wait to play on it and I will be giving an update on it with lots of pictures once I get it and play our first game on it. But for now here is a sneak peak of one of the many images he sent me. I do not want to post them all due to wanting to keep it all a surprise once I get and will reveal all of it in my future update.

https://imgur.com/gallery/RLJOZfo

On top of that I have also gotten a Millennium Falcon model 3D printed for me with a playable interior that perfectly fits star wars miniature models. This Falcon will be placed in the landing bay area of the Death Star interior map that David has already made to be big enough to fit the Falcon in. Unfortunately this 3D printed Falcon got delayed by a lot and just arrived to me a couple of days ago and still needs to be passed over to my local painter to work on and he says it could take about a month and a half before he finishes with it. Which means it will not be ready in time to be used with the Death Star terrain but it is what it is and I will just have to wait. This doesn't mean I won't use the Death Star terrain until the Falcon is ready, just that I will have to find something else to put in the landing bay area of the Death star terrain in the meantime.

If you are curious the other 8 planatary sized terrains that David will be making for me go in this order: Tatooine, Hoth/Echo Base, Geonosis, Naboo, Kashyyyk, Utapau, Jedi Temple, and Jabba's Palace. All of these future terrains are going to be made to look like miniature scaled down versions of exactly what was seen in the movies with s much detail as possible. I am very excited for all of these maps that I will be slowly getting one by one in the coming months.

I am defiantly super obsessed with this game and want to keep pushing it past what was ever thought possible. In such a short period of time this game has become the center of my life. I made my current best friends because of this game and we meet and play together almost every week now. This game has given me something to strive for and keeps me busy every day thinking about how I can better improve it and make it more immersive. Its taken my mind off a lot of the bad in my life and I haven't felt this happy and fulfilled in a long time.

I went to Gen Con for the first time this year and meet some of the Bloomilk community there and that inspired me to be more active here and post about my contribution to the game and what it means to me. There is so much more that I have done with the game that I did not have the time to write about on here as it has already gotten super long and I don't want to make this anymore longer than it needs to be. I just knew that the 3D terrain that I have been working on for years for this game has really been the biggest thing that I wanted to talk about. I will defiantly keep posting more about all the other things I have done and plan on doing in the near future and will keep posting more updates for each new terrain setting that I get as I know most will enjoy it. I know I've changed the game a lot from what it originally was and I hope this is not too off putting for some but I just wanted to make the game better and improve on what was already there because I love the game so much and only want to see it get better.

Thank you for reading and being supportive, it means a lot. If you have any questions feel free to ask. I love answering questions and seeing what people think.

Thank you so much! Glad you like them.

Haha, thank you. If only you were in the Northern Virginia area. I am always looking for more people to join my weekly group.