Frostgrave‘s first scenario is called The Mausoleum, and it requires, you guessed it, a Mausoleum as the central terrain piece. As I am totally into Frostgrave and Kings of War: Vanguard at the moment, and the fact that cemeteries make great backgrounds with fantasy skirmish games, I needed no other motivation to get stuck into making a Mausoleum. What made this really easy to make was that I followed Black Magic Craft’s mausoleum speed build on YouTube. I followed his steps almost to the letter, so I’ll keep this post short and encourage you to check out his video for all the details.

I started by creating a simple house shape out of foam board, with a steep angle roof to give it a more gothic feel. As Black Magic Craft suggested, I bought some laser cut MDF window frames from Shifting Lands. They have a great selection of window frames which will add a lot of character to any terrain build. Once the window frames where glued on the house frame, I cut out some 5mm thick pieces of XPS foam to go around the window frames. These were scored to look like a brick frame. I also rolled over them with a scrunched up ball of aluminium foil to give them a stone texture.

The next bit I focused on was the main stone work, in particular, the corners. My plan was to use 20mm x 10mm stone blocks on the facade of the house frame. They would all be 5mm thick to match the window frames, but the corners needed a bit more thought to have that classic brick interlocking look with the right proportions. So I made all the corner blocks 10mm thick, and then I cut away the inside 5mm, so that I had a bunch of L shaped pieces that were 5mm thick. I glued these around the corners of the house frame.

With the corners done, I got on with gluing down all the individual stone block pieces. These were made in my usual way, which is to cut a whole lot of blocks out of XPS foam, and give them all a good shake in a tin can with some rocks to round off the edges and give them a battered stone look. Gluing all the blocks down got a little tricky in between and around the windows where I had to cut some blocks into strange shapes to fit. On the upper sections of the front and back of the building, I let the blocks overflow, and once the glue had dried, I came back and simply cut the overflow away with a knife.

With all the bricks in place, I went to work on the roof. I capped all the edges with long pieces of XPS foam I cut with the Shifting Lands Angle Cutter on my hot wire foam cutter. But to be honest, no fancy tool is required here, because you can do the same thing with a hobby knife by cutting a long rectangular strip of foam in half, corner-to-corner, so that you end up with two long triangular strips.

I further decorated the roof by using strips of construction paper to look like copper banding. To make things a little easier, I used a glue stick here, because PVA glue will soak into the paper and make it way more fragile to work with. The rivets are simply small slices of styrene rod.

Finally I applied a very simple paint scheme. All the stone work was based with a medium grey followed by a light grey/cream drybrush, then it was all dowsed in a home made black wash. The roof and window frames were based with copper, overbrushed with Citadel’s Nihilakh Oxide, and then drowned in a home made brown wash.