Trash Terrain: GENCORP Tower

Legitimate businessman, pillar of the community and all-round swell guy Bugsy Capone indulges the local media while his small and discreet cadre of bodyguards stand watch...

Everything and everyone seems to be about Cyberpunk at the moment, and I'm no exception, loving the combination of neon glare, shiny chrome cybernetics and grimy cityscapes for it all to play out against. There's also some amazing MDF terrain out there that adds a wonderful Brutalist aspect to the whole scene too and the mere sight of it makes my palms go sweaty.

But that would mean shelling out money, and I'm a notorious tight-arse, so I decided to make something in the same spirit myeslf, a grim, towering centrepiece for a skirmish game where my punks and corporate suits can shoot it out over data. tech or whatever.

I started, as I normally do, with only a general idea of where I was going, making a tower out of two smaller boxes and using a larger one for the base and foot print of the building. I clad the tower in thin card and used cable ties to mark out the floors, then edged it with more card. I had a MDF kit that contained a fire escape, water-tower and electrical box, and I used these to furnish the roof and the rear of the tower.

As always, I wanted all sides of the build to have some form of feature and interest, with the one face being a more prestigious street-facing facade and the other a pretty grimy loading bay. I made the cladding from thicker card and the frames of the doors from sprues, with some bits from the Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprue.

I  then added more details to flesh out the various areas of the build and make them more attractive to the eye, gubbins and the like for the rear to make it look functional and fugly, then a nice sign and lighting for the front so that it gave the impression of a respectable corporate image.

I sealed the entire thing with Mod Podge, gave it a coat of texture paint where I wanted to give the impression of poured concrete, then primed and highlighted it with black, grey and then white rattle-cans. I picked out the areas of detail using a combination of craft paints and emulsion samples, only stepping up to model paints where more detail was needed. Last of all it got a series of washed using watered-down black and burnt umber acrylic paints, adding multiple layers in the places where the most grime would have accumulated.

As usual, let me know what you think here or on social media.