Imperial Shrine

Well, I suppose this is as good a time as any to get you guys hooked by showing you initial work on the first building:

Despite the big box of buildings sitting waiting for me, I went out and bought a pair of "Shrine of the Aquila" sets. These look really good, and a pair of them would be able to go together to make a VERY impressive church like building. It should be noted that because the walls are such large sections I found that a few were slightly bent, but nothing that a little bit of careful handy work couldn't fix! Overall, the Shrine box set are actually pretty reasonably priced and look like they have a fair amount of flexibility in their construction. Definately a worth while addition.

With this in mind, I wanted to step away from the square look, in fact, I wanted to create a largely intact Shrine to fight over so after a bit of thinking I came up with a simple floor plan design to make the most of all of the parts. I measured up and cut out two template shapes to help construct the building more interestingly. One for the floor, and one for the roof.

Here you can see the bulk of the Shrine. The large central space will hopefully house some sort of important looking artifact, relic or statue. I'm not sure what at the moment, maybe someone has some good ideas!?!

In any case, the keen eyed among you will notice that this doesn't even use a whole boxed set! You can see that even like this it would be possible to create interesting, half destroyed, shrines even if you were using only one boxed set. So, in any case you're probably wondering what happened to the rest of it!



Well here it is... This will form the front portion of the Imperial Shrine, equivalent to the main area of most modern day churches (the Nave). The front part of the Shrine will give the overall feel of a traditional church like structure - with a long approach to the main area. It also lets me put in a middle floor which will help mix things up a bit when it comes to gaming.

When the two halves are placed next to one another you get the echo of a modern day church, but importantly without the Christian style cross plan layout - as this is something which would have no reason in the 40k Universe! However, the roof was clearly in too good a shape, so I went at it with a pair of clippers, snipping and twisting to get a random effect. All of the snippings were saved for later use, even small parts went into a pile which can later be ransacked for rubble. The two collapsed sections will help you get your arm in to move models about. The two sections aren't glued toegether yet, I think I won't do that until I've painted them. There's a fair bit of work to do until then though!

Of course, there is still a lot to do on this piece of terrain, and they include:
+ Add more detailing to the roof sections - as these will form a big part of the gamers view.
+ Include something to worship! Maybe the big Space Marine statue from the GW set... maybe someone can give some other ideas!? as well as some additional internal details (someone has already mentioned adding pews scattered in the nave!)
+ I also need to add some of the external details, such as the steps, and probably some buttresses etc.
+ Then of course I will need to worry about adding rubble and painting, but these will all be done at a later stage anyway.