Modular gothic mission ruins

I was asked to print enough modular building components for a small firefight size game.

This is what I came up with.

There are a few new components and a new download for my modular scenery range.

Downloads:

CC BY-NC-SA

Download That_Modular-Sets 6-9 Gothic mission ruins

These buildings require all of the original downloads in addition to the above.

The following article has the original downloads:

https://blog.discoverthat.co.uk/2026/05/modular-scenery-buildings.html

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Modular scenery buildings

I have shown these in previous posts. They are for use with tabletop games with miniatures that are nominally 28mm scale. I have finally had time to package up the CAD files for download for others to 3D print.

At the moment, there are parts available to create gothic buildings or an alien fort.

The components snap together using OpenLOCK clips. This makes for easy storage and lots of possibilities for what shapes the buildings will be.

If you wish to print these yourself, you will need to download all of the generic parts and either or both of the Gothic and Alien fort components.

The Painting Rack is optional, but it makes it easier to support the components on end while, you guessed it, you are painting them.

I chose to paint all of the parts the same base wall colour, so that the Alien Fort and the Gothic buildings have interchangeable generic components.

If these parts are oriented appropriately, all of them will print without support. I print them with a 0.2mm layer height and 8% infill with a 0.4mm nozzle.

Downloads:

CC BY-NC-SA

CAD (mainly STEP not STL) zip files

That_Modular-Set 1 Generic floors

That_Modular-Set 2 Generic walls

That_Modular-Set 3 Ruins

That_Modular-Set 4 Gothic walls

That_Modular-Set 5 Alien fort walls

That_Modular-Set A OpenLOCK clips

That_Modular-Set B Painting racks

Please post a comment if you find these useful.

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Post-battle report

We had another great couple of games of One Page Rules - Grimdark Future a couple of weeks ago. Following that I've made a few improvements ready for the next encounter.

Each time we've played, the table setup has looked better. I've had more variety of scenery prepared and much of it is painted. I'm particularly pleased with the tyrannosaur skeleton. Modelled from a complete structured cut and assembled to look part buried and useful as cover. 

I've added to my modular buildings. For the last game I had just finished the alien fort.

The idea is that the base colours are the same, so that all the components are interchangeable. I found I was a little short of some of the bits to finish off the edges so since then I've printed and painted some more bits.

I've honed the painting technique to be as quick as possible. I've skipped the primer because the Rust-oleum Switch Limestone spray gets good coverage and adhesion on the PETG without the need for a primer.

I've watered down the off-black emulsion wash a lot more. This gives the effect I want without the need to further dry brush over the top. I remembered to mask off the floor, so that could be finished just by a quick dry brush of Vallejo sombre grey. This quicker process means that the basic building blocks can be ready to use very quickly.

There's always more scenery to paint. Like the buildings, I found a quick method for these rocks. Prime in grey then a sepia wash over the top changes the grey to a more khaki colour. This is then dry brushed in a very light grey to get the finished result.

Lastly for now, a scoreboard. That's something I wanted for our previous games, but it was always too far down the list of jobs.

I had tried to buy something but everything that included appropriate counters was a size more suitable for a stadium rather than an intimate tabletop game where we had squeezed it into our living room!

There were a few 3D printable designs but none that I could find were quite what I wanted. As I find fairly frequently, I had to design and print my own. It only took two iterations to get exactly what I was after.

The rings have an octagonal cross section and clip into matching holes. The team names and even the turn name can be swapped out.

Unusual for a 3D print of this size, I've printed it solid. This gives it a nice weight.

I'm sure I will continue to add and paint more scenery and I've starting to assemble another army. I'm looking forward to the next match.

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Painted scenery

What a fun day today. We played two games of One Page Rules - Grimdark Future, each with 2000 point armies. Robots vs Humans. This was the first time that I had a complete set of my own fully painted miniatures.

I had been rushing over the last couple of weekends to get some scenery painted and some terrain pieces finished so we have less unfinished scatter on the battle mat.

I've designed and printed some modular gothic building pieces and put together some simple foliage, based on plastic plants. 

The bulk of the plant pieces are based on faux moss. This proved difficult to work with. The structure was far too loose, I would not buy it again for terrain modelling. It took a lot of watered down PVA to give it any strength which I did not think would dry in time, but it did, just.

I'm pleased with the buildings. The inspiration comes from Notre Dame in Paris and St Vitus Cathedral in the castle in Prague. I've used OpenLOCK clips to join parts together to have different building shapes from the same component pieces.

I found it difficult to get a consistent paint effect over all the pieces, but the end result still looks good when setup on the table.

OpenLOCK

OpenLOCK is a trademark of Printable Scenery. They released the clips under a Creative Commons license for home use. CC-BY-NC. From the original descriptions it is clear that the intended use was for 3D floor plans. The layout of clips and other features of the templates provided by Printable Scenery are not ideal for scenic buildings used for tabletop wargames. I have adapted the layout of clips to suit the scenery that I have designed. Mainly, this is so that there are clips to hold upper storeys together and there is no need for a ground floor layer. I have stuck, near enough, to imperial inch sizes and spacing.

My layouts are based on a 3" (76.2mm) square wall section. It also works down to 1" wide.

I have used 1" (25.4mm) spacing between centres horizontally but to avoid overlap of the sockets I had to use 19mm (3/4") spacing vertically. I deliberately wanted them to print without supports and without the break-off mini-pillars used in the original example files.

As the sockets have a height of 4.2mm, the minimum wall thickness that I could have used is about 7mm, however, for a bit of extra flexibility with surface textures, I've gone with 8mm thick walls.

So far, I've been able to design everything to print without supports on my FFF printer using PETG filament.

OpenLOCK is also licensable for commercial use. There are lots of designers selling scenery that is compatible with the OpenLOCK system.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1833963

The various clips themselves are downloadable from Printable Scenery.

Scale Anomalies

I struggle with accepting the scale creep of miniatures. Years ago a popular size for tabletop miniatures was called 25mm and now they have crept up to 32mm. Generally referred to as 28mm. 

The following is how I rationalise it so that I can work with consistent rules.

1:56 Characters: The notional size is 28mm to a normal human's eye height, which is a top of the head height of about 32mm for say a  5'10" (178cm) tall person. To the nearest common model scale, that works out about 1:56.

1:35 Buildings and vehicles: These look too small at the 1:56 scale of the characters, probably because of the exaggerated features of many of the models and that they sit on, typically, 4mm tall bases. I find a scale of 1:40 works better for most scenery. The most appropriate common model scale is 1:35. This puts the 3" tall ceiling height at about 2.7m (9'). 1m (3') high garden walls and low hedges look right at about 30mm to 35mm (1.25") tall.

Knowing this, helps me design scenery to suit.

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