Large terrain pieces are the lifeblood of any good gaming table and in a fit of boredom late one night at my old job (after my work was done for the day, honest), I set out to create such a piece.

Enter the mesa. Like many such projects, there was absolutely no prior design, just some scribblings on a pad before I set off to construct it. I knew I wanted a stone arch with a pathway up and over for characters to fight on, and I wanted a winding road up to a plateau, but everything else came as I hacked and sawed.

Thankfully my job was at a lantern festival (you can see some pictures — not just mine — from that event in the the flickr group), so I had ready access to all sorts of materials. Even happier, the choroplast board that formed the base and the blue insulation foam were on their way to the garbage heap, so I was recycling.

Sadly no pictures from the actual construction period turned out, nor did I manage to save the sketch, so the earliest picture I have is the one below, of the mesa in its unpainted state. For reference, the board it is sitting on is 24″ x 24″ and the highest points are about 18″ tall.

The mesa has two major paths up the highest point, about 6″ up, one usable for vehicles, the other a foot path. The first is the previously mentioned stone archway, here inhabited by some crazy cultists one their way to sacrifice something to some elder god and end the world.

Next we have the roadway, which travels under the stone archway and the snakes up the side of the mountain before turning into the centre and arriving at the upper plateau.

Like all good scenery projects, this one is unfinished. I need to get the rope bridge I mentioned in the image caption above done, so that foot-bound figures have a way to cross the dry ravine and make their way up to the top. Guess I should get on that, as the mesa is going to make its debut as Gottacon, a local convention, in the adventure “The Amulet of Fire“