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This is 30mm-scale terrain for wargaming, roleplaying games, miniature dioramas, skirmish games, model railroads, class projects or just for fun. Assembly is quick and easy, requiring 7 sheets of cardstock, a sharp hobby knife and glue. The West Gate will make a great centerpiece for your village layout, acting as a toll gate or checkpoint between the districts of your medieval town. By cutting out the middle of the ground tile, it could also span a canal or small river. It's easy modify and combine this model with any other papercraft models, creating all-new structures for an authentically jumbled medieval appearance.

Assembly instructions are provided, including printing tips and advice for printing at various popular gaming and model railroad scales. One of the great things about papercraft models is that they can be printed at any popular gaming scale quite easily, so this model can be used for 28mm, 25mm, 20mm, 15mm scale and smaller. These files are 200dpi, which will look great when printed at full size without requiring large file sizes. You'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0 or later in order to use them, and the multiple layers may take additional time to render, so please be patient while your images load onto the screen.

MULTI-LAYERED FILES: The PDFs included in this model set are multi-layered and contain a variety of surface textures and external features that you can customize with the click of your mouse. Each model can be configured in countless ways before printing, so what you're really getting are many models in one! With this single model you'll be well on your way to constructing a complete medieval or fantasy town.

SINGLE-LAYERED FILES: For your printing convenience, this model also includes a full set of single-layered PDFs with one appearance.

DIMENSIONS: The West Gate has an L-shaped footprint of approximately 10.2" x 5.1" along its longest edges. Its height is approximately 9.25", not including the chimneys.

CONTENTS: This model features base textures with a choice of gray stone, red stone, wood upper levels, beams, with optional layers of heavy weathering. You may easily add the optional windows, iron gates, shutters, doors, lanterns, public notices and royal insignia. Choose from 3 different colors of roofing shingles with optional heavy weathering and lichens. There are 3 different footprint textures to choose from, 2 types of chimneys with a selection of 4 locations, and 2 optional balconies positioned above the passageway on either side.

FREE ADD-ON FILE: You can find a bonus PDF at DavesGames.Net that includes optional gate doors and shutters that you can add to this model. These pieces are designed so that you can open or close them, unlike the gate doors and shutters included with the original model. The URL for that file is here: http://www.davesgames.net/papercraft/pdf/west-gate-add-ons.pdf

Excellent and highly affordable kit.

I am getting really close to giving these a try...

At home!

Just need to purchase the right 'card stock' first, and then I'm off and running!

I've held off buying them because I know that once I buy one, I'm buying them all. While Dave may not mind that, my wife will be less than amused if I spend a couple hundred dollars on the stuff..

But that West Gate really has me leaning towards pulling out the Credit Card. Fantastic work, Dave.

I'd love to see some fortified structures... The 'coming soon' stuff is looking like it.. fortified mill over a river or something of that nature?

Oh, how about other structures? A bridge would be nice.

What I'm working on now is a set of modular medieval walls and watch towers. I've been thinking about that sort of thing for a long time now, and recently came up with a plan for how to do them. So far it includes wall sections that are 3.5" high and 1/4" thick, in widths of 1", 1.5", 2", 2.5"... up to 6". The wider wall sections have optional gateways so they can be used a river-gates or town gates. There are stone- and brick-textured buttresses, and wood-textured support beams, wood-textured walkways and railings. There will be two types of watch towers, and each will have optional features so you'll have a nice variety there. The neat thing about the multi-layered PDFs is that each file can get a lot of work done, and be used to create more than one type of wall. (To turn one of the walls into a gated wall, you just have to turn on one layer.) The more I work with layered PDFs, the more of those kinds of tricks I'm figuring out. You get a lot of bang for your megabyte.

Eventually, I would like to create some bridges. Ideas like that just need to tumble around in my head for a while until I figure out the 2D patterns that are required to build them.

I just added up the price of my entire collection and it's only about $90. If you only want the fantasy models, it's more like $70. That doesn't include the cardstock you'll need, but if it influences your buying decisions at all...

Alpharius wrote:I am getting really close to giving these a try...

At home!

Just need to purchase the right 'card stock' first, and then I'm off and running!

Write a review Alph. When all things are sorted for me, I'm building a fantasy table and want an empire town for it, I'm really liking these so far and the price is definately right.

MeanGreenStompa wrote:

Alpharius wrote:I am getting really close to giving these a try...

At home!

Just need to purchase the right 'card stock' first, and then I'm off and running!

Write a review Alph. When all things are sorted for me, I'm building a fantasy table and want an empire town for it, I'm really liking these so far and the price is definately right.

I will!

And that's what I'm after too - a medieval town to represent some smallish but well defended place in the Empire...

Damn.. I really thought it was more than that.. I guess I have no real excuse now, huh?

Dave, a quick question!

Do these need to be printed out on a color laser printer, or do inkjet printers work?

Also a suggestion, in these days of the internets and the you tubes, I think a video tutorial would be a nice addition to your site. Show an example of the steps of printing and putting together a building, even just the small cottage you have up for free download would be helpfull.

Shellfishguy wrote:Do these need to be printed out on a color laser printer, or do inkjet printers work?

You can use just about any kind of printing method that will print onto cardstock, and just about any kind of heavy cardstock. Everything's a trade-off, and I think you'll just have to make the best use of what's available to you, or experiment with different methods if you have access to several. Your choice of glue is also something that might make a difference.

I prefer color laser prints on 100# matte cardstock. The advantage is that it looks great, but the printed areas become glossy and will resist some glues. I sometimes have to use my X-acto to lightly scratch up the surface I'm going to apply glue to, since this gives the paper a little bit of "tooth". That wouldn't be such a problem with inkjet prints, since the ink doesn't "melt" onto the paper the way the toner does with a color laser copier. The problem you might run into with inkjet prints is that if you overdo it with the glue, you might blur the ink because of the excess moisture. There are other little things you'll discover about different printing methods and papers, and it's just a matter of finding something that works best for you. If you head over to the forum at One Monk Miniatures, where paper miniatures are all the rage, they have some great suggestions for papers you can use, including a matte photo paper that some of them swear by. I've never used it, but as soon as my current paper stock runs out, I'm going to give it a try. It's like buttah, they say. I use a wood carpenter's glue that I really like because it's strong and dries quickly, and that's what I need for my test builds, but it's probably too wet for some papers and will cause them to warp a little bit.

I might just cut-and-paste what I've just written into the instructions pages of my new models.

Shellfishguy wrote:Also a suggestion, in these days of the internets and the you tubes, I think a video tutorial would be a nice addition to your site. Show an example of the steps of printing and putting together a building, even just the small cottage you have up for free download would be helpfull.

That's a really great suggestion, and something that I've also had in mind for a while. I suppose I'll have to find some time to do that when I'm not obsessively designing new models. (Just having a how-to video on YouTube or on my Ustream or Livestream channels would be a good way to get some free advertising, too.) One of the reasons I offer that free Hovel model is because it was a simple structure like that one that got me started in papercraft. Once you get the basic idea of what to do and how to interpret the cut-and-fold patterns, it's all pretty easy. It takes greater patience and precision when you're moving onto more complex designs, but the techniques of cutting, scoring, folding and gluing never get any tougher than what you find on that little four-sided shack.

What you've done is add "video tutorial" to the checklist I keep in my head. Way to pass on a meme!

These look cool and total cost is reasonable.

What is the total file size for all the fantasy buildings out now?

I grabbed the freebie and it came out at 1.5Mb. But it doesn't have the layers.

I assume they add to the file size.

Thanks, and please continue to create new stuff!

Thanks Dave! Definitely looking into it more.

Thanks, everybody. I really hope you all find something you like in my collection, and I value your ideas and suggestions.

skrulnik wrote:What is the total file size for all the fantasy buildings out now?

I grabbed the freebie and it came out at 1.5Mb. But it doesn't have the layers.

It's just under 400Mb for my entire set of fantasy models, each in their own ZIP folders. Most of my models are provided as multi-layered PDFs, and the number of layers and what's on them can vary a lot. Each mutli-layered PDF page will end up being something like 3 to 8 Mb. Some models fit on just a couple of pages, but others take 3 pages or more, so the overall sizes can be anywhere from 7Mb to 50Mb.

Some of my models have single-layered PDFs only, and the file sizes on these are a bit smaller. I created single-layered models so that they'd be a little more affordable, but mostly because they're hassle-free if you want to take them to a print shop. (Some of the people who work at print shops won't be happy when you ask them to turn on or off certain layers on your PDFs, and they'll start talking about extra fees and hourly rates for graphic design to avoid doing any extra work.)

Lately, I've been including both multi-layered and single-layered files in my models. I'll probably keep doing that from now on, since it's very easy to produce single-layered files once I've already done the multi-layered version.

Thanks for the response.

Soon as I get new cartridges for the printer, and cardstock, I will be getting these I think.

The best part is that they can wait until I have the time to build them, taking up absolutely no space in my apartment.

Unlike the plastic and resin stuff I have that needs to be built and/or painted.

Since these are pretty high ink-coverage, it might be with it to send a print job to Fedex (formerly Kinkos) and pick it up the next day...