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All,

I was just wondering if people used the random terrain you are supposed to use for your tabletop games as listed in the WHFB rulebook. Do you use it exactly as written? A modified version of it? Or do you have your own rules? Just curious how the community uses the terrain in their tabletops!

EDIT:

After I get some answers, I will post what my gaming group does.

We occasionally use it, rolling again whenever we get something we don't have terrain for(which is quite often. its annoying when you roll a settlement 4 times)

I can't really speak on the topic, but it seems like a lot of the local guys don't. They treat it as being optional, which I disagree with, it seems pretty intrinsic to the way the game is meant to be played and the setting itself

The Battle Bunker near me has fixed tables. My FLGS has a bit more options.

Part of me doesn't like it because it feels like GW trying to force models down. And kind of boring ones if you're not an architect. Yeah, you can use a piece of paper or whatever or some other stand-in, but then you got real pretty armies and really junky terrain.

I think you're right that 8th as a system functions a lot better with completely random terrain. But that's not entirely realistic I think.

I think its good to have some random aspect. but its really tough to do as you are always limited by what you have avaliable.


we have plenty of hills and forests, lots of 40k buildings, but only a couple are acceptable for fantesy, one river, a temple of skulls, and a few hedges for terrain.

No rivers those thing are stupid.
Same with watch tower those rolls get re rolled

For the most part we use the rules as written for generating terrain. If we do end up getting some of the more annoying terrain pieces (lookin at you Sinister Statue / Sorcerous Portal / Wyrding Well) they usually end up shucked in some corner where they may as well not be on the board, although just as often they're placed centrally where they can be truly devastatingly frustrating.

Because buildings have such awful rules I tend not to use random terrain

Okay. So, my group isn't the only one that has these problems, then. I personally HATE the randomized terrain. I come from a competitive background and I hate it that you can just roll random terrain that bones your army. Also, when you roll a settlement, it just clutters the board so much that you can't even feasbily play the game. My group feels that the less terrain on the board the better when it comes to playing WHFB. So, we usually put down 4 to 5 pieces of large terrain and then leave it at that. We might put down several walls but that is it. And, we don't randomize any of it. There are just too many pieces of terrain that just does random crap that bones you.

I like some of the new terrain pieces.

the Arcane Ruins and Wizards tower are nice and flavorful, but won't have too much impact.


I think one issue with the terrain having the ability to fill the board is the fact 8th is all about huge blocks of infantry. its hard to move a horde of 50 dudes when the board is so cluttered.

I like randomized terrain, but I dislike 'Candy Land' boards with an Altar of Khaine there and a Dwarven Pup here and a Haunted Mansion over there, and I loathe Mysterious Terrain. So I made my own chart:



Same process, D6+4 pieces of terrain, generated from this chart instead of the BRB one. 1D6 means generation is much faster, and the terrain elements you get affect the game in more or less important ways (impassable especially) without killing off armies and causing confusion trying to remember what is what. We then take turns placing terrain and scattering it 3D6" + scatter die (hit = hit), which is sort of a NE US tournament standard. Has worked fine for my gaming group, or at least nobody complains to my face about it

- Salvage

I don't have a real problem with the different varieties of Forest and Water features, I just wish you rolled the specific subtype when you placed the terrain instead of when you wander into it. How in the world do the troops miss that a river/lake is boiling, or that a forest is in fact made of giant mushrooms instead of trees?

Thought I do agree that mundane versions of those features should be more common than the others.

I like the random Forests and Rivers. they are a little element of surprise.


I do think the type should be rolled before the game starts, but after deployment.

The last time I played mysterious terrain I lost 15 chaos warriors from one 20 man unit and 12 from another to a boiling river. My opponent agreed that we should restart the game and play against each other, not the fakking terrain

To paraphrase somebody on Dakka from a year ago re: inane terrain, if you want to play survival horror there are several other games that do it better than Warhammer: The Game of Fantasy Battles

- Salvage

how the hell did 15 warriors die?

Yes, but if you knew that the water feature was a boiling flood, it changes the way you would play around it. It would, almost essentially, become an "impassable feature" from your own terrain generator. The difference being you would have the option of moving into it if you didn't care about your troops that much, ala skavenslave soup from my last game against brettonians.

I use the part of the rules that say you have d6+4 pieces of terrain. But I don't roll on the chart to see what pieces they are. I use what I have. Then during the game I use the mysterious pieces of terrain rules. I can't really use the random terrain generator because I don't have enough terrain of each type to actually do it. You'd have to have like 10 of every piece of terrain to actually use the rules per RAW (considering that there is a possability of rolling 10 pieces of terrain on the d6+4 and then all of them being rolled out as forests)

Agreed with streamdragon. If you knew what the water feature was, why did you try to ford it? If you didn't know what it was, why did you use such a large and expensive unit (more importantly, why did you use TWO such units?) to scout it? In a real war, you really are just as much fighting the enemy as you are the terrain, not in the same sense as what happened to you, but the way I see it, the magical terrain adds to the experience and makes you think a bit more.

chaos0xomega wrote:Agreed with streamdragon. If you knew what the water feature was, why did you try to ford it? If you didn't know what it was, why did you use such a large and expensive unit (more importantly, why did you use TWO such units?) to scout it? In a real war, you really are just as much fighting the enemy as you are the terrain, not in the same sense as what happened to you, but the way I see it, the magical terrain adds to the experience and makes you think a bit more.

When almost the entirety of your deployment zone is a mysterious river, and you're running deep blocks of warriors, where else do they go? It was hug the table edge and never advance, or start in the river. And of course I had no idea what the river was, since it was mysterious until the first warrior block deployed in it ... Happy to say that when we reset and played properly, my lads made it out of the river a bit wet but not irrevocably crippled.

As to "real war" comparisons, I call shenanigans. Fantasy, when played with inane terrain, apparently involves armies with absolutely zero recon, of any kind. I would wager that even a gaggle of blind captives shoved ahead of a chaos force would make it clear which rivers were boiling and which woods were covered in poisonous barbs.

I find that inane terrain heavily detracts from my enjoyment of the game, and most often forces terrain to be avoided or placed into the corners, letting the game devolve into One Big Scrum in the center with even less tactical depth than the game normally has. YMMV but I gave up on a-thematic, mysteriously inane terrain a year ago and have never looked back.

- Salvage

I just feel like in a world of high magic, fantastical creatures and endless war that a lack of any fantastical terrain at all sort of detracts from the feel of the world.

Like I said before, I agree that the amount of normal terrain vs. fantastical terrain that gets generated via the Rule Book could be much better. I agree that there should be more regular forests than mushroom forests or blood forests or venom thickets or what have you. I agree that there should be more normal rivers than rivers of light and so on. But to completely rid the board of the possibility such elements is swinging too far in the other direction in my opinion. I also will echo my previous statement of mysterious terrain being rolled up and specified when it's placed, as opposed to when it's first entered. That way, you can decide if you want to incorporate it into your tactics.

For instance, the Boiling Flood (lake) I mentioned earlier. It was in my deployment zone, so I tested it with a slave and found out what it was. Knowing that charging across it could be disastrous, I then deployed my jezzails behind it. My opponent was forced to either go around, shoot me, or charge across it. It cost him a few pegasus knights to do it.

You can argue you should be fighting your opponent, not the board, but use of terrain is just as much a part of tactical thought as use of units. Doesn't matter if it's hiding behind a normal forest to break an opponent's steadfast, or hiding behind to a boiling lake to make pegasus and skaven slave soup.

To each their own. As for your deployment quandry, I blame terrain setup more than the fact that it was mysterious terrain. If it really was such a large part of your deployment area, and had the potential of having such a major impact on the game, I would have asked for a redo of the layout. I'm all for playing against the terrain and all, but sticking a large mysterious river into your deployment zone, specifically a river that occupies most of the area, flies in the face of logic.

At the very least, instead of shunning 'inane' terrain entirely, have you considered limiting it to one piece of mysterious terrain per board. It adds a bit more of a random element to the game and requires a bit more opportunity for tactical manouver than playing completely without, but won't really brake the game either.

Few of us at the LGC, just put terrain on the board that looks cool. Its usally over 10 pieces counting the walls. There is a guy that also plays in a area league that hey only put 6 pcs, its only hills, trees (normal), building. He puts them all on along the edge of the board so the middle is wide open.

Boss Salvage wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:Agreed with streamdragon. If you knew what the water feature was, why did you try to ford it? If you didn't know what it was, why did you use such a large and expensive unit (more importantly, why did you use TWO such units?) to scout it? In a real war, you really are just as much fighting the enemy as you are the terrain, not in the same sense as what happened to you, but the way I see it, the magical terrain adds to the experience and makes you think a bit more.

When almost the entirety of your deployment zone is a mysterious river, and you're running deep blocks of warriors, where else do they go? It was hug the table edge and never advance, or start in the river. And of course I had no idea what the river was, since it was mysterious until the first warrior block deployed in it ... Happy to say that when we reset and played properly, my lads made it out of the river a bit wet but not irrevocably crippled.

As to "real war" comparisons, I call shenanigans. Fantasy, when played with inane terrain, apparently involves armies with absolutely zero recon, of any kind. I would wager that even a gaggle of blind captives shoved ahead of a chaos force would make it clear which rivers were boiling and which woods were covered in poisonous barbs.

I find that inane terrain heavily detracts from my enjoyment of the game, and most often forces terrain to be avoided or placed into the corners, letting the game devolve into One Big Scrum in the center with even less tactical depth than the game normally has. YMMV but I gave up on a-thematic, mysteriously inane terrain a year ago and have never looked back.

- Salvage

I could not agree more. I would rather play this game with just mundane terrain. And I like the idea about when you place terrain, you scatter 3d6". That is a pretty sweet idea, actually.