We play a lot of Warmachine and have built a good portion of our terrain around the terrain as defined inside of the core rule-set. Of all of the terrain we’ve built, this has had the by far the most discussion as to the best most functional means of making “rough terrain”.
Scrap foam and toothpicks are your friend when trying to paint something of this size on all sides, sticking them with toothpicks makes the process go much much smoother.
The dry brushing followed our usual pattern of dark gray, light gray and white to achieve the stone effect we were looking for.
Some final comments on this, even though we intended this to be rough terrain, some defectors with in our group counts them as obstacles, which in warmachine warrants a different rule for how it affects movement. We also based these rocks onto a cardboard base and they all warped in the process. They are functional enough, but there is a good chance we will be remade at some point to better emulate “Rough Terrain”.
Rough terrain is one of those things that ends up being used in many games but defined with a pretty broad brush. The best thing we did during this project was talk about it and that helped us define and decide what is and is not rough terrain, it’s always good to have a understanding of how to operate a game around terrain. In most instances most people don’t ever make terrain the same size or the same way, so the better you understand the intent and means of using said terrain, the less arguing will occur during your games!