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Terrain: Star Theater


LoboStele

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EDIT: MASSIVE update further down the thread. Project completed! Lots of pics! :)

As are several others right now, I'm working on my own version of the Star Theater.

It's going to sort of be 2 floors. I plan for some of the outer areas to be both 1st floor and 2nd floor gaming areas. I'm a bit worried some of the 1st floor stuff will be tough to play in because of the high walls, but we'll see. This is my first time building something of this scale, so I'm experimenting a lot. :)

The whole thing is going to be 3'x3'. I'm building it in 4 18"x18" segments, and planning to make it modular, so you could put the segments in different orders to form the whole thing. also hoping to make some extra exits along the outer walls and such, so that it can be used for larger games as well. Construction is made from foam board, with a combination of hot glue/Elmer's glue. Foam core was used for things like the stage and to build the stairs. Then using varying sizes of popsicle sticks for different things.

Here's my WIP at the moment. Click images to see bigger versions.

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This is the stage corner. I need to finish putting the wood planks on the stage, and probably re-do the stairs leading off the back of the stage. They didn't come out as nice as the front steps, which is why you see the front ones in these pics, but not the back ones, LOL. Will have a bit of a back stage area. I plan to put a bar around the front, with actual fabric curtains hanging from it. :)

I've got one other quarter about finished, but I've gotta nail down some supplies for a special portion of that one first.

Edited by LoboStele
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I've also created some small terrain elements to be used inside the Theater, and have been making them to specifically represent some of the actual terrain features from the book. So....

Here we have a Pool of Aether

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And here is a bar for Drink Up!

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And here is some broken tables and stuff, to be Hazardous Terrain (nails and splinters, look out!)

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(this one will also be nice for placing in the middle of the board somewhere, to give some terrain to break up advancement over the large open area.

And, just for fun...every good theater should have a pipe organ!

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Oooh, also forgot to mention in the first post, I interpreted the Star Theater as more of like a giant drinking hall, with long tables (like the broken one above) and then maybe some high tables with stools (see the one laying on it's side). So, that's what I plan to fill the interior of my theater with.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Sheesh, I need to keep this thread updated! I have finished a bit more work on this lately.

I've now got the 1st floor for all 4 corners assembled.

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Before I start adding the 2nd floor details, I've got some work to do which involves this:

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Well, my TV remote got jumbled up in there, so hopefully it won't end up glued inside the theater somewhere. That would end up being bad.

And, just for some sense of scale...

Cassandra, taking Center Stage for the first time!

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And my cat, being his normal (un)helpful self, lol

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As usual, click the little images to link to bigger ones. Sorry for the lousy quality this time. Was really late, and didn't feel like hunting for the good camera, so just snapped these with the phone. Will get some nicer pics as it gets closer to completion.

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Yeah, I've got a slew of tables, chairs, and such planned for the middle. Plus, there's the image above with the table smashed up against the pole, that could be placed somewhere to break up the middle as well. I'm considering adding a couple more support poles like that just to further break things up. Hopefully, the rooms along the sides will help with how it plays as well.

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  • 5 weeks later...

About time for an update! I've actually made a ton of progress on these the last 2 weeks, and this picture below is almost a week old now. But I haven't had a chance to take new pictures yet. This corner is actually 100% finished now, so next round of pictures should be of a finished product!

Anyways, here was the progress for the stage corner as of last weekend:

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(As usual, click thumbnail for a bigger pic)

And, just for good measure, here's a hitching post for horses that I made to go out front of the theater. ;)

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well, I got it all finished! I'll try to get some better pictures in the next few days here, but we did utilize the theater in a big battle royale type of game at the LGS last week. Had 12 players around a 6" x 8" table, so my theater was just 1/4 of the playing area. We also included a bunch of the modular pieces that I had created for the theater, and showed in the above posts. Here's a few quick pics of the finished thing:

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View of the front entrance, from the stage

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The stage has a backdrop with some neat DaVinci style drawings that I found online somewhere. Curtains are actual velvet.

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Each corner is modular, and can be placed in any of the 4 locations. However, the set up as shown is the original, as-designed, setup, and is how the lighting works the best. It's hard to tell from these photos, but there are two glowing 'lanterns' in the front entrance hallway, and there are red, green, blue, and white lights for the stage. Finally, there's 3 light-up stars on the front of the theater...for the STAR Theater. ;) I'll get better pictures of the lights later this week.

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The Dressing Room behind stage ;) I wanted to include a few little things back here just to clutter up the area a little bit.

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A view of the whole inside, with some of the individual terrain I created.

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The girls, on their stage. :) I really need to get good high-res pics of my crew up in my other Showcase thread...had been waiting to show them off till I had a stage to photograph them on.

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Here's some of the denizen's that were attacking us. :tongue2: The 'tunnel' type area under the stairwell is mostly for if you use the modular option and set up the quadrants differently. There's a door in wall behind Perdita that was unusable in this set up, but would link to other doors depending on the layout (you can see one of these other doors in the 3rd pic above).

Also, I was super happy with how the stairs turned out. They are spaced just far enough apart that a typical Malifaux base will slide neatly between two steps and easily hold a miniature in the middle of the stairs. Obviously, some custom bases might have trouble with this setup, but overall, it worked pretty well for our group.

As always, click pics for bigger images. I'll be posting some prettier ones later in the week when I can steal my wife's fancy high-res camera for a few minutes.

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You should come up with some stage sets to swap out, could be fun.

Hehehe, that would be cool. I'll have to think about it a bit. Unfortunately, the way it's built right now, I don't have a lot of options with the curtains or the backdrop. But, with the scaffolding running across the stage, I might be able to do something. We'll see.

And here, I found this pic on my friends facebook page, which he snapped during our game last week, so it sort of shows what I was talking about with the stairs and sliding the bases into them.

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  • 3 weeks later...

OK, I'm going to apologize here for the enormous number of photos. They are all thumbnails which can be clicked for larger images, so hopefully that will help them load quickly...

Enjoy!

We'll start with some overall shots of the whole thing:

Stage:

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Bar area and doorways to back rooms:

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Front entrance:

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Back stair-well (to the left of the stage, when looking from the front door)

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Front entrance, close-up. There's a cool little balcony there which makes for some interesting hiding spots or starting positions if you set up in that corner.

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Stairwell onto the stage, from backstage. You can also see how the doors lead from each quadrant. The four pieces are fully modular, and can be set up in 2-3 different ways, and still have access through these doors. The dark passageways under the main stairwells, actually have doors at the back which can join with these doors in different setups. In the current, primary setup, those dark passageways don't go anywhere, but they make for nice hiding holes.

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More pics of the backstage area. These are small dressing room dressers or powder tables. Have small mirrors on them. Just built from popsicle sticks and stained with wood stain and then sealed. The stick thing is supposed to be a clothes rack. ;)

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These trusses I built using stirrer sticks and hot glue, just to add some extra structure to the stage.

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Close up of the backdrop. I found this image just doing some google hunting. Couldn't pass on this one, as it had a nice steampunk flair, and even included a mechanical horse, so I just knew Colette would love performing in front of this. ;)

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And...as I'm sure you may have noticed by now....yes, the theater is lighted. There's a false panel in the quadrant to the left of the stage:

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Battery compartment is behind it, and held in with magnets, with enough space for the power cord to be wrapped up and tucked away inside it.

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Then it looks real clean when it's set up and plugged in. The 3 boards which look like they stick out a bit? Those are button switches for the red/green/blue lights so you can individually turn those on/off. The white stage lights and the orange entrance lights are always on.

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I didn't take a good picture of it, but each quadrant is connected using 6-wire phone wiring. Took a bit of tricky splicing in some areas, but each quadrant as a male end on the left, and a female receptacle on the right. Plug all 4 together as you set it up, and voila, lights on all 4 pieces work, no matter which way you set it up.

So, here's some general shots of how the lights look:

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All the LEDs are mounted inside some small PVC tubing to sort of resemble the cans for real lighting, and to focus the light a little bit. The red/green/blue ones are aimed to light up the stage, so the whole set up works best in this configuration. If you swap the quadrants around, then you end up shining light on walls and stuff. :P

And, finally, here's some better pictures of the modular terrain pieces, set up in the theater, but able to be moved as necessary:

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I actually tore this one apart and rebuilt it, as after I got it done, we realized that it was WAY out of scale the way I did it the first time (used large popsicle sticks on the first one, rather than normal ones on this one). Plus, I found the cool round table things after I built it before, so wanted to swap those in. And you can see Cassie and the Coryphees taking some cover behind it, to help you see the scale is good now.

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And last, but not least, if anybody's interested, here's some shots of the layout I created to help figure out what I was doing before I started. You can see I included the size of the bar, because I wanted to make sure I put my door back there in the right place. The 3rd page has my wiring diagram, and boy was I glad I took the time to do that, lol.

Theater-Layout.pdf

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