Paper Modeling – South of the Border

This month’s Annual issue on paper modeling is not the first time I’ve messed with Dioramas Pro, paper, glue and a trusty hobby knife.

Whitewash City

Whitewash City and Cardstock Cowboys

t all started with our Deadlands: Reloaded campaign. Savage Worlds was our first game system that put a really heavy emphasis on miniatures, and I started painting a few Western miniatures for our characters, as well as investing in some fitting paper minis. Then Eric Hotz’s beautiful series of Wild West buildings (Whitewash City) caught my eye and soon enough I was busy building paper models for our game.

MexicanFort 3d

Mexican Fort in Perspectives Pro

This was all well and good until our posse ventured south and into Mexico, and the American-style buildings suddenly didn’t fit the mood anymore. When it became clear that our characters would have to free a rebel leader from a fort, I started out by drawing a Mexican fort in Perspectives Pro. This came out very nicely, but it wouldn’t really help out on our gaming table.

Dioramas Pro then came to my mind and I asked myself, why I shouldn’t be able to design and build a few mexican-style buildings myself. They’d not come out as marvelous as the Whitewash City models, but probably good enough for ourselves. So I fired up CC3, loaded a Dioramas Pro template for the first time in quite some time and set about designing my own models.

Gatehouse Diorama

Construction Sheet for Gatehouse

There was a lot of trial and error at first, the project grew and grew, the paper bin overflowed, but I finally managed to create the complete set of buildings as shown in the Perspectives Pro map. I even added some extra goodies like cannons, the village fountain and a graveyard.

We had a blast in the two game sessions our posse stormed that fort and successfully freed the captive. The time I spent on building the model is of course way beyond what you’d normally spend on preparing one or two game sessions, but I had a blast and learned lots about paper-modeling (and Dioramas Pro) in the process. The fort even served as a display piece at Spiel’10 in Essen. And here it is on all its glory:
Fort in Action

More images of the fort and other props of our Deadlands campaign can be found in my online gallery.

4 Responses to “Paper Modeling – South of the Border”

  1. Your fort looks amazing – that being said I was a little disappointed with this month’s annual. Diorama is the one addon I never purchased because I don’t have any interest in that aspect of the hobby. I bought Cartographer to… cartographize (I may have just invented that word) and Diorama didn’t move me.

    I’m sure it’s great for other people – and everyone who subscribed now has 1) A plug for one of Profantasy’s more obscure products and 2) A model they can put together and hopefully some ideas on how to make other models if they’re in to that sorta thing.

  2. Indeed, we can’t please everyone all of the time with the Annual issues. But we aim to please everyone often enough to make these worthwhile. And thanks for you kind words on my fort! 🙂

  3. Hi, wonderfull work. Would you be kind enough to share the construction sheets, especially the church and the little houses? Many thanks in advance and once again very good job.

  4. Here are the CC3 source files for the village (Church, Alcalde’s villa, houses and accessoires). They don’t have much in the way of assembly instructions though, so be warned. Each of the A-F groups is set up to be printed on a A4 or US Letter page at 25mm scale.
    https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6261189/Deadlands/Mexican%20Village%20Diorama.zip