“What Scale Terrain Should I Use?”

It’s time to answer another of the Moonstone community’s most asked questions, alongside “Does Jerry’s butt have a name?” and “What’s in Portly Pete’s flange?”. This time we are looking into terrain scale. What scale is best for Moonstone terrain?

Booty’s Bilge at Salute 2024, just to show off really…

The Short Answer: Don’t Worry too Much

Anything from 25mm-35mm, with a wide tolerance for many, many reasons.

The Longer Answer: 32mm, Sort-of

Moonstone miniatures are based on a 32mm scale, which is the rather awkward ratio of 1:57.2 for all you scale modelers out there (have fun with that). This means at its simplest level: when you are out there looking for terrain, anything that says ‘32mm’ on it is going to be about right.

The Long (Long) Answer: Whatever you Choose!

Except, 28mm is actually pretty good too… and 35mm... In fact, boiling the environs of Tauber down to one simple scale is doing the world’s inhabitants (as well as medieval architecture) a great disservice.

I’m going to talk about doors and windows a lot, which seems weirdly focused but these tend to be the ‘tells’ that people notice when scaling wargaming terrain. Walls are pretty standard and I’ve yet to hear anyone comment “that stanchion is rather thick”. (Actually that’s exactly the sort of thing my wife would say, but she wouldn’t really be talking about a stanchion and I’d have to apologise in polite company.)

Moonstone’s look and feel is based on Medieval Britain / Europe (roughly 1000s to the 1500s) and from Fritz’s Landsnecht cosplay to Sir Pubert’s oversized helm, the visual style of the game tries to stick with that where we can. Obviously fantasy is fantasy, and we have firearms, inflated frogs and other anachronisms, but by and large Medieval is where it’s at.

So to find out why my answer to the question above is “don’t worry too much about it” we are first going to use Professor Boffinsworth’s patented timey-peeky-glass to look into history itself!

Windows of varying size in Sherborne House stately home, because standardisation is for losers.

Location, Location, Socio-Economic Class!

So you want to have ‘accurate’ buildings for the time period, what should they look like? Well, that depends on how much money the inhabitants have. We can break down the people who lived in this time into three distinct classes: peasants, merchants / guildsmen, and nobility / royalty. There are variations within these but I’m writing a terrain article not a historical essay, so we’ll just stick with those (this is long enough already!).

The Baron does not want to meet the peasant that needs a door this big in their little hut.

Peasants lived in the fields and farms, in small wattle and daub and thatch cottages with teeny-weeny windows and one small door. And I mean small - they needed a hole big enough to fit through, but not so big it would let out any excess heat, because central heating isn’t going to arrive for many centuries. There may be another larger door if the farmers shared space in their home with livestock. This was also about warmth, using the animals to heat things up (and theft, especially if you happened to share a border with an unfriendly neighbour).

This lovely Tabletop World Blacksmith’s hut is one of my favourite terrain pieces, but The Baron wants you to know it’s about as historically accurate as Braveheart. The door is too wide, it’s stone not wattle and daub, and how many windows? Do you want pneumonia?

The merchant class (largely guildsmen in cities) were the blinged out overlords of architectural glory. (Only the church was more flamboyant, but go read Pillars of The Earth for that.) These guys had money, and because they were securely in large well defended towns they were not afraid to show it off! MASSIVE doors! Bloody huge! ‘Look how important I am!’ All the windows! ‘I can buy glass you low socioeconomic peasants!’ The wooden beamed ‘Tudor’ buildings we associate with all fantasy genres are in this category, and the dimensions changed based on how deep the owners pockets’ were.

This Battle Systems ruined farmhouse is advertised as 28-32mm, And is a typical “Tudor” terrain piece (though it’s seen better days). As you can see, it’s a perfect scale for Fancyhat, even if he prefers the elaborate buildings of Machberg or Sunrise city.

Time for nobility! The royals and their pals, who had HUGE stone houses with absolutely TINY windows? (Ooh, twist!) Turns out if you live outside a secure city and are super rich, you are more concerned with some other git breaking in and stealing your stuff than you are about looking pretty. Or, ya know, someone trying to murder you and take your crown. You might have the odd decorative door or window on the upper levels, but most will be small slits or utilitarian doors barely big enough to fit their intended audience,

This scratch built tower at Moonstone HQ is massive and imposing (and phenomenal). Personally the Baron thinks the large doors seems a tad indefensible, but all the windows are way above ground level and accurately tiny.

Reading through just these three simple examples you should see one thing - there was no such thing as ‘standard’ sizes. Doors were as small (or big) as needed, windows too. Building size was as big as you could afford to build or heat. Friar Flavious is going to have as much trouble squeezing into a nobles porch as he is beaky bobby’s hut. This means justifying your slightly smaller than average 28mm building or bulky 1/48 chateau on a Moonstone table isn’t an overly difficult task. That’s before we even get to my second point:

We’re not Only Human, After all…

Agatha is renovating the Tavern after Firespitter had one too many and decided to write his name on the wall, and as work is progressing one of the gnomish masons wanders over and asks, “How big do you want the doors?” This is not an easy question for our beleaguered innkeeper. Like peasant huts, the door needs to be small enough that it lets out as little heat as possible when customers wander in and out, so a smallish door makes sense. On the other hand, Gotchgut is one of Agatha’s best customers and he does not fold up small, so maybe a giant-sized door would prevent undue damage? That said, if the door is too big her smaller faun and fae customers won’t be able to move it at all…

Ribald thinks this inn is gnomecrap and will be leaving a 1 rock review on Trolladvisor.

Any ‘historical’ rules for architecture go straight out the window (which is only a problem if you’re a merchant and had it glazed) the second fantasy races get involved. For example:

• It’s all well and good a noble having a tiny door and a twisty stair to his guard room, but if his giant bodyguards get stuck every time they need the loo it’s not exactly practical (or sanitary).

• A faerie shopkeeper might have a bigger door on the front in case they get any cross-species trade, and a tiny back door 10ft up in the air for themselves.

• Gnomes are a naturally friendly species so often scale their doors for human guests, but private chambers such as doctors and churches will only have doors the size of a stout Gimble. (They generally do not have round doors anymore because they are extremely impractical and encourage overeating, though some do still hold to this tradition in the remote countryside.)

I didn’t even put ground floor doors on these scratch built Faerie houses, although the wasps’ nest style barracks has a ladder for visitors…

So, yay! All the things I said in the first section are now null and void, because trolls exist! How fun! Hopefully you are already thinking “I guess scale just isn’t that important”, which is correct! BUT there are a few things I can say about size.

Size Isn’t Everything

Most miniature buildings you purchase are going to be scaled for humans, because big terrain is massively species-ist and believe in human dominance over all fantasy worlds. (Or humans are just the most common race in fantasy - I don’t know, but it sounds logical.) This means that a door will usually look about right for a human to pass through, but bigger than a gnome and smaller than a giant. Multi-cultural gamers have no fear however! If you use a smaller scale than 32mm, then you’ll have perfect goblin / gnome / faerie terrain straight out of the box. In turn, a larger scale will be great for giants (and trolls to a lesser degree, but they aren’t builders for the most part, finding overhanging rocks quite luxurious and stone bridges practically palatial).

Weird Mick quirk- after years of playing Malifaux and Bushido, I always make my doorways between 30-50mm wide when scratch-building. This allows models’ bases to move through, which in real scale would be just shy of 2-3m wide - a silly size for any door, but it works in the game which is more important for some systems.

Outside of buildings, terrain scale is pretty much nonsense. If you played with a true-scale oak tree on a 3x3 table you’d find it pretty hard to reach the models, and a full-sized river would make Sen’ara and Bristlenose very happy indeed, though it’s going to slow the game down a fair bit. Everything needs to be just a bit smaller than true-scale to work, which luckily is pretty much how every manufacturer makes it!

One day I’ll work out how to build a true scale giant redwood grove to put a Faerie palace in…

In Summary

Terrain scale is massively unimportant, your visual enjoyment of the game is very important. So use terrain that you love. We love Tabletop World, Battle systems, Sarissa laser cut, EonsOfBattle downloads, Bad Squiddo, and 3D printed things we can scale however the hell we want, and so many more we can’t name them all! We also love our own scatter terrain of course!

Ultimately: you can use whatever you want. There’s no terrain police. At least I don’t think there are? Those blue lights better be Shabbaroon having another rave..

See you across the table!

Mick