Welcome to Vorsteck

This is the first of my short series of posts on the rock town of Vorsteck, built for a game that will now, I suspect, never get played. The irony of the whole thing is this was the project this blog was initially set up to talk about. I expected BigLee to report on the game and I would follow up as it were on the other channel with some behind the scenes extras.

That aside here at last are the buildings of Vorsteck.

The Brief:

A town built underground, carved from the rocks and built using just rock boulders. There is no wood used for building, except maybe the very odd piece that has found its way down. The windows and doors are curtained by dried algae taken from the underground lake. There is a ruined area off in one direction and a large town hall / palace building in the centre.

Unfortunately the palace building was never completed; the basic frame was built from recycled cartons and boxes to reduce some of the cost, but was thrown away during the great purge and clear up as it had not progressed any further than being a pile of glued together boxes.

The majority of these buildings used bought materials rather than recycled materials because of the nature of the buildings, so for these buildings to never be used is a bit of a disappointment, although I’m sure BigLee will come up with an idea for them in the future and the design I went with was with the intention of making them multipurpose so maybe all is not lost. (More on that later)

The build consisted of several box houses all of varying size designed to look as if they had been completely built of stone. These were made from foam board covered in small DAS putty tiles which were made separately and glued on.

For other buildings where they were designed to look as if they had been built directly into the rock face, plaster moulds were used to form the ragged rocks, and they were fixed to the foam board skeletons. Then additional DAS putty stones were attached to show the additional building work. The plaster rocks took some fixing and at first proved to be very heavy.

A number of the pieces I built for the ruined castle set were also going to be made available for some of the ruined buildings of Vorsteck.


For this reason there were no additional wooden fixtures put on to the castle-ruin pieces and no foliage either. Next year I’ll be completing these pieces with the extra decoration that until now has not been added.

NEXT: Vorsteck versatile buildings