Welcome to the Pilgrimage District

I wanted to play Inq28. I imagined a critical world cut off by the Great Rift, vulnerable, with imperial agents struggling alone to suppress heretical secessionists and other, darker influences. This would require terrain, so I built some.

Pilgrimage District, Hive Sacrament, Gamma-Euphorion Prime

During our group’s earlier campaigns, I created a subsector grappling with political fallout from the abrupt loss of Imperial support. Within that subsector lies Gamma-Euphorion Prime, a shrine world established long ago to reinforce and propagate the Imperial Creed throughout the subsector.

The Celestial Chorus cult has taken root there, in Hive Sacrament. They seek to infect and pervert the righteous signals by which the faith of Imperial citizens is bolstered. Ordained Inquiry 7323006 recently arrived from the Juventius system in response, finding heresy and decay even in the Pilgrimage District near the starport. The situation is dire; the holy work begins at once.

Build highlights

My overall approach is the same as for my previous Frostgrave tiles: XPS foam risers glued to floor tiles for dimensional precision. Yet this project presents a novel challenge. I wanted to suggest industrial standardization and consistency with only my meager human limbs and available tools. We often sidestep the issue by modelling blown-out ruins or rusty derelicts in extreme decay, but I envision here a slow, early rot, apparent but not overwhelming.

Luckily, I own a resin 3D printer. I designed small architectural details in FreeCAD, intended to disguise the trickiest hand-crafted elements. 3D-printed gothic arches and corner caps allowed for a little sloppiness in my cuts and glue joins while still achieving the desired result. This was inspired by the recent Slice and Slot Kickstarter campaign, which I backed eagerly. The benches, candles, servitor, and statues all came from online STL file proprietors.

Drywall tape and poster board did the rest of the heavy lifting. Long, thin strips of poster board hide the sloppy edges of the drywall tape and XPS foam cuts. They came together fast; I churned out the last two tiles in an afternoon. I am considering experimenting with cheaper packaging EPS foam for future fully-encased tiles like this.

I took every shortcut while painting these, too, but that’s for a future post.