Mausoleum: a Frostgrave build

When last we saw Tim the Necromancer, he’d heard rumours of a hidden underground library, which sounded like exactly the sort of place he’d want to loot as his adventures so far has included a distinct lack of magical tomes. I imagined that for a valuable library to have remained untouched, it must be inaccessible in some way, or hidden, so decided that the next scenario I should play would be the Mausoleum: Tim is a Necromancer after all, so digging up a dead librarian to say ‘vee have vays of making you talk’ strikes me as somewhat apt (as well as explaining why other wizards haven’t already picked the place clean).

So I needed a Mausoleum. So I made one, and it looks like this:

So, last September, I set about making one. The scenario states that it should be 6 inches square with a door on each side, so I started with that base. I liked the idea of decorative columns to avoid it just being a plain box, and some wine corks made the perfect base for this:

As ever, cork sheet it my go-to for constructions like this, being light, easy to cut and glue, and also having a nice texture when it’s time to start drybrushing. 

I boxed out the corks, so that they could stand inset in the corners of the mausoleum:

And then made a template to ensure that all four sides were the same:

I also added some little niches to take bones or candles, to really sell the mausoleum angle. Yes, I know they look like eyes on a face at this point. One other fun fact - I didn’t measure the niches against a skull part, and just eyeballed it, and so they turned out to be a little on the snug side when I later came to install some bones…

When making a structure like this, if it’s going to be a sealed box (rather than having a playable interior) you can have all sorts of interior constructions, like the backing to the niches here

Or incautiously slapping some thin card across the back of the doorways to give a surface to build doors on

As well as adding some chunks of cork to help attach it to the base (as a single layer of thin cork isn’t much space for squaring it up and getting a decent bond with glue)

Then it was just a case of glueing it all together to make a many sided box, with masking tape holding it all square(ish) while the glue dried:

Then it was just a case of applying filler to smooth out the joints:

(Ably assisted by my children, at this stage)

Then I popped on a roof that was the same size as the base, and bob is your mother’s brother:

Whenever you’re waiting for glue to dry, it’s a good idea to give it a good squash to ensure a firm and even bond:

This still looked a bit boxy for my tastes though, so I set about fancying up the roof. Nothing too fancy, I just added squares of diminishing sizes to give a stepped effect (whilst still ensuring that there was space for any adventurous minis that wanted to climb up there during a game):

And again, clamps and squashing ensured that it was all nice and even:

Well, as even as it can be with my wonky cutting, but you know what I mean. To cap it all off, I added a dragon egg piece from a Game of Thrones Risk set (as it put me in mind of an architectural pineapple, a subject I read a book on twenty years ago randomly), then went at it with filler and sand to texture it up and make it look less than brand new:

Then I undercoated it black, gave it a misting of grey spray, and then… a year passed. It sat in a box, we moved house, it sat in a different box. But then I found myself unexpectedly having some time off work, and decided that I wanted to make some progress on the set of generic rock formations that had… also been sat in a box for months. And digging out my terrain painting supplies (which also involved a walk to B&Q, as my Wilko tester pot greys had all but dried out in the interim, and I can’t just nip to Wilko any more), I figured I could also paint my Mausoleum at the same time.

But then I decided I also wanted to play a game in my time off, and that meant that the Mausoleum got painted at the expense of the rocks, and now it looks like this:

Once the piece was painted, I set about painting some skulls and bones from my rapidly dismissing box of spare boney bits. I quickly realised that I had erred on the smaller side when cutting my niches, so some careful filing was required to get them to sit nicely in the slots, and painting individual bones before glueing them into place largely involved me getting more paint on my fingers than on the bones, but eventually it was done.

What’s next? The game I played using it!