Zone Mortalis Ship Bridge

Zone Mortalis is awesome, a great environment and atmosphere, try it! My Zone Mortalis complement of tiles is currently sat at 7 official (6 painted) 6 unofficial painted. I still wanted a bit of a focal area, or target to aim towards. Hence a ship bridge.
So, I started some sketches, and some guesses. Firstly, it needs to be hardwearing, as my prior experience with scratchbuilt stuff is that it just will get knocked around more than normal. As a base I went for 2x2 feet of MDF, and then to get the height matched to the existing Tiles I added a layer of high density polystyrene between them for rigidity.
For the flooring, I had a load of mesh gauze specifically to imitate steel decking, which when combined with a combination of MDF lasercut panels (leftover from an urban set I’d hoped to use for Necromunda), some good old Warhammer movement trays, and some cardboard.


The intention with the Bridge was to vary the levels for line of sight changes, and because it’s a large tile, not to simply have a single open space to shoot across, as Mortalis is all about close-range. I then ‘peppered’ the deck with cabling, and added consoles as best I could from a combination of Mechanicum Kataphron destroyer side panels, and leftovers from everything I own.






The intention for the bastions at the back of the bridge were to sit right across the central routes of an aligned tiles with servitor skulls poking out as vox alcoves, so that you could approach the bridge from afar. The servitor consoles and screens are all cobbled together from card stuffs found in skips, and odd Knight parts, the servitors themselves intentionally obscured by the cablings coming into their chairs.

Pride of place of this entire endeavour was the Command throne, which was very enjoyable to create. The intention for this was very much to be central to the entire piece, and to appear as Gothic as possible. The Lions shields on the arms were offcuts that a ebayer had ‘chucked in’ to an order, and the main structure of the chair was greenstuff and Lego. Land Raider panels, Dreadnought shoulders, Dunestrider pintle mounts, Dreadnought panels, Knight innards, building parts and Milliput for gaps and something came together. This thing is pretty damn solid.


On to Painting. I’d intended to spend a bit longer on the bridge than the other tiles, but for expediency, and practicality I only managed to give it 80% of the attention that I’d intended. However I think it still looks the part, and terrain should never get as much of a focus as the models on it. I’ll revisit and repaint with greater care at a later date.

After one big drybrush, and a few select areas of focus, the thing was liberally weathered and spattered and dabbed. Free hand cross-hatching and some basic colour on the consoles and it was game-able! I’ve played 2 games on this now and it really works well, it’s a great focal point as hoped, and it increases the potential Mortalis game size massively.



Hope you like!