Before the opposing armies clash you need to prepare the floor or tabletop area for battle. Initially at least, a small playing area will suffice, say about 6 feet by 4 feet. This gives the troops room to manoeuvre and bring their weapons to bear.
The tabletop or floor is a flat and featureless plain, devoid of trees, buildings, slopes and other terrain. Part of the challenge and enjoyment of Warhammer is that you can create your own battlefield layouts. You can make trees and woods, hills, rivers and other features, but to begin with the buildings supplied in this boxed game will be enough. Once you have played a few games you will be ready to introduce new terrain. You can either buy terrain or make it yourself. As a temporary measure you can improvise using twigs and roots for trees, books laid flat to represent hills, and small packing cartons become towers and houses. Model trees are available from hobby stores including Games Workshop and are a good investment.
You'll find articles about terrain making in White Dwarf magazine and if you live near a Games Workshop store you'll be able to look at the shop scenery and ask the staff for advice on making your own.
The battlefield may be laid out in any way you and your opponent like. One popular method is for one player to lay the scenery out while the other player chooses which side he will fight from. This ensures that the scenery is laid out in a fairly even-handed manner, without conferring advantage to either side.
To help you set up your battlefield we have devised a terrain generator system which allows you to determine what types of scenery are present. Don't worry if you generate items of terrain you don't have, just re-roll until you get a result you can use. Many players like to draw up their own terrain generator charts based upon their collection of model scenic items. This is certainly a good idea as it saves endless re-rolling of unwanted results. Rules for various types of terrain are given in full in the section on Movement.
Begin with both players sitting on opposite sides of the table. Each player rolls a D6 to determine who starts to place scenery - the highest scoring player goes first. To generate a piece of scenery roll 2D6 and consult the Terrain Generator Chart on the next page. The player places the piece of scenery indicated somewhere on his own side of the table. If you place a river it must flow entirely through your table half. You may not place scenery on your opponent's side of the table unless it is a plain hill, in which case you can place it straddling the dividing line if you wish.
A further variation, and one which many players favour, is to set up the scenery and then roll randomly to determine who deploys on which table edge. This means you never know which edge you are going to start from when you are setting up the scenery, so both players are encouraged to set up a balanced battlefield.
Each player continues to lay down scenery by turns. When you have one river or stream on the tabletop any further river/stream results must be re-rolled. It would obviously be silly to have a battlefield criss-crossed with rivers! A player may place one type of scenery on top of another to produce, say wooded hills or hillsides with walls.
When it is his turn to place a piece of scenery a player may choose to stop, and declare he is satisfied with the scenery as it is. The other player then has the option of generating and placing one more piece if he wishes. The battlefield is now complete!
If both players are in agreement scenery can now be moved around or removed if it is felt a better battle will result. For example, you might allow your opponent to remove a wood from his side of the table if he lets you reposition a hill.
Remember the objective of setting up terrain is to provide an interesting and entertaining battle, not to impede movement to the extent where armies are unable to get to grips. If neither player is satisfied with the terrain once it has been generated then start again! We have not defined the size of hills or woods, as we assume players are going to use scenery they have made themselves. Obviously it would be silly for a wood to extend over the whole table! As a general rule no terrain feature may be bigger than 12" across, and even this would be large for a feature which is difficult or impossible to move over.
Rivers can be particularly problematic if one side is determined to play a wholly static, defensive game. Dwarfs often favour this kind of approach because they are rather slow and tend to favour long range shooting weapons like crossbows. This makes for a rather dull game, so a river is never placed over more than half the length of the table unless both players agree. Should the river extend over more than half the table length then the opposing player may place a bridge or ford as described on the chart. Even with this restriction in mind, deep rivers do not make for entertaining fast moving games and players may prefer to avoid using them altogether in favour of either shallow rivers or a lake.