Paper Medieval Tent from Codex Manesse

One of the fun bits about Never Mind the Billhook is this rule about Morale tokens: each army has a number of Morale tokens, and every time you suffer a reversal you have to surrender one of them - when you run out of tokens to surrender, you lose the battle. To keep your opponent from knowing how many tokens you have remaining, the author recommends you hide them inside a miniature tent.

Now I have three 15mm DBX- style camps from the purchases I made on ebay, but these - as many 15mm tents made for wargaming are - are solid tents with no place to keep the tokens. I decided a quick way of making "hollow" medieval tents was with paper or cardstock terrain, and found this one on googling.

The template is in pdf, and comes in layers, so there are different patterns of the scallops, and you can choose to have the flaps up or down. The template seems to fit 28mm figures, but I scaled mine down by 50%, which works well for 15mm.

More importantly, at 50% the template fits just nice around these extra sturdy cardboard tubes which I have been saving up - gluing the template around a sturdy core makes things a lot easier, and also means you can just print on paper instead of cardstock. The template gives a slightly tapering tent, while the tube is straight; this isn't an issue in 15mm since it is easy to compensate by squishing the paper a little, but in 28mm you may want to find a suitable core first - like maybe a small yoghurt tub - and then scale the template to the exact size that will wrap nicely around your chosen core.

Anyway, it was a simple job of gluing the template onto the tube, then cutting the opening for the flaps.

For the roof I simply taped the edges together without bothering with the flaps.

You don't want to tape all the way to the edge, since the edge will need to be cut and folded down, as you will see later.

I chose a 60mm round MDF base as the base for the tent, and assembled the components with white glue.

I then snipped the edges of the roof and folded the tabs down, as you can see in the photo above.

Finally, I painted the base to match my battle mat.

This was a quick and easy project, and I am now thinking of ways to make functional terrain pieces for my other games.