A gaming table Ruin - part 1

My current project, which will be probably take most of October to complete, is a ruined building for a gaming table that a friend of mine is building for our gaming group.

After some thought, I have compiled the following requirements list that the project must meet:

• it should have at least 2 covered levels to protect the units inside from barrage weapons (Thunderfire Cannon I'm looking at you)
• it should be 3 or 4 stories high
• I want a bit of scenery tied to the ruin, like a mountain or something like that
• it should have a big empty space for some decorative design

I'm not sure at the moment if I can pull it off but I'd like to add a bit of Khorne flavor to the project

With the requirements list completed I started to sketch up some ideas and in the end this is more or less what I'm planning to build:

As you can see I came up with a roughly L shaped building partially embedded in a mountain with a big empty space for a fire pit, like the ones that you could find in Khorne's throne room if you are so lucky to join him there :)

For this project I bought the Basilica Administratum and Sanctum Imperialis kits from GW and I started to play around with the bitz, trying to came up with the structures I wanted. I'm using a light MDF board cut to a size of roughly 25 x 25 cm.

I build a floor at a time, gluing all the pieces together and placing pins to join the main columns

After the glue has hardened I put all the floors together creating the two wings of my building:

As you can see in the following picture I glued (and pinned) a piece from the frame of the sprues under each wing to raise them up a bit from the ground to avoid covering them in dirt/sand afterwards. The sprues are glued with normal plastic glue to the building and with super glue the to MDF board. The balcony on the leftmost wing is also pinned in place.

After leaving the glue to dry for a couple of hours I used a bunch of polystyrene to create the main body of the mountain / rock areas by breaking it in irregular pieces and gluing them on top of each other with PVA glue

After leaving the PVA glue to dry for another couple of hours, I ended today work by applying a coat of PVA glue heavily diluted with water all over the polystyrene to harden it a bit and to make a stronger bound between the individual pieces. The diluted glue will dry overnight and it should be ready for the next steps of the project in the following days.

I'd like to mention that I'm planning to paint the ruin for the October Monthly Painting Challenge of the Wargamers Consortium Forums, an initiative that aim to motivate guys like me to paint their models from start to finish and don't leave them half finished like it so often happen to me :(
Check them out! :)