The "holiday season"

We're currently in the tail end of August. This means that there's only 2 months until the Samhain/Hallowe'en season, and 4 until the winter festival season (Hanukkah, Christmas, Hogmanay, Solstice, etc.). As such, it's time to start saving your pennies.

In part i say that because of the consumerism of the "festive season", but primarily because the next 5 months will give a lot of opportunities for the canny hobbyist to pick up bargain terrain.

Obviously, the scale in which you play will be a big factor in all of this, and the genre/period of the setting, but, look out for the following and you can dress your table fairly cheaply:

Hallowe'en
Shops that sell seasonal decorations will fill with skulls, gravestones and other macabre trinkets. While most of these will be too large for use in most games (unless giant skulls are a thing in the setting), many of these places will have little trinkets, such as necklaces, pins and bracelets, that will contain elements much more in-scale with Heroics scale and larger, allowing you to, with a little work make some cemetery terrain, or a charnel house, or similar.

Also look out for haunted house ornaments and toys and animal skull trinkets. Some popular brands of toys are in a close enough scale that the toys that get pushed in the run up to Hallowe'en can be used as intact buildings or tombs in game. Animal skulls, often made approximately life size for costume elements, sometimes with other "bones", can be very useful for certain periods and regions, especially Africa and India, for elephant graveyards, or North America up to the early 20th century, for sites of buffalo hunts and such. For fantasy, these could be even more exotic animal remains, like dragons and chimrae.

Winter
Christmas decorations will often be on sale before Hallowe'en decorations, since Christmas is a bigger economic cash cow for most companies.

The most common thing to look for are miniature Christmas trees. These are generally cheap and nasty little things made of fibres in a twisted wire stem. You can get nicer ones, but why bother? The cheap ones can be used straight away for forest terrain pieces, or, with some masking tape or caulk around the stem, some paint and some scatter, they can become decent forest pieces.

Obviously, a lot of companies will have special deals in the run up, including miniature companies, but keep an eye out in the toy section. As i said above, some toy ranges are similar in scale to some games, and in the run up to Christmas, retailers will often overstock toys that they expect to sell well. If sales of these lines aren't up to expectations, the prices may start dropping in mid December, and they'll almost certainly be included in the January sales.

In a similar vein, a number of stores will try to sell "traditional" Christmas decorations, including larger scale train sets, often with engines suitable for games in the North American wars of the late 18th to mid 20th centuries. S gauge or scale is approximately that of Heroics. Similar decorations often include castles, in 6mm-ish scale, and Victorian style, Dickensian, street scenes, which can provide cheap and easy, ready painted model buildings, again, often in a comparable scale. Figures from such sets are generally too out of scale to be much use, but can be used for statues and similar.

General
Believe it or not, there are some products that are sold as one thing for Hallowe'en and another for Christmas, which can be very useful for a gamer on a budget (although, for the most part, these are add-ons, not core elements).

For Hallowe'en you'll find a number of white, fibrous products sold for use as spider web, for Christmas these same products are sold for use as fake snow, or as "angel hair" and similar creepy concepts. Of note is the finest, most fibrous of these. Tiny fragments of this can be used for old cobwebs in sheltered spots on model buildings, or larger pieces to cover doors and windows to suggest a building has been long abandoned. Similarly, tiny fragments on tree branches or window ledges can be used to elicit the idea of a light snow fall.

Magic grain/reindeer food is a common enough product that's terrible for the environment. It's basically sand, gravel or grain mixed through with glitter or shredded plastic to give a sparkle. Rather than poisoning local wildlife with it, mix it with some PVA, and you've a great way of emulating an uneven, cobbled street surface.

Tinsel, once a feature only for Christmas, is now often available, in a different colour range, for Hallowe'en. This takes a bit of work, but, if you get the short-, thin-fibre foil stuff, it can, relatively easily, be made into over grown hedges. Basically, in 6mm, paint and scatter will do the job, in larger scales, a few rows up each side of a bit of board, another along the top, paint and scatter, and attach to a base.

So, a few ideas for things to look out for over the coming months, that will let you build up your terrain collection without eating into you hobby budget (since they're clearly seasonal decorations).