Fortified Manor Set
Plastic Glue
Flying Base
Large Flying Base
Mordheim Window 4

Mordheim Building Sprue
Plasticard (Sheet Styrene)
PVA (white) Glue
Sand
Citadel Paints

Overall Construction

To create a Tower of Moonrise, begin by assembling the Fortified Manor set more or less as normal. To match what I've done here, you'll need to shuffle the parts around a bit. For instance, in my arrangement, the stone wall is actually on the opposite side of the buildings. However, you'll assemble almost everything, save the tower, as normal.

The stock tower comes with open windows, which would enable ambitious hobbyists to model a fully detailed interior. If you like, you can block the windows with plasticard to be painted as glass, as I have done here.

The Tower

The most involved part of the conversion is extending the tower to make it a bit taller. I considered stacking two tower pieces together, but upon further examination of the sprues, I found this approach to be impractical. Add height to your tower by cutting plasticard panels and detailing them with cornerstone and window bitz from the Mordheim sprues as well as any Arcane Architecture parts you might have in your bitz box. Measure your panels carefully so that they fit exactly with the stock tower pieces.

If you like, you can detail your plasticard panels further with battle damage, exposed brick, and the like. Simply cut holes in the panels and fill them with green stuff sculpted appropriately. I chose not to detail my panels in favor of adding texture in the painting stage.

The Mirrors

Finally, you'll need to add some kind of detail to the top of the building to represent the moonlight array that gives the tower its name. There are a lot of ways to approach this part, and I considered designs based on lighthouses, signal fires, and television repeater stations. I finally chose to model a set of focusing lenses, made out of flying bases, suspended from a frame, made from plasticard off cuts.

My frame is far from square, and I'm a bit embarrassed by the poor craftsmanship. However, others have (charitably) suggested that the rickety frame helps to invoke the character of the tower's location in the backwoods of the Empire. The whole array fits into the top of the tower with a pin.

You could make a similar frame out of all sorts of materials: balsa wood, old sprues, craft sticks, and the like. Use your imagination to create a unique arrangement on top of the tower.

Painting & Other Suggestions

Painting was fairly basic, and I used a color scheme similar to the one used on the Headless Badger Inn terrain piece.

You might consider mounting your Tower of Moonrise on a hill to give the piece more height, adding more walls for extra defense, or extending the height of your tower even more with more plasticard.