Stargrave Loot Runs: Scenario Terrain for Starport Heists & Settlement Raids

Most Stargrave games are won or lost before the first activation, in the two minutes where you and your opponent set out the loot tokens and decide where the board's chokepoints are. A Frostgrave-style crew game rewards a table that gives every loot counter a story: the crate behind the cargo hoist, the data core in a locked comms shack, the physical loot sitting in the open with nothing but a crossfire protecting it. This guide walks through building two scenario-driven Stargrave tables, a starport heist and a settlement raid, using physical 28mm sci-fi terrain kits you assemble and paint yourself. If you already read our earlier crew-skirmish primer, treat this as the follow-up that gets specific about scenario layouts.

Why Loot Placement Drives Stargrave Terrain

Stargrave and Frostgrave share the same core loop: loot tokens are placed on the table, crews deploy, and everyone races to grab and extract. The terrain around each token decides how expensive it is to claim. A token in an open plaza is cheap to reach but costs you a crew member to enemy fire. A token inside a building with one door is safe to hold but slow to extract. Good scenario terrain gives you both types in roughly equal measure, plus a few tokens where the answer is it depends on who gets there first.

When you own a physical kit rather than a pile of loose scatter, you can also be consistent. Buildings with real doorways and interior floors let you place tokens inside them and know exactly what line of sight looks like, which matters a lot when you're arguing over whether a Sniper on a rooftop can see the loot in a doorway two buildings over.

Table One: The Starport Heist

A starport is the natural Stargrave setting: landing pads, control shacks, fuel storage and cargo lanes. The Sci-Fi Uladh Starport Buildings Bundle gives you six outpost structures printed at 28mm (also available at 40mm for heroic-scale crews), which is enough to build a working starport quarter on a 3x3 foot board without leaving bare table.

Layout the loot around the pad. Put the central loot token, the one worth the physical loot or the data-loot you both actually want, in the open on the landing pad or the apron in front of it. Ring the pad with the smaller outpost buildings so every approach passes a doorway or a corner. Place two more tokens inside buildings that open toward the pad, and the last two along the board edges where a fast crew member (a Runner or anyone with a jump pack) can snatch and extract in two turns.

Add hazard rules. Stargrave's optional rules and many fan scenarios treat certain terrain as hazardous. A fuel storage tank makes a great hazard: any figure within 2 inches when it's hit by a blast weapon takes damage. The Uladh set's rounded structures and tanks read as fuel or coolant storage with a simple silver-and-rust paint job, and you can mark them with a small orange warning decal or hand-painted hazard stripes to signal the rule at a glance.

Extraction points. Instead of extracting off any board edge, try a house rule where crews must reach the landing pad or a marked shuttle hatch to score loot. This makes the pad the fight, which is what a heist should feel like.

Table Two: The Settlement Raid

The other classic Stargrave board is a frontier settlement, the kind of place where a crew shows up to relieve the locals of their goods and leaves before the militia responds. The Sci-Fi Atreus Settlement Terrain Bundle gives you eight buildings, which is more than enough density for a 3x3 table and a serious upgrade for a 4x4.

Streets over open ground. Arrange the eight buildings into two loose rows with a main street between them and narrow alleys cutting through. Put loot tokens in the alleys rather than the main street. This forces crews to commit figures into short-range firefights where Frostgrave-style close combat and grenades matter, rather than sitting back and trading shots down a long boulevard.

Use the buildings' interiors. Physical printed buildings with lift-off roofs let you place tokens inside and run the door as a real chokepoint. Stargrave's rules for opening locked doors and hacking terminals get a lot more fun when the terminal is actually on the table inside a building your opponent has to breach.

Reinforcement scatter. If you want the board busier, a few outpost pieces from the starport bundle above double as settlement infrastructure: a comms tower on the outskirts, a water tank, a small generator hut that can hide a token.

Going Vertical and Industrial

Once you have a starport and a settlement, the next step most Stargrave players take is adding a genuinely different environment for campaign variety. Splinter's Terminal is a sci-fi industrial outpost bundle that gives you the grimy processing-plant look: catwalks, tanks and blocky structures that create multiple height levels. Elevated walkways are ideal for Stargrave's climbing rules, and a crew with a grappling gun or jump pack suddenly has a reason to exist.

For a full modular sci-fi city that you can rearrange every game, the Sector Corvus Prime OpenLOCK sci-fi city bundle uses clip-together OpenLOCK walls and floors. Because the pieces reconfigure, you can build a new block layout for every scenario in a campaign, which solves the problem of a campaign table starting to feel the same by game four.

Assembly and Painting Notes for Scenario Terrain

These are unpainted, printed kits, so a little planning at assembly time pays off on the table. Three habits worth building:

Keep roofs removable. If a kit's roof is a separate piece, resist gluing it on. Removable roofs let you place loot tokens and models inside buildings, and that alone doubles the number of interesting scenario positions on a table.

Pin tall pieces. Comms towers, monorail supports and catwalk legs are the parts most likely to snap in transport. Drill a small hole, glue in a piece of brass rod or paperclip, and they'll survive a campaign season.

Paint for readability. Scenario terrain works best when hazards, extraction points and locked doors are obvious. Use a consistent colour for hazard markings across all your kits (a warm orange works on almost any sci-fi palette) and paint door frames a contrasting tone so both players can see at a distance where the entrances are.

A Sample Campaign Rotation

Here's how a four-game Stargrave campaign might use the tables above. Game one is the starport heist on the Uladh bundle with the extraction-at-the-pad rule. Game two moves to the Atreus settlement for a raid with tokens in the alleys. Game three heads into Splinter's Terminal for a vertical scramble where half the loot sits on catwalks. Game four returns to a rebuilt Corvus Prime block for a final showdown. Each board plays differently, each rewards a different crew build, and none of them require you to own more than a couple of bundles.

Ready to build your first scenario table? Browse our full range of sci-fi terrain kits, pick a starport or settlement bundle, and let the loot placement do the storytelling.