There are a number of excellent renditions of Balin's Tomb designed for use in the Lord of the Rings (or Hobbit) Strategy Battle Game by Games Workshop. One of the best that I've seen is at the One Ring (Part 1, Part 2). It's absolutely top notch.
But storage space is an issue for me, and I just don't have the room for scenery of that size. So this article discusses some of the trade-offs I've made in constructing my own, less-detailed, version of Balin's Tomb.
Other examples that I found useful as inspiration have been published in Battle Games in Middle Earth #21 magazine (left picture) and The Fellowship of the Ring Journeybook (right picture).
(Click on any image to see an enlargement.)
I've seen a few Balin's Tombs (even in White Dwarf) that are "standard table size" (4'x4'). That seems way too large to me. I want a small playing space with a slightly claustrophobic feel, but with enough room for a bit of maneuvering. With this in mind, the Fellowship's 18"x18" version seemed a little too small. So I decided to go with a 24"x24" playing area.
The BGiME suggestion to use four 1'x1' cork tiles as base seemed like a good idea. Tiles can be separated and stacked atop one another, and by making the walls removable I can take apart the Tomb and end up with about a 15"x15"x4" stack, which even I can find the room for. (The metal bar in front of the stack is a 15" ruler.)
I didn't bother with the hallway piece (a fifth tile) that BGiME used, though. I want all eyes on the Tomb room proper.
The cork tiles provided some intrinsic texturing for the floor. The seams between the tiles are quite visible in the picture; my memory is that the initial fit was tighter than what you see here. I was careful to mark and track which piece went where, and in what orientation, so it's not casual mismatch of the parts. I wonder if the paint caused any shrinkage? At any rate, the flaws are much less noticeable in actual play
I cut foam insulation to make the raised walkway, and used HirstArts floor tiles to build up the staircases. These were all glued down with wood glue. You could probably get away without gluing the walkway, which would improve the storage footprint even more, but I worried that the walkway would slide around too much during play.
I ran two wooden skewers through each corner across the walkway seams to help with structural strength, since the cork tile is otherwise not much support.
The rubble is just spare HirstArts blocks and rocks.
BGiME suggests using textured wooden beading along the bottom of the walls, and I preferred that to the rather spartan look of the Fellowship version. I found some examples in Michael's (an Arts & Crafts chain here in the U.S.) that looked vaguely dwarfish, cut it down to size, and glued it down. This also helps strengthen the seams. A miter box was handy for getting the 45-degree angles needed in the corners just right.
The sarcophagus is just layers of foamcore. This ended up being too light, so I cut out a circular area from the bottom of the base and glued in a 1" fender washer to give it a little more heft, which helps keep the corners of the cork tiles from curling up.
The Fellowship piece doesn't use any walls, which helps with visibility during play as well as storage. But it gives up any feeling of being in a small room. So I knew I wanted walls.
But BGiME's permanent walls complicate storage, and it's virtually impossible to get the movie shot of Frodo hiding behind a pillar from the Cave Troll with the walls in the way. Since that was a cool scene, I decided to make removable walls so I, too, could get those tight shots from behind the characters.
Plain walls seemed, well, too plain, but I wasn't fond of the way BGiME did alcoves, either. So I took some inspiration from that great One Ring version and added some alcove-like decorations, using scrap foamcore. My "alcoves" are 2-3/4" high and 5" wide, made from 1/2" strips. The top bars are 2-1/4" wide.
The walls themselves are 5" tall. They hug the raised platform and you can see from the earlier photo in the "Sizing" section that I didn't bother painting the bottom strip that is hidden by the platforms when the walls are in place. The scenery takes enough paint as it is; there's no point in painting what no one will see anyway.
I wanted the walls bowed a bit, slightly convex, so that when attached to each other the resulting tension at the edges would help keep the center flush against the raised walkways. Unfortunately, after my initial painting the walls were bowing concavely -- the opposite of what I needed. I solved that by brushing plain water on the outside surface and waiting a day, resulting the convex bow shape you can see in the "Sizing" section.
I didn't want the outside of the walls to distract from the action on the inside, so I decided they should be black. I could have used paint, but instead I bought some cheap black contact paper on Amazon and just cut it to size and stuck it to the back. I went ahead and covered the openings as well so they don't need to be masked when photographing games. If you do the same, be smarter than me and use your wall opening as a template to cut an extra piece to exact size before covering the wall. You can then attach this to the contact paper covering the hole, and then there's no sticky part of the contact paper exposed. This will help keep the dust away.
The walls are joined together with velcro strips. The result isn't quite as tight as I'd like, actually, but with a little jiggling you can get satisfactory results.
I decided to reuse the Moria pillars that I made for the Khazad-dum scenario. This doesn't match the movie, but seemed expedient and the look is not too bad. I arrange the pillars so the Cave Troll base just fits around them. This lets the hobbits hide behind the pillars, but not with complete immunity to danger.
Originally I had planned to make a working front door for the room. I had planned to attach it to the outer edge with masking tape hinges, which would be covered by the contact paper. Unfortunately, the thickness of the walls prevented the doors from actually opening. Were I doing it again, I would attach the door to the inside edge of the wall before constructing the archway around the door. The archway (more 1/2" foamcore scraps) could then cover the masking tape.
So that's my Balin's Tomb. Now to get a battle report together...