Dungeon Construction - Paint on the Walls

Watching Guy Ritchie's The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was a fun, if trying*, way to pass time while slapping paint around on the tiles for Castle Meatgrinder.  The tiles were spraypainted earlier in the day, with some trepidation.  

*Fun spy flick, but a mistake to put on a movie with that many subtitles in it while you try to paint something.



Worried for nothing.  The craft store sells a nice foam-safe spray paint in a dark gray.  After spraying these boards, you can dust them with a black and light gray for an easy mottling effect.  The boards were ready for use, at that point, but I slapped down some brown and gray on the floors, too, to add even more texture.

Then some gray on the walls, and you're off to the races. At this stage in the game, we're looking to make the floors look dirty, and make the walls pop out from the tile.  With such low placeholders, you really want the walls to stand out from the tiles.  As you can see, the lighter gray provides that all important visual queue to the nature of things.  Looks like we need to darken the shadows on that flight of stairs heading down, though.  See it in the lower right hand corner of this next photo?

Still have some work to do on this, but it's coming along swimmingly.  Rightnow everything still packs up into a nice and tidy box, with some room left over for furniture.  Once I get the last few tiles built, painted, and in the box, we can start looking for smaller boxes to hold the more fragile furniture pieces.

Now that's when the fun really starts.  Right now, these tiles are fine, but with some crazy set dressing we can turn these barren halls into weird shroom forests, spider holes, and the all important lair of the mad wizard Scruyu B'dee.

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With respect to the arch-wizard demon-lich, Scruyu.  There was a time when I would have tried to come up with a serious and ominous sounding villain name, the sort of name that would be memorable, without sounding ridiculous.  One thing my years hunched behind a DM screen has taught me is that it can't be done.  Any name you come up with will be twisted into a parody name within five minutes, and that's the only name the players will remember.  These days, I save them the work and just give them softballs.

Whatever helps them remember the names during the breaks between game sessions, you know.