The Halfway Solution

So if 8" geomorph tiles aren't going to work, what is? That is the question.

After a day of mulling it over and several hours of research (read: trawling the internet), it occurred to me that making flat terrain tiles for 10-mm figures is a fairly low cost and non-time-intensive strategy. There's no reason not to make each dungeon unique. You really only need four tiles for each dungeon, and with a bit of thought, you can make the tiles for different dungeons fit together for one massive megadungeon.

Yesterday, I picked up a handful of 8-inch by 10-inch pieces of 2mm thick matte board. This is the stuff that the craft shop charges an arm and a leg for when you use it to make attractive borders for wall art. They always wind up with a stack of standard sized rectangles that they'll let you have for a buck.

Each sheet is the right size to give you a 13x13 grid of 15mm squares, plus enough left over to cut 29 tiles.  Here's a shot of the plan for one board, with a washer that will serve as a base for the little mans for scale.  It's a bit light, as I didn't want to press too hard lest the unused portions of the board end up with a grid, too.

The tiles are light gray and not this awful green.
Not quite sure what happend to the colors there.

Here is a small stack of the tiles carved out of the remaining scrap board.

The 2mm thickness for the tiles amounts to about a foot and a half in little man scale.  That's pretty good for stairs if we want to go 3D (we do), or even if we just want to add textures and layers to a single level dungeon (oh yeah we do).  More on that next time.