There Will Be Oil (Stain)

Friday morning: Half-inch hail hit the yard.  I live in Hawaii,
it's not every day that frozen water falls from the sky here.

Despite the deluge, on Friday I primed the sewers in flat white and hit them with a coat of black oil stain.  It's not nearly dark enough, nor did the stain penetrate deep into the cracks.  The mottling looks good, but this might need a black basecoat and building colors up from there.  We'll have to see about this.

While the stain dried, I started in on a new tile.  At some point the poor looters might get ambushed before they even get to the dungeon, so here's a single outdoor tile, just in case.  As you can see, I started with a piece of foamcore, and used a blunt mechanical pencil to press out grid marks.  Then I carved out a stream channel, and glued some spare foam in place for rocks to mark a small ford.  It's near the top of the tile in these photos.

The stream channel leaves that portion of the tile pretty flimsy.  It acts almost like a hinge, begging to be torn.  To keep that from happening, I glued a fitted piece of 2mm matte board to the base of this tile, and left it pressing under 5 pound weights overnight.

This is also a bit of a test piece to see if foamcore will work well for building 3D terrain for 10mm figures.  At 5mm in height it works great for shallow dips like this.  Time will tell if it works for larger, as in 2 story, structures.

First Three Sewer Tiles

Enough of the playing coy with the goods.  Here's the very first terrain board.  If you look close, you can spot the two examples of textures that I used in the last blog post.  You're looking down the long axis of a corridor three squares wide with a sewage channel running down the center.  

That channel present a nice obstacle for the heroic little mans.  One way to keep each dungeon distinct is to present unique challenges and give the players some reason to think tactically.  That channel forces them to pick a side or maybe split their forces.  At one square, they may be able to jump across it, but failure means bigger trouble than ever.

From start to finish, the construction of this tile required about an hour of effort.  I've since completed two more tiles, and they took about the same amount of time.  One hour for a long and elaborate hallway plus three rooms isn't that bad of a pace.

Today's lovely parting shots are of all three terrain tiles laid out in just two of the possible combinations.  As always, click on the picture for a bigger view.

These are going to look so sharp I'm tempted to start painting right now, but that would be a mistake.  I need to build one more tile to have enough space for all of those filthy minions of the Rat King.

Sewers of Cornerstone Keep

With the construction plan in place, or at least as in place as its going to get until it meets first contact with the enemy, we can now set about building the first dungeon tiles.  I'll spare you the details on the campaign background for now - it's enough to say that we are building a sewer system that will be populated by the contents of Pendraken's Rat King's Lair Dungeon Pack.

Before we get into that, though, one of the things to point out is the necessity for layers in a project like this.  Here's a great example of using the 2mm matte board for the basic tiles and cereal box cardboard for thinner tiles to add texture to a tile:

Those cardboard steps don't amount to a full fledged change in elevation, but the little drop adds a bit of depth and hence visual appeal to the board.

Here's another example of layers for texture.  I cut a 'hole' in four of the 2mm tiles and capped it with a washer cut from cereal box cardboard.  Before putting the ring in place, I glued a couple of cross cut pieces of spaghetti for grating.  There are four 'layers' here (base, bars, floor, and ring) to break up the monotony of the flooring.

These little details will give me more surfaces and edges to highlight and really make the hallways of this terrain jump out.  Next time we'll look at three of the tiles post-contruction and pre-painting.

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.

Dungeon Mapping

Let's think about this for a minute. Dungeon design for miniature use presents some unique challenges. You have to balance the feel of discovery of the unknown with replayability. At one end of the spectrum you have board games with a set single dungeon (like Dungeon) where the only random element is the monster and treasure selection. One the other end you have the room and hall approach favored by most commercial 3D dungeon products like Dwarven Forge.

It would be nice to build a new custom dungeon for every new hole in the ground that my players point their murderous avatars towards, but that's a lot of work. One and done just doesn't cut it for miniature wargaming. The downside of the room and hall approach is the sheer fiddly-ness (fiddle-osity?) of keeping everything together. Those rooms and halls tend to drift apart on the table every time you bump into it.

But there may be another way. What if you used the idea of dungeon geomorphs? These are tiles that always fit together, no matter how you slice them. You can pack rooms and halls together on the same tile and limit the amount of nudging it takes to keep the whole thing together.

So you start with these 8 tiles:

And you can make an awful lot of different dungeons, like so:

Now that I've seen it, though, that dungeon maze just looks too damn busy for my tastes.

[Update: Oh, and the other thing that occurs to me looking at this post, that arrangement of geomorphs gives you an unlimited number of dungeon layouts that all look like the same random collection of rooms and halls. Yuck. The more I look at this, the smarter it looks building a mockup before charging down that dead-end.]

There must be a better way...

New Project: Back to the Roots

With the latest car wars debacle still fresh in mind, it’s time to completely jump genres and scales.  It’s time to get back to my dungeon crawling roots. It’s been a few years since I’ve hosted a dungeon crawl, and this is as good a time as any.  Some thoughts on planning:

What rules?

This ranks as the most important question and the least important question at the same time.  On the one hand, the rules drive the miniatures.  On the other hand, there are a lot of rules out there, and they all operate from the same basic perspective with respect to the physical aspect of the game.  Every rule set worth its salt uses a square grid, so until we’re ready to really start rolling dice…we don’t need to answer this question just yet.  We will later, but not today.



A selection of Pendraken hero types in 10mm. 



What scale?

The big 25mm to 28mm miniatures are widely available and in a huge variety of styles, but they are so darn big.  You can only fit a few hundred in the box that I’ve got, and that’s assuming flat terrain tiles.  Which are boring.  They are also really expensive, on the order of $3 to $10 each, and they take an hour or more to paint.  Each.  Without the time, space, or money these are flat out wrong for me.



There are a lot of nice figures out there in the 15mm range, but most of those are sold in lots of 40-50 figures, the better to build an army.  You get a lot of personality, but wind up with a lot of unused lead in the bargain.  So that’s out, too.

Considering the three critical variables, there is really only one scale that will work for my dungeon crafting purposes, and that’s the not-quite-too-small-10mm range.  They are cheap – less than fifty cents a figure, and you can buy them in small enough lots for dungeon delving.  As if that’s not enough, Pendraken make a line of dungeon furniture in 10mm, too.  And if you don't think figures at this scale have enough personality, you haven't seen what Copplestone Castings can do:

Copplestone Casting's brilliant hero pack in 10mm.

What figs?

Here’s a question to which there is no final answer.  I can tell you this, though: I was able to pick up almost 20 heroes,  30 orcs, 16 ratmen, 3 bases of rats, a couple of food tables, a sewer beast, fire, pack animals, and a crate of food for less than 25 bucks.  That’s not a bad start.  For the record, I ordered one pack of heros and one pack of bad guys from each of Copplestone Castings and Pendraken Miniatures.  They'll be shipped out from the UK which gives me plenty of time to get started on a dungeon for them to guard and loot.

What dungeon?

That's the fun of this whole project.  I'm looking at all the various and sundry ways of building a 10mm dungeon from print your own to pre-cast walls and floors, and none of them look like as much fun as scratchbuilding my own.  At this point I'm still browsing the craft stores and kitchen drawers to see what looks cheap and effective.  At any rate, that's what you can expect from this blog over the next few months.

Kid's Stuff Redux

It's a travel week for me, and that means no update on my late, lamented project.  Time to cut my losses and move on from the car wars highway.  While I figure out what to do next, here's a quick shot of my son's latest acquisition:

Warhammer 40K Cadian Imperial Guard Command Squad

Personally, not a big fan of the Warhammer rulesets.  The one positive, that you can always find an opponent, is offset by just too many weaknesses in the overall system.  Gotta give the GW boys credit, though.  They know how to craft figures with a lot of personality.

Incidentally, there may be a use for my much too large to fit in a box urban terrain after all.  The locals have a semi-monthly-ish wargaming swap meet slash local trade message board.  It didn't sell on ebay, but might be worth some 40K loot for somebody locally.  If it can score me some Impies for the boy he might just start to show me a little respect.