Ideal Idylls of the Idle Rat King

Work progresses on the sewers.  Black spray paint, white drybrush on the tiles, and one tile grayed up a bit.  The color gradations on this terrain are subtle; they are the details that you only don't notice when they aren't there.  Here's a comparison of the white (left) with gray applied (right):

With all of the stone tiles completely painted, the terrain looks like this:

 These are sewers, to there's even a bit of green, just the faintest hint of green, drybrushed onto the tiles.  Click on these for a close-up.  Here's a single tile so that you can see a bit better.

Next step is to paint in the sewage and the dirt into which the sewers were dug.  Actually, that's already done, but I'm going to wait one more day to show them to you.  Don't worry - I'll spare you the tedious details on painting the sewage and the dirt - tomorrow will be the finished product.

For ease of navigation, there's a tag cloud over to the right.  Have fun with the added functionality, kids.  Also, don't do drugs.

Tactical Terrain

Last time you saw the first of what should be several outdoor terrain tiles.  These open up the field of play, but if you're going to have an open field, you might as well just use gridded paper.  The whole point of the tiles is to present a 3D play experience, and the point of that should be to enhance the game.  A great way to enhance the game is to limit the players in some ways and give them choices in other ways - to force them to make decisions.

This just needs individual trees and rocks and other obstacles.
Man there's a lot of stuff to build for this game.

That brings us to the design of this first outdoor tile.  The foamcore let us carve a stream channel which forces the players into the decision making process.  They can jump into the channel and fight at a disadvantage, or they can fight for one of the crossings.  The danger is creating a piece like this is giving the players too few options.  With one bridge crossing the game devolves into a fight for that one square; that makes things dull and repetitive.

In this case, the tile gives them three different crossings, a bridge, a narrows they can jump across, and a ford they can wade across.  I may paint a nice road leading to the bridge, but that's one more feature to have to align when more tiles are in play, so that might not happen.

That's just enough choices.

In other news...the sewers look a lot better with black primer.  They'll be darker, but the tiles will jump out a lot better once painted.  

Next stops: Drybrushing, Detailing, and KOO-ka-mung-Ah!
Probably needs some movable bridges for those trenches, too.

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...