Tomb of the Tiny Pharoah

With those new 10mm figures arriving from over Pond, the continent, and then halfway across another pond, I've had plenty of time to get a jump start on the dungeons.  Here's the second (or third if you count the wilderness area), in all it's complete glory.  This time around, we're going fully 3D.

As always, the tiles can be rearranged to make a lot of different floor plans.

The red tiles are elevated by a full 10mm, and the only access to them is the steps flanking the altar at the far side of the room.  The baddies can plug up the steps and rain arrows down on the heroes.  Those two movable columns can serve as cover.  There's something a bit off about this dungeon - one detail needs to be added, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

The !Egytian temple room.

The four columns are made of small wooden spools bought for 15 cents at the local craft store.  Card stock squares cut to the size of the tiles hides the spool holes.  Click on the images for a closer look at the hieroglyphics along the top of the columns.  They run the length of the interior walls of the back room as well.  Those were printed up, cut to size, and glued in place before the protective dull coat.  Nothing too fancy.

Four columns should do it - every column shrinks the dungeon
by one square, so you don't want too many.

I haven't even ordered the figures for this dungeon yet, but it made for a good project to tide me over until the first figures arrive.  Which they did.  I show you what they look like tomorrow.

Irish Megaliths

Happy Saint Patrick's Day, peeps.  How about some nice Irish standing stones to celebrate.

These are actual stones, based on 12mm steel washers and painted up in colors to match the river stones.  The steel washers secure the stones to magnets that line the transport box.  The bases were sanded and painted using the same techniques and colors as the boards, so that they'd blend right into the tile.

The sacred ring of standing stones.

It felt a bit silly painting black rocks black, but real rocks just don't have enough color and contrast for use on the table as is.  The extra effort to use similar colors and techniques in the painting helps the boards look like a unified whole.

Adventures in the Great (and Tiny) Outdoors

As promised, the outdoor tiles are complete.  The rivers don't line up nearly as well as hoped, but they do provide tactical, interest to each board.  Here you can see a 1-tile offset, hardly the end of the world.

No flocking on these boards - it would look HUGE!

If you need a wide open space, you can arrange the tiles like so:

Give me land, lots of land...

That would be a really boring battle, though, so the next stage of the project is to build trees, rocks, logs, fences(?), and other things to block movement and line of site.

Close up of the shallow ford.

This shot also shows what you get when you drybrush over shallow impressions in the boards.  In the first two photos, the grid lines disappear in the random ground cover pattern.  You need to look close to spot the grid, but when you look for the straight lines, they jump right out at you.

Kid's Stuff Threedux

A good friend bailed me out of some personal drama (loaned me a spare car when my transmission went ker-chunk). Our kids are both into 40K, and after a recent battle, a couple of his terrain pieces wound up in our box.  As a partial thanks for the loaner, I spent an evening sprucing up his son's Imperial Bunker.  It started as a flimsy cut-out glued together scrap of printed cardstock. It wouldn't sit straight and tended to blow over in the slightest breeze.

First step was reinforcing the building with foamcore, followed by mounting on a decent base.  Hopefully, this is a pleasant surprise:

Front?

Back?

The individual steps for this mini-project took a few minutes each, so I was able to work on this while finishing off the outdoor terrain for 10mm skirmishes.  Pictures of the base tiles will be up tomorrow.

Lair of the Rat King

Construction ended on the sewers beneath Cornerstone Keep.  The last step is a thick spray of dull coat to protect the work.  Otherwise, these tiles are ready for the minions of the Rat King and the adventurers to slay them.  As promised, I'll spare you the details on the sewage and dirt; suffice it to say, I started dark and brushed my way lighter until it hit the desired shade.

The maze in one of its many permutations.

Close-up of some of the detail.

Movable bridges.

Those little bridges are made out of bamboo kabob skewers.  Cut to 15mm lengths and superglued together, they look just like rough logs at this scale.  They even work well with the outdoor tiles that are in progress, too.

I'm really looking forward to getting  those figures in the mail.  I feel like Ralphie waiting for his Little Orphan Annie decoder ring, only better - I know my figures aren't just an advertisement.

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.