In the Pits

One of the nice aspects of the half-a-level pieces shown in the last post is that it gives you a chance to incorporate even more three-dimensional challenges.  Flat painted with deep pits shown in perspective are nice - need to do some of those some day - but nothing beats the visual appeal of a sunken and flooded room like this.

Bonus points to anyone who recognizes the inspiration for this room.

The water level of this room is the bottom layer of the foam core paper.  Spray, painting the entire terrain piece resulted in significant warping of this paper.  This was not unexpected - part of the reason for the island in the middle is to maintain some integrity in the room, and I was careful to weight down the piece with a heavy textbook while it dried to ensure that the outer edge of the room would lay flat during use.  The remaining warping in the water level looks a bit like waves and is obscured by the paint job.  A terrain piece with a hard floor - either wooden or stone - would need to be heavily reinforced prior to painting.

Half A Level Onwards

In the grand old D&D tradition, going down a level in Castle Meatgrinder means going up a quantum step in difficulty.  You won't find black dragons or pit demons on level II.    One of the few sops to metagaming tolerated at my table is that understanding that you shouldn't go down too far past your limitations.  To help the players, when characters do advance down a level, the players will know it due to the long length of the staircase, pit, or chute.

That said, elevation differences are one of the best ways to add variety to encounters, and beef up weak opponents by giving them the literal high ground.  In a 3D environment such as Castle Meatgrinder this is often accomplished through the use of daises, platforms, and the odd wall crawling beasty.

This small collection of half-level rooms open up the possibility of fighting in cramped quarters on staircases that don't equate to the full change in difficulty level typically encountered.  There isn't much room in the One Box to Hold Them All, and these rooms take twice the space of the rest of the rooms.  As a result, these rooms are just a dead-end offshoot of the main level.  It may be possible to use one of my straight staircases to provide a second way to access the larger room shown here.  Have to experiment a bit with that.

You could double up on the standard 5-mm foamcore to make rooms like this, but I had some thick foam sheet left over from a previous project, so this was a case of making use of what was on hand.  Otherwise, the construction details and paint scheme are the same as the rest of the dungeon.

An extra little piece of three by three foamcore called out for something different, so it got turned into a curved flight of stairs.  That gives this set-up two different ways to access the upper half-a-level.

Flooring, Inserts, and a Little Juxtoposition

One cheap and easy, and light on the storage requirements, method to add more flavor to the 2.5d dungeon is to use inserts.  So far my dungeon has five of these clever little devices.  Rather than an unending series of black floors, these pieces of cardstock can be dropped in to add a little more pizzazz to the place.

 Here you can see how the octagonal room becomes a large ball room or central chamber.

This idea was lifted from The DMG Info guy but with a bit of a twist.  This smaller room has a nice tile insert, or maybe a summoning circle, but...

...my own personal twist is that these cardboard inserts are reversible.  The back side of each one features a more sci-fi feel. 

 The big room makes for a decent vehicle bay...

...or a flagstone floor.  Note that this requires the features be flat enough to not add wobble to the board when the wrong side is down.  All I've added is a bit of cereal box cardstock for hatch covers, because anything else would make the room wobble when used for fantasy.  You sacrifice some detail, but gain a lot of flexibility.

 

Now the dungeon tiles can also be used to create a space station for use with the sci-fi figures.  All that will take is some suitable powered doors, sci-fi furniture, and other bric-a-brac.  I figure I can cannibalize the city scape for vending machines, benches, planters, and vehicles for the repair bay, so all it really needs is a few sales kiosks and maybe a sci-fi fountain. Here's a shot of all of the sci-fi inserts together. 

Come to think of it, there could be a Barrier Peaks style room or two in Castle Meatgrinder where these would be appropriate, too...

Puzzle Statue

There are few things more certain to distract a party of dungeon plunderers than a strategically placed statue.  A statue pointing to something with a sword, on a half-circle dais, and holding a glowing blue lantern?  That's like crack for adventurers.  There's got to be some treasure or a secret door around here somewhere, or maybe the thing comes to life when you least expect it.

This is one of Reaper's Bones 28mm miniatures, but it makes for a great towering statue in 15mm.  The hard plastic sword is a little bent, so at some point I will have to decide if that's true of the statue, and if it is bent for a reason.  I'm really pleased with the way the glow from the lantern turned out.  It's juuust subtle enough.

So far this brings the list of dungeon rooms with something interesting up to eight.  That includes:

• Wizard library
• Wizard laboratory
• Bunkroom
• Dining Hall
• Mystic Garden
• Hall of the Blood Columns
• The Well
• The Statue

Factor in the standard "half rooms empty" given in God's Own Version of D&D, and that's one pretty good level for Castle Meatgrinder done right there.

Right now I'm working on a second half-level to provide for pits, water filled rooms, and even a balcony overlooking lower level rooms.  Stay tuned.

Marching On Saint Francis

Looks like your humble host is going to be working in San Francisco for the month of March.  If any reader out there has some time and could shoot me an email about the gaming scene, or maybe wants to get together with a poor wayfaring stranger hit me up at myname@gmail.com - you know my name, it's your old pal WarrenAbox.

Paging the Lizard King

Doors are both boring and time consuming.  I really didn't want to do them, but they are probably the single most important feature in the dungeon, so it had to be done.  After fiddling around with a bunch of designs for self opening doors that didn't really work, I stopped letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and just went with a half measure that violates most of my ideals. 

As mentioned before, they are a little too big for scale, but they are easy to work with, and make the dungeon feel more alien and like a much less mundane place.  They are also big enough for trolls, small giants, and even young dragons to fit through when pesky adventurers show up for some fun.

The key difficulty was making a door that fit into the 2.5-inch gaps in my terrain.  The little blocks to the lower left of each door are meant to extend the walls, but they get rotated when the door opens.

Not a big deal, because the doors in Castle Meatgrinder at the wussy sort of doors you find in modern D&D.  They are Moldvayian antagonists that are hard to open and slam shut behind you the instant you turn your back.  Hope you brought enough iron spikes.

Castle Meatgrinder - The Mad Wizard's Garden

Here's a quick and dirty little project to spruce up a dungeon - an enchanted garden full of mysterious and arcane fauna that should give the players some interesting things with which to interact.  Some may want to kill the characters, some to talk to them, and they may be perfectly harmless.  Not knowing whether or not they are poisonous, beneficial, or even intelligent plants is all part of the charm.

The terra-cotta plant holders are copper electrical bits, and the big plant is a prehistoric jobby from the Toob o' Trees.  The rest are bits and bobs from plastic plants.  All are mounted on washers for added stability.

Perhaps some of these plants have healing nutrients and can be eaten, but it's a much better bet that at least one of them thinks the same of the characters.  Either way, even if they are all mundane, a room like this is an easy feature that should occupy players for a while - at least until the dungeon denizens catch up to them.