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.

Support My Dungeon!

Relax, it's not a Patreon call.  These ten support columns are cheap found items glued to washers.

They are called wooden dowel pins, and you can find them online or at any local hardware store.  In the hands of a woodworker, they would be used to pin wood joints together.  In my hands, they become fluted columns.  They come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes (see below) so poke around and get what suits your own needs.  I went with a classic look, a little on the small side, but take a look at these spiral cut jobs  - give the groove a glowing greenish color and you're really talking  mad wizard's lab.  A bag of ten set me back $1.99, so it's definitely one of the cheaper and easier pieces to build.

The pink marble paint job is a flesh color base, white cream drybrush, watered down red for the veins, and a final light brush with bright white.  The wife thinks they look like blood is running down them, and maybe it is.  Whatever helps remind everyone that they aren't in fantasy-Kansas anymore.

Dungeon Dressing - Bits and Bobs

The two simple beds now have plain spun sheets and rather harsh looking pillows.  The sheets are facial tissue stiffened with watered down white glue, and the pillows are simple squares of cardstock.  

Easy peasy

A few more accutrements for the wizard's amusement.  The not-a-palantir-honest on the left is two cheap beads glued to a washer.  The well on the left is the flange end of the applicator tip of a tube of superglue.  The tip has been cut off, and the resulting engraved tube has been cut to size and sandwiched between two washers.  The water in the well is hot glue painted blue.

Lemon squeezy

Dungeon Dressing - Barriers to Entry

My dungeon corridors are really wide.  At 2.5 inches from wall to wall, that equates to 12.5 feet using the scale in common use today.  What to do when you want to force characters to march single file?  

Making separate tiles for bottlenecks doesn't appeal, so instead I went with a more flexible approach, rubble.  These two tiles of rubble serve multiple purposes.  They can create chokepoints that narrow a hallway.  They can represent collapsed tunnels that block all movement.  They can even represent low piles which slow movement but do not block missile fire.  Is there anything they can't do?

Simple basswood and real world rocks.

Of course there is.  They make terrible locking gates.  For that you need locking gates.  I've got two sets complete with keyholes.  The light makes this one look gray, but they do have a more silver sheen in person.  Not a huge fan of the angled crossbraces, but they keep it sturdy - an important factor in terrain that is likely to get tossed into a box.

Excellent Dungeon Maps

There are a few tidy little dungeon mapping software tools out there online, but none of them were quite what I needed for my simple little Castle Meatgrinder Maps.  With a limited tile set available, I needed something digital that would allow me to drop them in place and rotate them as needed.  It also needed to be a program that let me customize simple icons for my dungeon dressing locations, and maybe drop in some notes to self as well.

 Here's a neat little post discovered while goofing off at work - on my lunch hour, the length of which we won't discuss.  Pretend Heroes shows the world how to use Excel to create simple, but information dense dungeon maps using everybody's favorite spreadsheet software, Excel.

First thing I did was build a suite of my rooms in one worksheet...

...and then drop them into a second worksheet with corridors, furniture, and notes.

That's all I need, and I can throw them together at work any time things get light.  Even better, by copying and pasting one level into a new worksheet, I can ensure that linkages between levels (stairs, pits, etc.) are accurate.

Anybody have any experience doing things this way?

Ye Olde Danke Library

No wizard's workshop would be complete without plenty of quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore.

There's some jars of unguents, spices, and weird skin creams mixed in with arcane copper devices and scroll tubes.  The dribs and drabs of hot glue that clung to the shelves despite my best attempts to pluck them off got painted a bright white.  They're cobwebs now, and fully intentional - a designed part of the shelves from the beginning.

The backs of these shelves look pretty rough, so we'll keep them against the wall and no one will ever notice...

Curses!  The one downside of building 2.5d dungeons!

Table for Four, Take Two

Couple more pieces of furniture ready for the movers.  Another boring table for four, this one a bit smaller than the last, and pretty sweet wizard's work table.

The base of that table on the left looks pretty blah.  I'll have to gray it up a bit to lower the contrast with the floor.  The wizard's table, though.  How great did that turn out?  

Click on that photo to see the cover of the eldritch tome on top of the stack of books, and the cool diagrams on the unrolled scroll.  If everything turns out half as cool as that table, this dungeon is really gonna turn heads at the...well, I don't get out much, so I don't know where.  But if I ever do get out, it's gonna turn plenty of heads!