Post by ashrothedm on Apr 17, 2013 12:45:28 GMT -5
I thought I'd post a few of the tiles that I've made. They are fairly generic, and my quick snapshots are a bit out of focus, but you'll get the idea.
Background
We play 3.5 currently, and this is the sixth year of this campaign in a Homebrew campaign setting.
The Warehouse
The first tile was used as a warehouse that the PCs were in. It has a few features like multiple levels and a secondary room inside. The picture, and painting of the doors kind of sucks, I only had one of those cheap plastic 25 cent paint brushes that you get in a kids watercolor set. They are just cardboard, card stock, hot glue, paint, and sharpie. Also, I only had four colors of paint; brown, grey, white, and black. That was my test tile, and their first time gridless (only one session).
There was initial grumbling when I mentioned gridless at first, but once they got into the story, they forgot that they needed a grid at all. Some players may love the tactics and the rules part, but I would bet that if you give them an interesting story, they forget about specifics and actually RP their characters. That was the case for my group at least.
The Necrotic Shrine
This second set I made this week; one sitting at maybe an hour invested in time. (not including dry time.) Spoilers ahead (if my players see this by Saturday) They will have a short delve into a small necrotic shrine. I'm stealing a small part of DM Scotty's mausoleum encounter and will have ghasts and other undead continually streaming in from the graveyard above as long as the disturbance within remains. It's a nice way to add a little urgency to their exploration.
These tiles are intentionally generic. I want to build up a stock of some standard, boring, and reusable shapes. Adding one or two interesting tiles will give me diversity, but everyone needs the occasional hallway. I have two little rooms, some corridors, a generic room with a raised platform, a collapsed corridor (because that's what a DM does when he doesn't want to create a massive network of tunnels but he wants to give you the impression that they are there) and some irregular cave tiles. I shrunk the images down, so you can barely see the rubble and the texture along the cave wall.
I made about 12 graves last week, but I forgot to take a picture of those. Maybe I'll post those another time.
The layout is probably not my final layout. It doesn't even match my original sketch. This is a very linear dungeon. It's one tiny part of the story and not designed to be part of a dungeon crawl.
Things I Learned
1.) I'm not going to be precise, but I can fake it if I pay attention to the connection piece measurements. 1 cm square raised wall on either side of 1 or 2 inch openings. (notice the cavern wall joins are perpendicular to one another.)
2.) Don't cut wall sections with the grain of the corrugation. (oops on the first tile)
3.) There is a reason that cheap paint brushes are cheap. I knew that... not sure why I didn't listen to myself.
4.) Red sharpie bleeds through paint. Oops.
5.) Toilet paper tubes are much larger (at the scale of minis) than I had expected. Big columns need big halls.
Background
We play 3.5 currently, and this is the sixth year of this campaign in a Homebrew campaign setting.
The Warehouse
The first tile was used as a warehouse that the PCs were in. It has a few features like multiple levels and a secondary room inside. The picture, and painting of the doors kind of sucks, I only had one of those cheap plastic 25 cent paint brushes that you get in a kids watercolor set. They are just cardboard, card stock, hot glue, paint, and sharpie. Also, I only had four colors of paint; brown, grey, white, and black. That was my test tile, and their first time gridless (only one session).
There was initial grumbling when I mentioned gridless at first, but once they got into the story, they forgot that they needed a grid at all. Some players may love the tactics and the rules part, but I would bet that if you give them an interesting story, they forget about specifics and actually RP their characters. That was the case for my group at least.
The Necrotic Shrine
This second set I made this week; one sitting at maybe an hour invested in time. (not including dry time.) Spoilers ahead (if my players see this by Saturday) They will have a short delve into a small necrotic shrine. I'm stealing a small part of DM Scotty's mausoleum encounter and will have ghasts and other undead continually streaming in from the graveyard above as long as the disturbance within remains. It's a nice way to add a little urgency to their exploration.
These tiles are intentionally generic. I want to build up a stock of some standard, boring, and reusable shapes. Adding one or two interesting tiles will give me diversity, but everyone needs the occasional hallway. I have two little rooms, some corridors, a generic room with a raised platform, a collapsed corridor (because that's what a DM does when he doesn't want to create a massive network of tunnels but he wants to give you the impression that they are there) and some irregular cave tiles. I shrunk the images down, so you can barely see the rubble and the texture along the cave wall.
I made about 12 graves last week, but I forgot to take a picture of those. Maybe I'll post those another time.
The layout is probably not my final layout. It doesn't even match my original sketch. This is a very linear dungeon. It's one tiny part of the story and not designed to be part of a dungeon crawl.
Things I Learned
1.) I'm not going to be precise, but I can fake it if I pay attention to the connection piece measurements. 1 cm square raised wall on either side of 1 or 2 inch openings. (notice the cavern wall joins are perpendicular to one another.)
2.) Don't cut wall sections with the grain of the corrugation. (oops on the first tile)
3.) There is a reason that cheap paint brushes are cheap. I knew that... not sure why I didn't listen to myself.
4.) Red sharpie bleeds through paint. Oops.
5.) Toilet paper tubes are much larger (at the scale of minis) than I had expected. Big columns need big halls.