Building Dungeons

I have been watching terrain creation videos and such for a long time now. Not as long as I have played games and what not but still its been a few years. Through them I have dabbled in scratch building pieces for various games (mostly for Gaslands). And I have had my eye on some specific things. Through watching creators like Wylock and Black Magic Craft, I had thought I might pick up a proxon table foam cutter. It seemed the logical choice.

A single roll of filament can make a decent number of tiles.

Foam insulation sheets are relatively inexpensive and can make some great terrain. With the proxon you are able to get more accurate cuts to make things like buildings and dungeon tiles. I really thought that could be my next direction.

But while I was watching all this, 3D printing was becoming more cost effective and there were a number of groups making stuff, often providing either cheap or free STLs of the stuff. And I have been sharing for a bit now some of the stuff I have been printing. Yeah, I never did get a proxon.

Which brings me to the past couple weeks. I had picked up a basic set of Fat Dragon Games dungeon tiles and began printing out the start of the dungeon tile collection. And yeah, I was able to get a decent collection just from basic stuff.

Well, after seeing a couple tiles in a forum, I did a search for Open Lock tiles on Thingiverse. I printed out a couple tiles and some clips to make them work with the Dragonlock tiles. This stuff is starting to grow.

The disadvantage of this stuff, I am going to need to paint it. Now the thing with that is, even when you craft the stuff from foam and cardboard, you still have to paint it. You also have to spend all your time building the pieces. And the number of pieces you need to create an entire dungeon is insane. Or you print it all and you can be doing other things while the printer is putting things together. I like that option.

One of the things I have considered with all this is the ability to create and entire board for a game session. When you consider something like frostgrave, you need a 3’ x 3’ play surface and all the terrain to create the play area. You can print off the tiles you want to use and actually build a different play area each time. I like that. I am all into modular playing areas. When you consider you can already find tile to print that will give you options or you can try your hand at playing with CAD software, the possibilities become staggering. I like where gaming is going now.

You can get a decent number of tiles from a single roll of filament. I’ve only used a single red roll so far and even then, I had printed off a few other things before I set to printing tiles. The disadvantage with this is, I like the look of the tiles unpainted. But you know you can’t keep them that base color. I mean who does that…

And now I am out of filament for a bit. I should be painting stuff in the down time. But it won’t be tiles for a bit. I still have a ton of models that have little more than primer on them. The hobby never ends.

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