Subterranean Magic Pools

 

Magic pools are a staple of Old School dungeoneering. If you drink from one, will it heal all your wounds? Give you the power to speak to animals? Make you swell up like a balloon and die, blackened and stinking? It's always a gamble.

These are some more of the subterranean scenery pieces I've clubbed together from FDG DragonLock tiles, along with a very old 25mm Grenadier miniature from a box set of wizards.

Green Devil Face

This is a dungeon dressing piece from Fat Dragon Games, and also a feature of that classic megadeathkill dungeon module, The Tomb of Horrors. I can't remember if it was actually named as such in the module, but I've always known it as the Green Devil Face.

Because I am incredibly slack about tuning and maintaining my 3d printer, I tend to get a lot of stringing and zits on my prints these days, and this is no exception. However, in this instance I don't really mind so much, since it's supposed to be an ancient dungeon thingummy, so a certain amount of cud and cruft is to be expected.

I really should get on to tuning that printer though.

The Joy of Two (Dimensions)

Here's tonight's initial game setup — the tiles are cobbled together from FDG's "Ravensfell Sewers" papercraft dungeon tiles set in Photoshop and printed on my laser printer, and the froghemoth in the pool is the one I 3d printed the other day.

I'm always impressed by beautifully built and painted 3d dungeons, but I can't be bothered with them for my own games. Most of the time I just draw on that laminated grid layout (the textured thing underneath the sewerage pool) with dry-erase markers and call it good enough, but from time to time I'll go berserk and make something a bit fancier — like this sewage collection pool.

Grills Gone Wild

This is a piece I designed for my own campaign, for use with 2d dungeon tiles. It could also be used with 3d tiles, but I haven't sized it to fit in with any particular range. It's designed for use with 28mm miniatures.

It prints in two pieces, front and back. If you don't mind printing with slicer supports, you could rotate the two pieces and mash them together in the slicer, and print them as one piece.

STLs are at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3437714

Sewer tile by Fat Dragon Games

Tabletop RPG Terrain - Door

I've included a Reaper 28mm wizard figure, for scale.

 Useful markers for tabletop FRPG games with miniatures, possibly more so than any other dungeonish terrain pieces, are doors. Doors of all sorts.

I made this one in Blender and printed it on my Ender 3 at 0.12mm layer height in grey PLA. I've seen quite a few models with hinged, openable doors, but I find them to be of limited usefulness in gaming, and they're always a lot fiddlier to print and assemble than a simple one-piece marker that does essentially the same job.

I've uploaded the .STL file to Thingiverse, for free download for anyone who wants to print as many of them as they want.

I realised after I started printing it that I'd forgotten to include the latch on the "inside" side of the door — I've updated the .STL since then. Having printed it, I think it might be better printed tipped over on its side. The print lines would then be running in the same direction as the grain of the door planking, and I'd get smoother lines on the hinge-straps.

Here it is, all painted up. I learned from this that the creases between the blocks could do with being deeper — they're visible, but not visible enough on their own when painted with a stoney texture. I had to do some manual edge-highlighting and crease-washing to get them to stand out.

In the raw PLA plastic

I like the way Cura's tree supports look sometimes.
On one side they look like some kind of disgusting giant caddis-fly larva,
and on the other they look more like a tentacle or something.

A few hours later...

I whipped up a metal door version of the same module, also on Thingiverse at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2983980

I haven't printed it myself yet. It's very late, and I'm going to bed.


Here's the metal door, painted up, and with my trusty Reaper Filthy Bartender for scale.

Tabletop RPG Terrain - Stairs

Although I seldom actually make use of it for one reason or another, I am quite fond of scatter terrain for use with miniatures in tabletop FRP games. Part of the reason is that it can be a bit expensive, and it seems a frivolous use of my gaming dollar to spend it on what is effectively doll's-house furniture.

However, now that I have a 3d printer and access to Thingiverse, I can make my own bits and bobs quite easily.

This is one such bit or bob, a spiral stair marker.

If it was in an actual castle, it would most likely turn in the opposite direction, with the intent of impeding a climbing intruder's weapon hand, while allowing the defenders more freedom of attack. However, if you assume the standard and traditional D&D "dungeon" format, then the attackers might be more likely to be going downwards, so this orientation would be more correct.

Anyway.

I've included a Reaper 28mm figure for scale.

It was printed on my Ender 3 FDM printer in PLA at 0.12mm layer height, and took about 2½ hours.

Enhanced Interrogation Client Containment Module

Amongst the Reaper Bones Kickstarter III offerings is a set of pieces to dress up your friendly local torture chamber.

One of them is this one, an iron maiden.

I've used a couple of Vallejo's GameEffects rust paints on it, and I quite like the effect they give. You can slop them on straight from the bottle, but I find they give best results in several layers of washes, not too thin.

This is the rest of the Torture Chamber set. I think there might have been some other bits and pieces in one or other of the Kickstarter expansions, but I didn't get any of those except the Cthulhu Mythos set.

Dungeon dressing — magic pools

This is another of Reaper's plastic Bones line. I think it came with their first Kickstarter, or maybe I bought them separately; in any case, I've had it sitting around unpainted for quite some time.

It's 77136: Well of Chaos ($3.29) by Bob Ridolfi.

On the red one I've tried painting on a bit of light reflection to give the impression that the pool is glowing. It's pretty much my first go at this technique, and it actually doesn't look too terrible I think.

Tabletop Dungeon Mapping Modules

 I've been experimenting with using flat printed images on blocks of MDF for 3d (or 2½d) dungeon mapping pieces. Proper painted 3d resin pieces are very nice, but they also cost an arm and a leg.

These ones are my first "secret door" image, printed on self-adhesive label paper, and stuck to 12mm MDF. I might possibly go to 18mm for added stability, but I'll see how these go in play first.

The black edges are problematic. They'd be better covered with the stone pattern, but the edges of MDF aren't an ideal surface for sticking the label paper to unless it's sealed and sanded pretty smooth, which means more trouble than I really want to go to. Maybe as a partial fix I'll paint the sides of the blocks, where they're more likely to be exposed, in a roughly stone-like colour — it would still be a bit of a dislocation, but they wouldn't stand out quite as much when they're butted up against each other like this.

What I want to end up with is something like the Fat Dragon card dungeon bits, but with more weight and stability.

This is the image I've used for this particular module — I've got a bunch of other doors in the works at the moment, if these turn out OK.

I've saved it at 300dpi, but I don't know if Blogger's image uploader will preserve image resolution information. The physical dimensions of the image are 50 x 50 mm, so if it prints bigger than that, then you'll have to find some way to adjust it (such as embedding it in a word processor document, resized to the right dimensions.... though that sort of kludge makes me sad).

Later...

I later realised that I had a roll of 12mm double-sided tape, and since the MDF is fortuitously also 12mm, I could make my own block-pattern edge banding tape with relatively little travail.

Which I have now done.

As I suspected, it is a great improvement.

---

Later...

I tried out a single wrap-around image for a standard dungeon door, but I found that it made the location of the door sides centrally on the block on both sides difficult — impossible, in fact, without getting a lot more pernicketty about my measurements.

So instead I went back to separate individual images for each side, but this time with sufficient overhang to wrap around and cover about 60% of the width of the block. There is therefore a line up the sides where the two images don't tile seamlessly, but it's not at all noticeable unless you look for it, so I call that a win.

Here are JPG files for a couple of styles of door, to go on to 50 x 50 x 12 mm blocks:

Doors

Here, for your printing-and-folding-and-glueing pleasure, are some doors.

The link points to a PDF of about 650 KB, with 16 doors ready to assemble, and some simple instructions.

They should be printed on reasonably heavy card. My own laser printer won't handle anything heavier than paper, so I print on to sheets of un-cut self-adhesive label paper, and then stick that to black card before cutting anything out.

Enjoy.

Dungeon Doors

I bought these resin pieces many years ago, in the late '80s, and I no longer remember who it was that manufactured them. They've been sitting waiting to be painted all that time, and now they are.

I probably should have photographed them with a figure for scale, but I didn't, so tough luck. They'll do fine for 28mm miniatures.