D&D: Experiments with 2.5D Dungeon Building

Howdie.

My kids have begun to express an interest in Dungeons & Dragons, most recently from watching the first episode of Stranger Things.  After all these many years, and collecting miniatures, I thought if I did decide to put some kind of game together for them, it would probably be the old Basic Set, and I would probably like to use mro tangible terrain with miniatures, rather than just graph paper.

There are MANY great 3d sets out there, and it is something I may collect some of.... however, I wanted a cheap and easy method to work up some terrain.

Enter The Dungeon Master G method of terrain building... I would link to him, but not sure if he would like that... but look him up.  I like his method, I like the looks of it, was not sure how easy it would actually be... probably easy.

Then I found the Crooked Staff Blog (again, no link, but you can look him up) who created some free pdf dungeon tile terrain, with methods for using it with the Dungeon Master G method... only without painting.

So....

... I super quickly, super sloppy, bashed together some dungeon tiles.

You can see in the example one way of putting stuff together, and how it looks with a variety of FINELY painted miniatures.  Now, to be fair to of the people I referenced, my terrain looks vastly inferior to theirs as I did not measure consistently, have pieces that do not quite fit together, and generally look a little crude.

It does demonstrate to me that this is a great method for creating dungeon terrain.... if I took a little more time, was a little more careful, this would look much better.  Easily.


One advantage of the original method is that the exposed sides of the cardboard would be painted black... though, you could overlap the "rubble" wall tops to both sides if needed, and it would infact look much better.  See here for the exposed sides...

I even started a more experimental tile, cutting into the floor of the double layered cardboard, and painting in a pool of dark or stagnant water... this tile is a work in progress, though already occupied by a Green Hag.

So, there it is.  My effort is acceptable for some quick gaming, though, hardly inspiring in its crudity... except to note that even with a little more effort, this would look pretty darn good.

I will try to find some time to make some terrain using the original DM G method and see if I like that better.

Thanks for reading, hope you find all the lightning traps before they find you!

Chalfant