Dungeons & Dragons Crafting

As some of you know I started running (also known as Dungeon Mastering) a D&D game this winter.  I decided to put my modeling skills learned in architecture school to use, and have been crafting lots of pieces for my campaign.   Most the stuff you see if carved out of rigid foam insulation (also made some use of the offices 3d Printer for doors and what not), and painted pretty much everything with cheap craft paints. The Lights are all made by taking apart battery powered tea lights (they flicker like real fire) and putting them back together to match the surroundings. I have also been painting a fair number of miniatures.  Below are a set of images that represent a sampling of the stuff I have been making.

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The Tavern

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Close up on the Tea  Light Fire Place

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Molok’s Prison

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Molok’s Chambers

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The Road To Phandalin

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Baba Yaga’s Hut

Kaulder’s Tomb

The Organ of Madness and the dancing brooms of animated attack

5 Comments

  1. These look awesome! I’m never showing my players these. A tutorial on basic principles and tools wouldn’t go astray.

  2. That barkeep’s pewter cup is so damn shiny, I love it.
    In all seriousness, These way exceeded my expectation when you were telling me about them. They are actually quite amazing, and I am shocked about how great they turned out. Keep making these, they are awesome! I’m sure it makes the game more fun, not that I would know. What I tend to like the most is the floors, how are you making them, the textures on them are amazing! What is your average time spent on a scene, are they reusable?
    Whats next for these. I like the videos. where will the progression take you? Or are you at a happy spot now with them and they will continue to look like this?

    • Thanks pat, I am glad you like them. The bases are pretty easy and quick to make the foam takes the imprint of pretty much whatever mark you put on it, I just draw on it with either a ball point pen or an x-acto knife if I want the lines deeper. I add the texture by pressing a ball of tenfoil into the foam for stone and what not, and for the wood I ran a wire steel brush across the surface for wood grain texture. For paint I do a base coat of black (most the time) and then sponge paint the lighter colors back onto it, and in some cases do a little dry brushing. Once the foam is painted and clear coated it is fairly resistant to denting.
      All the pieces are reusable in other scenes and I have a bunch of walls and other random junk that I didn’t include in this post. I like how everything is feeling and I want it all to match as it is reusable, so I am going to keep things looking pretty similar. For the future I would like to craft more small detailed pieces, the detailed stuff is more fun to make.

      Right now we are playing through a prewritten module and I am finding it hard to craft all the stuff for those because they rely on kind of complex maps were everything happens from simple room to Simple room there is a lot of back and forth, and the modules I wrote had more complex rooms and you move through them in a fairly linear order. so we will see, but that might also prompt me to make some more modular tiles that fall more inline with the prewritten modules. then I could link the simpler tiles to this more complex stuff I have been making..

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