Dungeon FX

Dungeon ladders: these are made from basswood, painted
with Reaper's woodland brown and mounted to card stock
paper bases; the wood is also sealed with two coats of
flat varnish.

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Dungeon bars: these are also made with basswood, tiny
dowels and are painted with Reaper's woodland brown and
honed steel; I took the trouble to finish with flat varnish on
the wood and glossy varnish on the bars.

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Dungeon tables: again, made with basswood and sealed
with a flat varnish; these were more difficult to make
than they look since setting the table legs at close to 90
degrees was a challenge.

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Portculli: these were made with basswood and 10-mesh
plastic canvas; plastic doesn't stick to wood very well
so I had to use a heavy amount of gell glue.
Tip: wash the plastic canvas to remove mold release oils.

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Wooden doors: these were made with foam core mounted
to card stock paper bases; the door design was done using
Campaign Cartographer 3.

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Stone doors: these took a lot of finagling in CC3.

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Metal doors.

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Curtains: it's amazing how many classic adventures feature
curtained rooms.

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Dungeon beds: saved for last, these were done last and took
the most effort; here we have basswood, tiny dowels, foam
core (mattresses) and card stock (blankets). The pillows are
also foam core with the poster backing shaved off.

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One of the New Years resolutions I recently made was to the create more visual effects for use at the game table, something I dabbled with when I ran my AD&D campaigns long ago. I'm not sure when I gave this up or why...

In any case, between gluing dice towers as Christmas gifts, I decided to put my crafting skills to work on a few dungeon dressings as well. I made another list of top items I wanted to get done. I finished the beds just last week.

The ingredients for most of my tiny new dungeon furnishings are fairly simple (see the photo captions for each recipe). I want to note, just for the aliens digging through the remains of Earth, that I used a clear gell for the glue in most cases. It dries clear and strong. Most ingeniously, I used Legos to align everything and to make insure each piece was at a decent right angle to the game table, an idea I stole from the Hirst Arts website.

I used basswood (used in pinewood racing cars amongst other things) in most cases because balsa wood is just too soft, light and fragile. I know this from experience because I tried it long ago. In most cases I made 5, 10 or 20 items, basically gauging how frequent each item's use would likely be.

I also used a separate, sharp hobby knife and clear scotch tape to temporarily hold some of the pieces together, particularly the bed posts. I also used my color printer. I even ended up using the Genetica Viewer once again to texture the blankets on the beds. I used a liquid texture called "Melted Jello Shots." By the time I scaled the bitmap down it looks just like a blanket or quilt. (That just goes to show that mere words never do a picture all that much justice... recent picture captioning in RPGs annoys me for this reason, but that's another show...)

I think that's about it, except that I also made some stairs and a new set of dungeon tiles that I'll post about later. Anyway feast your eyes and especially wonder in disbelief at how the tiny beds came out. I still do. :)