Ye Olde Inn

Sooooo …. I have always liked a bit of dungeon bashing and enjoyed D&D and other similar games most when played with miniatures and dungeon floor plans. I have been delighted for years by other folks efforts at building 3D Dungeons or 2.5 Dungeon tiles and blown away by some of the faithful transformations into 3D of the Warhammer Quest tiles I have seen.
I have imagined doing something similar for years and finally I have got my thumb out of my arse and done something about it.

What prompted this new enthusiasm for this project? …. Two things:

Firstly, I got behind the Twisting Catacombs Kickstarter and although that has been somewhat delayed the arrival of some very exciting dungeon goddies is just around the corner and I wanted to have a nice dungeon to put it in as I get it painted up. (Even during the Kickstarter I started thinking about how great it would be to have all this stuff painted up in a cool dungeon of my own).

Second was a thread over on the Oldhammer forum where a lovely fella called Stuart (AKA Bane) shares the good times he has ‘Heroquesting’ with his children. On this thread Stuart also makes some nice dungeon tiles from stryrofoam.

Now, I have always put off having a go as I worried my modelling/painting skills wouldn't give me the results I wanted BUT Stuart provided a fantastic ‘walkthrough’ step by step on his Blog:

http://thelostandtheverydamned.blogspot ... tiles.html

and managed to completely de-mistify the whole process which really gave the confidence to have a go myself. So big thanks to Stuart.

So first a few decisions …. The ones every Dungeon builder must make early on.

Walls or no walls? No brainer for me ….. walls look great but they just get in the way when you are playing and you can’t ‘sit back’ and enjoy looking at the table  … you kind of have to be standing over it looking down into it from a birds eye point of view. Also I had grown up using GW dungeon floor plans …. so ...

Size of squares? Whilst I get the urge to go bigger than 25 mm squares …. Because round bases spill out of them  and it gives a bit more breathing space for the heroic scale of models … I decided to go 25mm. I like the idea of big dungeons … so smaller tiles means bigger dungeons with more rooms will fit on the table. Most of my fantasy stuff is mounted on 20mm squares anyway so sit comfortable on 25mm squares and even the bigger monsters are on 40mm or 50 mm bases so will fit on the squares. Finally I quite fancied making some rooms and corridors with Hirst arts moulds. You can get these in 25mm squares. (Also the lasercut Heroquest board I painted recently also has 25mm squares …. and I had the idea I might try and reproduce some of these rooms as individual, generic dungeon rooms.



Border or no border. I get the urge to have a border …. To stop minis toppling of the side …. And also to keep the look of the Warhammer quest tiles. However, I think given my basing decision the first point will not be an issue for me and I decided to go with 10mm think tiles with black edges so I have retained the Warhammer Quest tile feel a little bit.

Generic dungeon of faithful reproduction of Warhammer Quest? Well the faithful reproduction bit has already been done by more talented painters than I and I had some ideas of my own I want to do ... BUT ... I will not be able to resist having a crack at a few of the Quest tiles whilst I am at it …. It would simply be rude not to. So it will be a mix of Quest tiles and original stuff.

So enough chat …. Last weekend I found myself with a day off for good behaviour and got stuck in ….

I started with some of the Warhammer quest basic rooms:









This is some PVA:



These are some shreddies:



These are some crushed up shreddies:



Here is a bed:



OK you get the idea.



Then I had a go at a couple of bigger rooms of my own.

Next I stuck a boat load of Hirst arts tiles I had made earlier onto some mounting board ....

...and after a few hours I had produced this little lot. So off to a good start.

So this was one of my rooms:



This could be set up as a fountain room .... The fountain is an Airfix piece.



Or as a Wizards study ... using some old Scotia Grendel bits I have:







I have made a couple of more rooms designed to fit some of the other Scotia Grendel pieces I have:

Next I had at the styrofoam with my hotwire cutter:



I put the same grid on this as the dungeon rooms and then covered it in sand.
I want the grid to be there but not THAT visible.

Looks amazing! Now hurry up and paint everything!

I approve. Beautiful stuff.

Lovely!

These are some shreddies... Nice!

Looks great!

Impressive these look great