DM Michael
Paint Manipulator
Preparing for 'In the spider's web' part of LMOP
Posts: 169
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Post by DM Michael on Jun 7, 2015 20:04:51 GMT
At some point I will be running "Lost Mine of Phandelver" from the 5e starter set. (I cannot bring myself to say D&D next.) Part one features the Cragmaw Hideout. I will be making a new set of cave tiles for this. Like nixcraft I also feel the scale is off somehow. So to get a feel for the size I set up this dungeon using my existing dungeon and sewer tiles. This setup is almost exactly twice the size of the cave. I feel this setup is a little too big, so I will probably go for something in between. (If you click on the image, you can zoom in on it. In the original size you can see the mushroom on one of the goblin bases.) As you can see I work in 3D. But I am not sure exactly how much 3D the cave will be. There is quite a lot of level differences throughout the cave. (Did anyone else notice how many times "Escarpment" was used in this adventure.) The bridge will be raise to another level but I am not sure it will not be 20 feet above the stream. I don't know yet how much I will be using levels in this cave. I will keep posting to the thread as I continue the work.
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Post by DnDPaladin on Jun 7, 2015 21:43:50 GMT
as i said, some rooms are fine at this size. others once you describe will feel a much bigger. exemple... the room with the pillars ont he right. in the book, it is described as being huge with tons of stuff in it. at lest 10 caravans of stuff. and there is still lots of room for the characters to move in it without being noticed. yet once you look at the plan, the room is far from that size.
the room with the wolves also seem much larger when described. because there are stairs before the wolves and the wolves cannot get to those stairs. yet on the map, the room is so small that it would lead to us thinking the wolves are pinned down by their stakes instead of being attached to them like it is said in the book. so again, do as i did, make "some" rooms larger, make them feel bigger then the scale they are written in.
and also... it is 5th edition, there is no more "next" "next" was the tentative title during the beta. people keep refering to it, but it would be like reffering the dolphin still for the gamecube.
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Post by lordbryon on Jun 8, 2015 13:57:21 GMT
Looks beautiful. I really like the painted tiles in barracks. Adds some eye candy to the piece. I also love the color of the sewage... Well done.
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Post by nixcraft on Jun 10, 2015 3:01:21 GMT
you know once i built it all out and put minis in it .. it wasnt that bad.. its meant to be a small goblin outpost that they stage road side ambushes from. So i am cool with the size
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Post by DnDPaladin on Jun 11, 2015 2:41:04 GMT
of course your stuff isn't exactly as described in the book. but to be honest thats whats fun about it all, we can easily scale, rescale or change things. no need to be perfect about it 8)
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DM Michael
Paint Manipulator
Preparing for 'In the spider's web' part of LMOP
Posts: 169
|
Post by DM Michael on May 17, 2017 16:03:04 GMT
It took longer than expected, but this Saturday I will start running the Lost Mines of Phandelver. I don't know how far we will get. Maybe we will make it into the caves, maybe not. I suspect I won't have it all done by then. Time will tell. I decided to go with my 2x size. You need bigger dungeons for 3D. I changed the setup a little. I made it dams that can be opened using a crane. The text says the goblins will yank out a collapsible wall, but I don't think the goblins are stupid enough to stand in front of the wall and be flushed out. The bridge is made of ordinary craft sticks that have been roughed up on the edges. It took me about 15 minutes to make. (Still needs painting though.) The dam is made of kebab skewers. The rope and hook are from a device several of the local supermarkets use to fasten price-tags to clothes.
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DM Michael
Paint Manipulator
Preparing for 'In the spider's web' part of LMOP
Posts: 169
|
Post by DM Michael on May 21, 2017 12:53:02 GMT
This was the state it was in when we started Lost Mines of Phandelver yesterday. Walls have been textured with grout and polyfilla. The floors have been textured with sand. The stream has also been textured with polyfilla. I added a little blue colour to the polyfilla in the stream, hence the light blue. I also added a little black to the polyfilla on the walls. The polyfilla chips pretty easily, so to hide the chip marks I try to make the polyfilla about the same light grey colour that I use to paint the finished set with. You will notice that apart from a single floor tile, there are no tiles for Klarg's Cave. I reuse the tiles from all the other caves to setup Klarg's cave. There isn't room enough at our gaming table to setup the entire hideout all at the same time anyway. We play once every 4 weeks, so now I have 4 weeks to paint the set. --- My players were unable to gain entrance to the cave without raising the alarm, so they decided to set up camp just outside, and shoot everything that came out. When no more goblins or wolves came out they went in. Afterwards one of my players admitted that she had heard a podcast of someone playing through the adventure some time ago, however that did not stop her rogue from throwing up a grappling hook through the fissure into Klarg's Cave. This alerted Klarg and he was able to ambush her. With his additional 2d6 points of surprise damage and a semi-lucky roll he gave a hit to her head with 24 points of damage. That was enough to instantly kill the rogue, who then came tumbling down the fissure landing in front of the other characters, dead. Because Klarg was hidden, the players don't even know what killed her, only that she took an AC 19 blow, that yielded 24 points of damage and that I rolled a lot of dices. That freaked out the players. Afterwards the player admitted that she a bit angry at herself for messing up. She should have climbed the fissure stealthily and then quietly thrown down a rope to the rest of the party. She will re-join the party as a guard of a Lionshield Coster caravan being held prisoner alongside Sildar Hallwinter. Despite having DM'ed for three years, this was actually my first character death.
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Post by margaret on May 21, 2017 23:01:40 GMT
Nice set-up! My players' rogue managed to sneak up successfully, but it's pretty lethal if they get caught.
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DM Michael
Paint Manipulator
Preparing for 'In the spider's web' part of LMOP
Posts: 169
|
Post by DM Michael on May 30, 2017 18:20:38 GMT
Hello everybody, I just wanted to show my status now. Everything has been base coated with one layer of acrylic black paint mixed with white glue to add some strength to EPS. Then an additional layer of black paint has been added to make sure the spray doesn't eat any of the EPS. Finally everything has been 'dusted' with a light grey spray paint. (It is darker than it looks on the picture.) I spray painted in three batches, and I can see that the first batch has significantly less grey paint than the others. I might add some more later on. I was planning to add a paint wash and then highlight using drybrushing, but I think that it would be bad. The problem is that the filler I used to create the rock surface was made in big batches to save time. It took a lot of time to apply the filler to the EPS, so the filler was in various stages of curing. That means some of the pieces have very smooth rock faces while others have very rough rock faces. I fear that if I apply a paint wash followed by drybrushing these differences will be even more visible. You might notice that I have added couple of segments to Klarg's cave. I have started working on the Redbrand hideout and I needed 4 more pieces to complete the big cave in a suitable size. I am very pleased with the way the bridges came out. I made two because I need two for the Redbrand Hideout later on. You might notice that I have roughed up the surface to get some more wood grain texture of the planks. I try not to paint wood, but use real wood and then dye it and drybruseh it till it have the right colour. All in all I probably spent an hour making the two bridges. The cranes are done now. After I finished then I kind of regretted the way I made them. I should have made them more generic crane looking so that I can reuse them better later on. Right now they are designed to be able to rip open the flood valve in the fastest possible way. An ordinary crane would be able to do that too.
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DM Michael
Paint Manipulator
Preparing for 'In the spider's web' part of LMOP
Posts: 169
|
Post by DM Michael on Jun 12, 2017 12:17:01 GMT
Done!That's it. I am finally done. I added a little more paint to the room tiles so they are about the same colour as the rest. The photo is photoshopped. I don't have enough room tiles to make all the rooms at once. Our gaming table isn't big enough to fit it anyway. With a few exceptions, most of Klarg's cave is tiles from elsewhere. I had originally planned to make Yeemik's cave bigger, but it didn't serve any purpose, so I didn't. This means I could make the last corridor piece shorter if I wanted to. But I had already made the MDF and the EPS at that time, so it would just add more work. But If I were to make it again I would. This would ensure that you have line of sight from the ridge into the goblin cave. I wasn't happy about the way the stone pillars looked. I am also working on making the Redbrand Hideout. For that project I made two big rock columns using EPS, and I like the way they turned out. So, I decided to make smaller versions of those pillars and use them instead. I think these look much more natural. They don't take up as much space and as an added bonus you can place minis on top of them if you wanted. I had a really hard time getting the colour of the water to match. These two particular tiles had the biggest difference. The angle and the lighting make it look a bit worse than it actually is. The opening was done almost two years ago, using different materials and paints. It was impossible to get a match in colours. The shape of the waves in the cave is much smoother than that of the waves in the opening. It was much easier to make the waves in the opening look more realistic with paint. To smooth out the waterline I used an airbrush. I don't use airbrush paints. I just water down my regular paints until they have the consistency of milk. It is not optimal and sometimes the airbrush will clog up and a big splutter of paint will be released. The result was that it was smoothed out way too much. It might be OK if you were going for a shallow look towards the edges but that wasn't my intentions.
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