Given that I have no real desire for more gaming books thanks to WotC’s pushing of the Essentials line, I’ve started to work on making the games I DM more interesting. Here enters arts & crafts. As you can see in the below image, I’ve been putting together some gaming accoutrements.

The first idea came to me after remembering something Raddu76 said in his review of the desert gaming tiles: that not every terrain is a flat surface. I put some wood boards together, glued them, cut them to various sizes, and drew a grid on both sides. One side has a difficult terrain grid, and the other a plain grid. By stacking them in various ways, I can simulate all sorts of three dimensional terrain like dunes or rocks.

The second idea came from a package sent in a 6 foot 4 1/2 inch diameter cardboard tube. I’ve always had the idea to bring facsimiles of structures onto a plain 2D grid and the tube provided the materials to do so. Sawing the tube into 4 and 8 inch increments, adding a support dowel at one end, layering and gluing two thin pieces of cardboard on top of the dowel and having a grid on that now-layered cardboard gives me a very nice tower-like structure.

I’m interested in seeing how they fair in game and with players as time progresses!

Edit:

In preparing for a game, I realized I would be better off with 4 of the four inch high towers so I made 2 more. At the game itself in the “Streets of Tyr” encounter in the “Marauders of the Dune Sea” adventure it worked out great and found the 4 inchers are much better to have around than the 8′s for a few reasons:

  1. Even the 4 inchers are quite tall compared to the minis. You could make them any in-game height you want since the effect of the towers (they are tall) is quite obvious to the players regardless of the towers true height.
  2. The 8 inchers reduce visibility of the players around the table far more than the 4 inchers. So for playability, 4′s are better.

It’s possible that the taller 8′s will be nice to have in paragon or epic tiers for some reason, but at least for heroic, I found more 4′s better to have around.