An upcoming encounter calls for the players to go down a passageway and then down some stairs into a chamber. As I am fond of ensuring my players have as 3D an experience as possible on a 2D grid, I wanted to create that stair case.

Of course, since the main area was down the stairs and not up them, I decided to raise the entire passageway so that the players could walk down the stairs and onto the main area which would be drawn onto my battle mat. I decided to only raise a portion of the passageway since I didn’t think any encounter would extend back a certain distance, but even if it did I could always draw the rest of the passageway on the mat. In the spirit of re-usability I created several different pieces and just pushed them together. That way, I might make use of a different configuration when the need arises. Here’s what the final set up will look like (sans battle mat):

When seeing how the D&D game tiles do stairs I was a bit perplexed. I noticed that they had 2 steps of a stairs per 1 inch square. When making a 3D step block to match the tiles I immediately realized that having anything less that a 1 inch square would make it odd for minis to stand on them. So I took some license and just made two steps and drew a line through each to give the representation of more stairs. The two blocks adjacent to the squares will be where I’ll put some braziers which are those electric tea lights that are so popular.