In one of the final encounters of the “Marauders of the Dune Sea” adventure the group enters it’s most important battle. The battle is set in a 15×12 cave with a 4x4x4 pit in the center, two fountains, and an alter. It’s quite a plain looking room and my original intention was just to draw it on my battle mat. But for the finale of the adventure I couldn’t diminish it with such simplicity, so I decided to create a 3D set where combat would take place.

As I’ve shown before, when you need to go down you have to build up. If I was to incorporate the 20 foot (4 inch) deep pit in a model, I would have to raise the entire set 4 inches. That alone took some effort. Since I couldn’t  find a box of the exact (or close to) size I needed, I constructed my own with my most abundant building material: cardboard from the recycling bin. This proved to be more intricate than I thought it would be.

I needed a great number of support columns for the floor, so were you to look underneath the box you would find a Frankenstein monster of disparate pieces of cardboard in a variety of shapes and locations. The pit section itself (where I’ve placed an infinite-use electric tea light) is actually a piece I did separate from the main cave floor and and became the central support column for the whole box. After using varying sections of cardboard I could scrounge up for the floor, I realized it would have been better to have found a large cardboard piece and create a veneer that would give the floor a more uniform look. But since I enjoyed the fact I had done the work without purchasing anything, I kept it as is.

Final model for the "Crown Wyrm" encounter in "Marauders of the Dune Sea".

The additional pieces to the model were two fountains and an alter. The alter was no problem and I new what I wanted to do with it (again, in cardboard), but the fountains were something I wanted to expand on. In the adventure, the fountains were described as “dragonhead fountains.” The fountains being dragon heads made very little sense to the story and I suspect they were chosen because there are dungeon tiles for them. I decided I wanted the fountains a little closer to the story so I came up with a fountain with kraken tentacle statues reaching out from them.

Closeup of one of the Dust Kraken fountains.

Why they would be present at all would be described in part of the Ul-Athra mythos that the players would obtain:

…and so the Dust Kraken reached up from the sea and swallowed it whole, but it found itself still wanting.

And here’s the box in play: