A Towering Effort

With the Thundertree dragon encounter coming up in my D&D campaign, I really wanted to have some terrain ready to make it more visually interesting. I figured the tower and its adjoining building would be great centerpieces for the session. But, in keeping with my desire to make everything re-usable, just building a single structure wasn’t going to cut it. Having a tower would be nice, but using the same exact tower every time we needed a tower would get old.

So, I decided, my tower would consist of modular, stackable sections that I could set up in a wide variety of configurations. There would be an assortment of different floors, stairs, and “toppers” I could mix-and-match as needed, and I could gradually add more varieties of looks and layouts as gaming sessions called for something new.

Easy, right?

Phew.

Laying a foundation

I started out with a 6″ disc of XPS foam, cut on my Proxxon using the circle jig from ShiftingLands. Then I cut some bricks. I initially made them about 3/4″ x 3/8″ x 3/8″, but I decided I wanted them slightly wider than tall, so I shaved 1/16″ off one side of the ones I’d already cut and switched to a 3/4 x 3/8 x 5/16 size for the rest.

Once I had what I thought was a good-sized brick pile, I used the rocks-in-a-can method to texture them. I started by laying two bricks along the side of my disc and hot-gluing a third brick on top of those. Then I started adding a brick at a time, gradually forming a circle around the rim of the disc. It was important to make sure it was a loose circle, a) to make sure the floor pieces would fit with no problem, taking into account the fact that coatings would add a small amount of thickness, and b) to avoid gluing any of the bricks to my circle.

Over the course of my tower-building exercise I found it useful to raise my “guide disc” up to the level of the wall I was working on at the time. Mostly I did this by raising it up on some of the tiles and stackers I’d made previously.

I ended up making each level eight bricks tall. Inside each tower level, on the backs of the 7th brick row, I glued a few bricks protruding slightly into the tower interior; these would serve as supports for the floor of the level above the one I was building at the time. (Hopefully the photos below will do a better job of explaining this!)

Starting out with what I thought was quite a lot of bricks, I quickly discovered that I had not, in fact, made a lot of bricks. So as I continued to build tower parts, I had to pause frequently to make more bricks. Then, I made some bricks. After that – brick-making. Did I have enough bricks yet? No, I did not.

Did I mention how wonderful the Proxxon machine is for this sort of thing, rather than doing all this with a ruler and knife? My hands would now be gnarled stumps without it.

Floored by the results

A big empty tower wouldn’t be very interesting if all the players could do was to stand at the bottom looking up. “Yep. That’s a tower, alright.” Towers need floors for the characters to stand on, where stuff can happen.

I wanted some variety in my flooring, so I planned for a few different textures. My original grandiose design was to also make an assortment of floors that essentially had different openings in different places, allowing me to place stairs, ladders, etc, on each level that led up to the next. Achieving the variety that I wanted wasn’t realistic, though, unless I wanted to make floors by the dozen to cover enough possible layouts.

The compromise I settled on was to make solid floors without any openings. Instead, access to each tier would be simulated with a stairway, etc., to the next level up, and a piece of black-painted chipboard in an appropriate shape to depict the holes leading to the tier below. (My holes and stairs are still in progress, so will be covered in a future post.)

After cutting a bunch of 6″ circles in dollar-store foam and gluing them down to some chipboard, I tried out a few different looks and ended up with a collection of floor parts.

As shown above, I made a few damaged pieces and a pair of half-floors (in case I wanted some sort of balcony overlooking the floor below). The textures above were achieved using a trick I found in a Facebook crafting group – a bunch of staples taped together and pressed into the foam surface! This not only made a nice stone look, but created a grid without me having to try to draw it in evenly myself.

I’ll eventually make some wood-textured floors as well, but I haven’t been too satisfied with my results trying to create wood texture on foam, so I’m considering picking up one those wood-grain texture rollers first.

Tiers were shed

I ended up making an initial set of four tower levels:

• An entry area with a single door opening.
• A simple room with four circular windows. I embedded key-rings to form the circles and intended to paint them in a dark metallic color, but ended up leaving them the color of the surrounding rock.
• A room ringed with murder holes, through which guards could fire down on passing enemies.
• An outer-balcony room featuring an external ring adorned with bronze railing. I realized too far in to change it that this one breaks my “keep the walls out of the way” rule, so if I do something like it again it will probably just be an outer ring I can slide into place around the top of one tier to serve as an outside balcony for the level above.

I made two “toppers” as well:

• A damaged upper level, for instance to show that the upper part of the tower has been destroyed.
• A set of battlements to adorn a less crumbly tower.

All the foamy bits were black-and-mod-podged, coated in dark grey, then dry-brushed with a tan and a light grey

I also made a couple of ruined brick buildings, patterned after some of the abandoned Thundertree houses, and painted them with the same scheme as the tower bits.

The guided tour

Lost in a dense forest, our adventurers notice a stone structure visible through the trees in the distance. As they approach, they discern that the mysterious building is an old tower that’s seen better days.

They enter the ground floor, at which point the DM lifts off the tower structure to reveal a tower room complete with some furniture and a spiral stairway – which, due to my current lack of those items, will be simulated below by a blank floor…

They ascend the stairs, and the DM adds the bottom tier and a floor back onto the structure. Here they’re assaulted by, I dunno, let’s say a very densely packed zombie horde.

The zombies defeated, they climb another stairway to the next room, murder holes for archers shaped into its walls. Clues carved into the stones hint at the phrase that must be spoken to open the hidden hatchway to the room above:

Puzzle solved, a hatchway opens and a rope ladder descends. They climb to what was once clearly a wizard’s laboratory, filled with books and alchemy tools, and featuring an outside balcony offering a view of the surrounding woods. From this vantage point, they can see some ruined single-story rectangular buildings in the area.

The ceiling above them is damaged and what were once stairs to the upper level appear too rotted to support climbers, but the party can see the damaged wall above through the opening where the stone has fallen away.

More to come

While so far I have a limited variety of room types, I already have some flexibility in the sorts of layouts I can create.

After I get the aforementioned stairs and holes finished, I’ll probably take a break from tower construction to finish up a couple of other in-progress projects. But the basic scheme here lends itself to adding more pieces over time, and I’ve already got a long list I’m considering:

• Wooden floors, as mentioned above.
• More copies of the existing tiers and toppers, for taller or multiple towers.
• Doors that actually fit in place, since my existing ones don’t.
• Tiers with multiple doors, for instance to align with castle walls on each side.
• New toppers such as minarets or wooden structures.
• A redesign of the outside balcony level to achieve near-wall-less-ness, as well as some clip-on decorations to cover the somewhat blob-shaped joints in the railing. Some shields and some tapestries are possibilities.
• An elevated bridge/walkway that can be used to link across towers above ground.

Suggestions for other additions are greatly appreciated!