With my campaign coming up on the Lost Mine portion of the Lost Mines of Phandelver, I decided it was time to make some cave scenery. My existing tile sets are good for wood-floored areas and symmetrical stone buildings and dungeons, but they don’t lend themselves very well to more natural cave formations.
Mass Production
I decided to go with Black Magic Craft style cave tiles, because they had the flexibility I was looking for, and the videos about building them even went into detail about methods for making a lot of tiles in a short time. I’ll only summarize here how I made these, since I mostly just followed the guidelines from the BMC videos.
I started off by cutting a whole lot of 3″x3″ foam squares – 120 or so, if I remember correctly. Then I made a subset of those into corners, angles, and pieces with one or two edges shaved off to represent the outside edges of the cavern. I also shaped a few of the scraps into little bit that could be used to narrow or reshape passages.
Armed with a box of tiles, I was ready to do the black-and-Mod-Podge coat I usually do… but this time I decided against it. Instead, I mixed a bunch of the Suede paint I was going to use as the initial color into some Mod Podge and coated everything with that, hoping to save myself a step or two. Unfortunately I still needed to do two coats to stop the green of the foam from showing through in places , along with a third layer on pieces where there was blue text on the foam, as it was still showing through.
I’m not usually a fan of sponge techniques – I think dry-brushing generally looks better and is more fun to do – but for the sake of efficiency over so many tiles I used sponges to dabble on some brown paint to get some color variation in the rocks. I mixed up some black wash with lots of brown, and squeezed in a bunch of a bronzish metallic paint as well. The tiles were all dipped in the wash and spread out to dry. I’ve had issues with my washes pooling in the past and not really leaving the desired effect, so this time in flat areas where there was too much of it I dabbed the corner of a paper towel into it and let capillary action suck up the excess.
Soon my big box o’ cavern tiles would look more like this:
I think I still need to work on the consistency of my washes somehow, as they don’t seem to have the same overall effect as I’m seeing in most of the videos I’ve watched – more pooling and less darkening.
G is for Ground, C is for Ceiling
That’s how I was taught to remember the difference between stalagmites and stalactites many, many years ago. Wave Echo Cave has some stalagmites large enough be used as cover and hiding places, so I wanted to make some. I’d also recently watched this video while perusing a new-ish crafting channel on YouTube, so I figured I’d experiment with some variations on that video’s techniques.
I started with some fairly large formations, made from a mix of XPS and foamcore. I cut some chunks of randomly-shaped foam and stacked them together to get a general idea how they’d be arranged. Then I drew in some layer lines by hand on the thick XPS pieces.
I hot-glued these together and was relatively happy with them so far – but the stalagmites on the Lost Mine map were just not that big!
To make some skinnier formations, I used the circle cutting jig for my Proxxon to carve out a lot of round foamcore slices, starting at a 2″ diameter and gradually stepping down to the smallest the cutter would make. I then took a nail file to each circle to smooth down the sides and add some asymmetry – stacks of perfect circles just wouldn’t look natural. Soon I had a pile of stalagmite-layers-to-be (not all shown in the image below).
Given the narrower bases these would have, it seemed like a good idea to add some weight to the bottom to help keep them upright. My first inclination was to carve holes into the bottom layer to glue washers in place, but I realized that since I was going to be stacking layers anyway, I could just glue a washer under each of the first two pieces. I finished the bases with a random number of layers of the largest circles, then switched to the next smaller circle set and built some separate second tiers which I would then glue onto the bases, making sure to use foil to roll textures into any surface that might be exposed at the end.
With the first two tiers complete, smaller bits were stacked in different configurations on each one and tin-foil-textured.
Next, of course, was the ubiquitous black-and-Mod-Podge step (because I already had some mixed up, and the lighter colored version hadn’t really ended up saving me any time). I also at this point started experimenting with some different color combinations on some scrap foam. I even made a stubby little extra mini-stalagmite from the leftover circles shown above.
I decided to stick with the same color scheme as the cavern tiles, only with dry-brushing of the layers over the base coat instead of sponge painting, since there was less ground to cover (ha!) this time around. Somehow I accidentally started with the wrong base color and covered two pieces with it before I noticed; I ended up leaving them with that color just for some variety.
Next came the wash. I had some left over of the wash I’d made for the cavern tiles, so I used that. Rather than dabbing it on with a brush, I wanted to see if I could get it to flow more naturally into the textures and layer gaps. To do this, I sat each piece in a plastic container and poured the wash over it. Lather, rinse, and repeat, as the shampoo bottles say, until all the pieces were coated.
At this point I was reasonably happy with the look, and probably should have skipped the next step, or done it differently.
He Slimed Me
Stalagmites are formed by the slow trickle of mineral-laden water. So, I reasoned, they’re probably at least a little wet most of the time, and that moisture is probably a breeding ground for mold, algae, and other assorted gooey stuff.
I made a wash by mixing several different shades of green, a lot of water, and a drop of dish soap as a flow aid. On my test strips it went on worryingly bright, but eventually dried down to a darker green that looked pretty good as a patch of slimy growth. So I took that wash and dribbled little bits of it on the tops and sides of my formations, letting it run down and pool where it wanted to. I reasoned that the plant growth would follow the natural path of trickling water.
It ended up drying a little lighter than on my test pieces, for some reason… and, overall, I found I didn’t care for the effect once it was applied to the actual terrain. It was too late to undo it, but I did apply a little of the original dark wash over the green bits, and it helped tone down the brightness.
This phase of the build complete, I sprayed them with clear matte protectant and declared them done except for some more add-ons I was planning for later. I decided on one extra step after the finish dried, though: to make the pieces look wet along the spots where water would be trickling down, I dribbled some clear gloss varnish onto them, mostly in the areas where the green had flowed. I have mixed feelings about the results here as well.
These pieces are usable and kind-sorta done, but I still wanted to Shroom them up a little. That’s a somewhat different project, so I’ll cover it soon in a separate post!