Modular Dungeon Tiles, Completed!

I finally got the painting done on the set of dungeon tiles I started creating a couple of weeks ago. All that’s left is a coat of spray-on clear flat sealant, which will have to wait for a warmer day. There are a few areas where I need to improve my technique and a few things I’d do differently for another batch, but overall I’m pleased with the results.

From their humble beginnings as part of a 4′ x 8′ sheet of XPS foam – most of which is still unused – my tiles got sliced up into various sizes and shapes and gridded using a combination of a Proxxon foam cutter and some utility and exacto knives. Then a pen was run through the gridlines to give them a little more definition and bevel the edges a bit.

The tiles were planned to be stone surface on one side and wood on the other. The stone sides had some cracks manually drawn onto them (in several styles, as each of us did a few and took a different approach) and a crumpled wad of aluminum foil was rolled across the surfaces to create texture. On the wood side, a wire brush scraped a wood-grain-like texture into the foam and the pointy end of a small nail was used to poke simulated nail-holes along the edges.

The next step was to give them all a coat of a mix of Mod Podge and black acrylic paint, to strengthen them and cover some of the green.

Around this time I also started playing with making some outdoor terrain pieces – a flat board which will have a grass mat or some flocking attached to it, and some random-shaped rocky things to serve as hills, etc. More about those as they progress, but they can be seen in their early stages in some of the pictures below.

I tried to go fairly thin on the base coat because I didn’t want to create much thickness that could flatten out the textures. As can be seen in the picture above, some of my tiles at this stage still had some visible green showing through. In a few spots as I started painting on other colors, the base coat plus the first color coat ended up still letting some of the blue printed text on parts of the foam show through, leaving me with at least one dungeon tile that clearly read “Lowes”. I upped the paint-to-Mod-Podge ratio to get something a little thinner and darker; it did a good job of touching up the green spots on my otherwise-unpainted parts and covered better on a few new bits I built, so I’ll probably stick with a slightly more paint-heavy mix in the future.

All the painting was done with cheap craft paint. Walmart had 8-oz containers of Apple Barrel brand paints on sale so I picked up a Nutmeg for the wood side and Pewter Grey for the stone. The Nutmeg ended up being darker than I expected – especially after applying a dark wash – so in the future I’ll probably experiment with something a little lighter.

Next came dry-brushing, with Antique Parchment (a light off-white with just a hint of a yellowy tint, a color which I might also try swapping out for something else the next time I do wood surfaces) on the wood side and Granite Gray on the stone. I’m new to dry-brushing so my technique was less than perfect and a few of the tiles came out looking a bit streaky or with too-obvious brush strokes, but nothing seemed too hideous.

Lastly came a black wash to help bring out all the textures. This was a mix based on what’s described in this video, but could probably have been done with just a thin paint-and-water mix with a drop of dish soap. I left the wash to dry without trying to wipe off excess (as described in yet another Black Magic Craft video), and it ended up pooling in a few relatively flat areas and drying as dark blotches. I’m not fond of the blotches, but it could be argued that they’re simply old water stains on the floors, so they’re not a deal-breaker.

I also made a small collection of “stackers” – yep, from a BMC video again – for use as supports, stairs, and walls. These got the same base-coat, gray-on-gray, and wash as the stone sides of the regular tiles.

So at the end, I had a collection that looked like this:

(Astute observers will notice some doors as well – more on those in a future post!)

I threw together a sample layout which doesn’t really make sense as an in-game layout (a tavern, maybe, with stairs up into a stone-floored area?) , but shows some example configuration options.

Ironically it might be a few weeks before these actually get used. We’re past those middle areas in the Phandelver adventure where it would be easy to put together layouts from these modular parts, and moving toward the castle and the caves, which would both require some more complex parts.