The Great Outdoors, Indoors

With a starter collection of dungeon tiles and a few passable doors completed, I decided to move on to trying my hand at some outdoor scenery. I wanted to continue with the concept of making terrain in a way that’s flexible and modular, rather than making fixed layouts. I want re-usability, and I’m willing to sacrifice some realism to get it. (Not that I’ve reached the point where I’d be producing ultra-realistic output even if I wanted to, of course.)

The hills are alive with the sound of dice rolls

I made brief mention in one of my dungeon tile posts about having made some flat, rocky bits as generic hills, crags, cliffs, etc. These were kept very simple and ended up just painted gray with a few lighter tones dry-brushed on, so they look like weathered but somewhat homogeneous stone. I didn’t add any plant flocking or sandy textures this time, though I’ll be making more such pieces in the future with more detail. These will serve for now as landscape pieces that miniatures can easily stand on.

The one thing I will make a point of as I make more similar pieces is to plan ahead to make shapes that are more easily stackable. My initial ones were created pretty much randomly and I ended up with a lot of rocks where the smaller pieces weren’t shaped so as to fit on top of the larger ones in a natural-looking way without jutting overhangs.

Equipped with a pile of rocks, I now needed someplace to stack them. With modularity in mind, it seemed like the best thing to do was create a flat outdoorsy area and then gradually build more scatter terrain to be configured on it as needed.

The table we’re currently playing on is about 40 inches square. I considered using an MDF board as my terrain base for its durability, but all the ones I could find locally were too long to fit on our table, and I don’t have easy access to a table saw to cut one to fit. So I went with some of my big sheet of XPS foam instead, cutting a 38″ square and then using a hot wire cutter to make the edges jagged and irregular with a slight inward slant. The board probably won’t last as long as MDF would, but it’s much lighter and less likely to damage any surface it’s laid on.

I gave this big board the usual black-and-mod-podge coating, followed by a light brown around the edges with a bit of dry brushing, the overall effect being a look of sandstone or sandy soil. I considered painting the surface in shades of brown and trying to add some of the grass flocking I’d picked up a few weeks before at a local model railroad store, but I ended up deciding to just go with the roll of scenery paper I’d grabbed at the same store. This will probably ultimately be the more durable solution. A spray adhesive glued the paper down to the surface, and once that dried I laid the whole piece face-down on a clean plastic dropcloth on my garage floor. There I used a combination of knives and scissors to trim the paper edges flush with the foam.

This one time, at D&D camp

I wanted to be able to create a campsite to make random nighttime encounters more interesting (if we’ve already got the terrain board out anyway). I found a DM Scotty video about making a long rest camp, and decided to do the tents from that; but I also found another of his videos featuring a glowing campfire using dollar-store tea lights… several of which I had around already.

Scotty used paper towels for the tent surfaces, but I quickly discovered that the only ones in my house would have resulted in tents with the word “Bounty” textured on the side. My wife offered some old scraps of fabric she had lying around instead, and these actually worked out pretty well even without any paint applied:

I still wanted to try to apply a wash to them to create some dirt and shadows, but despite the amount of glue the fabric had absorbed during their construction, they still soaked up the wash and created sort of a blotchy mess. So I ended up painting over them and doing the dry-brush thing to bring out the textures.

I reasoned that V’nee, being an outdoorsman who also has a lot of experience hiding in the wilderness from authorities searching for him, would perhaps have a better-camoflaged tent than the rest of the party in our current campaign. So I left his blotchy, and went on to add more blotches in shades of green, brown, and gray – he’s smeared lots of unpleasant substances onto this canvas over the years.

I’m not a wonderful painter, but my campfire came out decently as well. It’s a little bulky because of the size of the tea light base it’s built on, but I think it still looks pretty good.

So in the end, I had the parts to construct a camp site in a variety of different layouts:

I tried to do a layout with the camp sheltered under a rocky overhang. It ended up rather cramped and probably in direct violation of Neverwinter fire code, but it showed off the light nicely.

So now “all” that’s left to make are trees, roads, paths, rivers, plants, ponds, better hills, ruins, maybe a cave or two, perhaps a hut or cottage…