I’ve become mildly fascinated lately with watching videos of folks crafting extensive custom gaming environments – dungeon tiles, landscapes, fancy gaming tables, and the like. I see a lot that I’d really like to try, but for every single project I look at I also see limitations in layout, re-use, practicality, and visibility. It’s all very pretty but for flexibility there’s still nothing that compares to sketching out crude, blocky maps on my trusty battle mat.
There’s also the problem that supers games probably require a lot more different kinds of environments than the traditional fantasy stuff these folks are building. Over the course of about 16 sessions my MP campaign has been to suburban streets, a real 1800s island fortress, a fantasy realm with multiple terrains, a walled modern compound in the woods, a storage facility, a public library, a church, a prison, and a cavern under a wildlife preserve. My players’ team base is a converted section in a strip mall down from a UPS store and a Dunkin Donuts. There’s a not-unreasonable chance that time will be spent in space, in one or more parallel universes, at sea, or even underwater. Covering enough possible environments for more than occasional use would be tough.
On the (upcoming) D&D side the prognosis is a little better, but since for now my intention is to use a lot of pre-made adventures, the modular tile type environments aren’t necessarily as useful as I’d like them to be – dungeon maps that aren’t designed for the kinds of layouts you can assemble with a pack of tiles are often packed with asymmetrical twists and turns, oddly shaped areas, and passages that criss-cross over each other on different levels.
And yet… I still really want to build some stuff.
But to get back to the originally-intended point of this post: I will be putting to use One tip I found on the YouTube channel of a well-known dungeon crafter named DM Scotty.
There’s been a little bit of flying around so far in my MP campaign, and I expect there will be more as it progresses. I know there are some commercially available little flying platforms for miniatures, and I’ve been considering buying a few to replace my current “sit one of my washer tokens on top of a hex nut” method of portraying flight on the map. It’s been in the back of my head for a while to try to find a better DIY option for this, and that’s what DM Scotty suggested: A pack of plastic cups labeled “cordial glasses” from the dollar store!
They’re a few inches high and when flipped over on the map they present a hollow circle just over an inch around – perfect for miniatures or one of my 1″ tokens. There’s a down side in that they take up a little more than a 1″ square or hex map grid, so they may inhibit tight flying formations or interfere with positioning of characters on the ground adjacent. But, hey, at six for a buck, I’ll work around that!