For the last few days, I've been busily chasing away the Xmas Shopping blues with a little bit of judicious terrain construction. I'm blessed with a multitude of pdf versions of various dungeon tiles produced by a good half dozen companies or so. Pdf's which have been gathering dust, unused, in my archives for several years. So I used the opportunity afforded by Christmas errands to by myself some art materials. I've been busily making dungeon terrain ever since.
One of my main issues has been the cost of printing dungeon tiles. My printer cartridges can only manage a dozen or so sheets of photo quality tiles before they need replacing, meaning it's actually cheaper for me to simply go out and buy the sets (or have them printed professionally) than it is to produce my own. Given this, I've decided to concentrate more on 3D terrain features -bookcases, torture tables, beds and the like- since my dungeon tile collection from commercial products is fairly large anyway.
I've also found that simply selecting the "text and graphics" option when using semi-gloss photo paper produces pretty damn good results as it is, without having to use up more ink with the "photo quality" printer options. Which will hopefully make this little side-project of mine a lot more affordable.
Finally, also to cut down on costs, I'm using ordinary poster card rather than thicker, modellers card, to assemble the 3D models. I've sandwiched two layers together for strength, which still saves on the pennies, before glueing the photopaper on top after printing. I've also been using plenty of scrap card to butress the models from the inside, just for extra strength. I remain a bit worried about storage, so I plan on seeing how durable this first batch is before I go making any more
No pictures yet, because my other half (the photographer in the family) is out and about and I personally haven't a clue to go about taking a decent photo of what is, essentially, a 3D photo. I'll include them in a forthcoming post about what miniatures I'll be using (and have painted) in my Hyborian game - finding miniatures with the right "feel" for the setting can be something of a challenge after all. I'm also planning (finally) on getting those two posts on the Necromancer class for OSRIC finished as well as picking out a few more modules for my Hybrorian campaign.
Until then.
Being a chronicle of my experiences in the murky world of "old school" roleplaying, wargaming and Miniature Painting. Likely to feature games of Dungeons and Dragons, Tomorrow's War, OSRIC, Harnmaster, Warhammer Ancients, Retinue and All Things Zombie.
2 comments:
Sounds good Brian, hope to see those pictures soon. I've got a small collection of tiles so I am interested to see how yours tiles turn out.
Not very well now I'm afraid. The actualfloor-tiles are fine, but the furnishings haven't turned out as well as I'd first thought. Although I scored along the bends with a sharp knife and secured the glued parts with small crocodile clips until dry, the various layers of card have already begun to come apart. Looks like I'm going to have to find myself some thicker card, rather than glueing several layers of thinner card together.
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