Dry fitting a storeroom

So, this not only isn’t painted, it’s not even glued together. I just dry fit a bunch of stuff to see how it looked.

So, this little room required about sixty floor tiles, and about half of my cut stone wall blocks. Plus a bunch of “accessories”. This is a pretty big room, but not huge.

Basically to do an even remotely reasonably sized “Keep” or even guardhouse looks like it would take roughly thirty pounds of hydrostone and a couple solid weeks of just casting the blocks….

What have I gotten myself into?

Broken blocks

One of the things I do is deliberately screw up some of my blocks. Sometimes that means breaking perfectly good blocks, other times it means casting partial blocks, usually at some angle, which allows them to appear to be embedded in the ground. This is sort of tricky stuff, but so far I’ve liked the results. I used some of these on my ruined tower terrain piece, and I’m using some also on my cavern dungeon I am building. There’s a bit of art and science both to this technique…

A view into my casting process…

So, here’s another photo I probably shouldn’t post. This is my work table with some curing blocks that I’ll pop out after posting all these updates. This is pretty much the process, nothing fancy… you mix up your hydrostone and water (the water bottles are for mixing, not drinking) then you fill in your molds, use the putty knives to flatten them when they settle a bit, and after they cure you pop them out and use the smaller putty knife to scrape off the spilled hydrostone… I’m probably gonna get cancer from this one day…

Bins, bins, bins…

Some of my terrain block bins.

Yes. I said “some of my”.

When I’ve got a half hour free or so, I mix up some hydrostone and fill in some molds. Then I let it cure and pop them out after about an hour or so and eventually they end up in these bins… These bins are about 25 pounds worth of casting… Yeah, eventually I’m gonna make something with this stuff… I’ve got two and a half molds filled up and curing as I type this…

Probably shouldn’t post anything that reveals how crazy messy my craft room is…

Fountain base

I had high hopes for this, but I put way too much paint in the clear resin (and I just put a tiny little drop…) and it ended up being opaque instead of clear blue… So I tossed it into my junk terrain pile where it’s gotten a few chips. Eventually I’ll put a miniature on this for a statue and incorporate it into some terrain…. For now it’s just an object lesson in testing before committing…

Silly dragon

Just messing around with some left-over epoxy… Normally I’d have just rolled this up and turned it into crates or something, but it seemed like such a happy little guy…

Gelatinous cube #2

Actually, #3, I gave #2 away…

Toothpick dragon

This is the dragon that my 4e GM gave to me. I finally got around to putting it together. I had to do quite a bit of cleanup on it to remove flashing and to get the bits to fit together. I still need to fill in gaps with some epoxy putty, and then paint it. I was gonna make a mold, but I’ve got over 70 dragons already and I’m starting to want unique ones instead of armies of similar ones.

Anyway, thanks Raevhen! I am making (agonizingly slow) progress!

Oh, yeah… “toothpick dragon” refers to me having to use a toothpick for one of its horns. I think it will be fine once painted….

Status report – 2-20-12

So, it’s not that I haven’t been doing RPG stuff lately. I just haven’t been posting.

I’ve been working on some behind-the-scenes stuff for campaigning, updating my own characters for gaming and making some Hirst blocks for creating terrain.

My next terrain element looks like its going to be a cavern prototype. I’ve been steadily casting cavern walls, stalagmites, ground tiles and paraphernalia. I’ve got one of my plastic bins full of hydrostone elements and have been designing the topography of the terrain.

I’ll post some pics as I get the foam core pieces cut and glued together. The plan is to have the terrain not just be horizontally oriented, but to have lower and higher areas, including underground pools of water. The prototype will be a single cavern element, basically a simple cave. The intention is to have a couple of ways in or out of the cave, at least one using stairs, and the other perhaps just being a rough tunnel.

I did a dry fit of the pieces on Friday but didn’t glue them down because I hadn’t worked out the topography. That’s my goal for tonight, which will mean stacking a bunch of foam core poster board or even using thicker styrene sheets to build up the inclines.

When it’s done it should be a pretty nice one-shot encounter opportunity that would slide into many campaigns as a bandit hide-out or monster lair.

Ruined tower

A prototype of using the Hirst blocks in a freeform manner.