Underdark Terrain

For me, hobby-wise, things go in cycles, and the last better-part-of-a-year has been a cycle of Dungeons and Dragons. A return to my teen years, I guess.

There is an obvious connection between this and miniatures gaming. While our games have not typically fought out battles as full-blown miniatures battles, we have used tokens and large grid paper to play out these combats. For someone who likes to build terrain related things, I guess it was only a matter of time until I started building terrain that would be suitable to miniatures battles in D&D... I'm kinda surprised it took this long. So I decided to make an attempt at making some Underdark terrain that would be reminiscent of the Moria scenes in the Lord of the Rings movies.

The first step was to try to make a sample piece just to see if it looked OK. So far so good, so the on to the next step of making more. The nearest-to-hand round thing (a mostly use up roll of blue painter's tape) was used to scribe the arches. The rest conformed to a simple template. 8 inch tall pieces. 2 inch thick top surface. 2 inch thick support pillars.

Sample arched piece and scribed others

The next step was to cut out the scribed pieces with a Hot Wire Foam Factory hot wire cutter. (The material was 2 inch thick dense foam insulation board - in this case reused pieces that had been painted green...).

Hot Wire Foam Factory carve-outs

A roughly cut arch-bridge piece looks like this:

A little cleaning up

After the edges are cleaned up a bit with a knife to knock down the sharp edges, the piece is ready for some simple carving just to break up the straight lines.

Softening the edges and adding a little detail

To keep this a nice simple project, the remainder of the detailing will be done with paint (along with some glue and gravel).

Surface detail

Next...Painting and a bunch more pieces...