A Little D&D Crafting

Our D&D campaign has continued along at its leisurely pace, which has given me plenty of time between sessions to craft various bits of specialized terrain and landmarks as the mood strikes. With the big battle at the end of a 10-session Underdark story arc coming up, I thought it would be fun to create a custom battle board for the fight at the demon temple. This ended up being the most involved bit of custom crafting I have done.

A base for the Temple of Queralath

The final battle would be at a demon-summoning temple atop a cliff overlooking a large Underdark lake. So I made a landing area at the foot of a cliff, atop which I could drop a custom built temple board. All would sit on a "water board" I had made previously. While this bit of crafting was done specifically for this battle, everything I made would be modular and reusable except perhaps the temple enclosure itself. The "shore layer" is a separate piece, as are all of the cliff layers and the stair pieces. Within the temple area, only the basic box outline and balcony area aren't individual pieces.

The completed Temple of Queralath (battle in progress)

Within the temple area, the two oval rock outlines are summoning portals, which have translucent tops under which are color-changing LED votive lights. It made for a nice effect throughout the battle.

Temple close up (battle in progress)

Once the Underdark battle was completed (difficult but successful) and the characters wrapped things up and got back to the surface, I was excited by the prospect of doing some above-ground stuff for a while. One planned encounter in their first foray into the Onorian wilderness north of the town of Linden (their home base) revolved around an eroded causeway leading out to an ancient elven monument in some swamps.

Swamps and the Monument of Irileth

For this terrain set up I used a pair of new "swamp" base boards, a few new little "causeway" pieces, and then a handful of existing "runic monument" pieces, hills from my historical miniatures gaming stuff, and a few rock scatter pieces from the Underdark stuff I had made.

Swamp spawn swarm the Monument

There will be more on the battles themselves when I get around to the write-ups on my Myaran Realms blog, but the point of this post was just to show some of the terrain and battle pics. Not to mention the fact that the D&D miniatures collection continues to grow...