Cavern Terrain

It's been a long time since I've posted here, but I'm still alive and kicking. The last 4 years I've devoted more time to my SYW/Imaginations projects at my Fleisch-Spätzlestadt page. The past few months however (well let's say 2015) have seen my interest drift back more towards the Fantasy RPG genre and with that some new work to share.

I've been running a D&D 5E campaign. It's been a monthly thing (or every other month depending).  Psyching myself up for a game in the downtime created by scheduling conflicts has been important. My solution has been some therapeutic terrain and creature making to complement the games

Here's some things to share that I made for a cavern encounter with a Stone Giant (Otherworld Miniatures), a Roper aka Stone Lurker (Reaper), and some Piercers (homemade).

The stalagmites above were mostly made with paper towel tubes cut and turned into cones of various sizes with hot glue to hold them together. I then hot glued wood coffee stirrers inside to use as a handle. These were dipped into acrylic gel medium that was tinted with gray acrylic hobby paint. Very simple and I was happy with the results. See below with the Otherworld Stone Giant. In the game mechanics, the Stone Giant blends in with his cavernous environment.

I later tried making a second batch of stalagmites using some other techniques. I used bamboo skewers with lots of hot glue as a base for the goop. I also tried using pipe cleaners. The pipe cleaners didn't work out that well, but the hot glue was alright. Also used some gray caulk as well with decent results.

You'll also see my quick and dirty Piercers below. I'm not aware of any company making these. They really are one shot monsters. They drop from the ceiling and if they fail to kill you in that first attack, well...they aren't much of a threat after that.  I used some small shells, added mouths with greenstuff, and made the eyes with a small drop of hot glue.

I also wanted cavern walls, to give a better sense of 3D tabletop RPG play and also because I could make the cavern look more irregularly shaped on the rectangular tiles I'd made (soft hobby foam sheets sprayed with gray paint into a checker pattern.)

The cavern walls are shown in progress here. I used some some craft popsicle sticks as the base with soft foam as walls and used caulking to texture. These would later be painted, but you can get an idea here. I'll be posting a follow up of these with some newer work.

I do have several more things to show. Inspired by the cavern work, I shifted my focus to making up a mushroom forest. More on that to follow. 

For those curious on the actual game...the first time the group of 8 characters made it to the Stone Giant lair they never made it inside. They fought his cave bear pet, slew it mercilessly in front of him and sent the Stone Giant into a rage.  He went full on berserk and slew half the party one by one as they scattered in a rout down the mountainside to avoid being the next victim.  The follow up session was essentially a new group with 2 of the prior survivors.  They encountered the Roper and Piercers first and in a hard fought battle triumphed. The noise of battle drew the Stone Giant from his true lair further in the caves. They fled again, but the rear guard was engaged and drew the party back into battle. They did however have new characters with new abilities and bested the Giant this time, casting a Darkness spell on him and having a character that could see to target through the Darkness helped a bit...