Dungeon Tiles and You: A GM’s primer

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I’ve discussed my search for a good play-area here, and in the end I settled on Dungeon Tiles.  I still mean to experiment with Heroscape tiles, but in the meantime I like the art on the Dungeon Tiles and I can get them up and working with minimal fuss. That is, until you get something a bit more complex than usual, say:

Please forgive the picture fidelity –all I’ve got on hand is my cellie cam.

This table spanning epic is what I mapped out for my players.  It’s the product of two sets of Lost Caverns of the UnderDark and  one set of Fane of the Forgotten Gods.  Pretty cool, but how in the heck am I going to assemble that without either showing the whole map come game time, or incorporating “build lag” between every room.

Then an idea hit me. Actually my wife hit me. With an idea.  There was conversation we had about this, but I’ll give you the equation.  Dungeon Tiles + Foam Board + Double-Sided Tape = modular, reusable terrain tiles.

Once you’ve layed out the dungeon, you can then cut out foam pieces and tape them onto the foam boards.  You make the sections what the PCs will see, and then you can easily lay out the dungeon a chunk at a time with about as much lag as takes you to connect two boards.

The boards are in progress here.  I confirmed that the double-sided tape is indeed safe for your tiles, so you’re not yanking the print off the other side.  The first time you do this, I’ll confess, is going to take a bit of time.  But after you’re done, you’ll have the boards cut, now all you’ll have to do is re-tape the new boards.  I think you could even grid the foam board out and have uniform slices, which is something I’ll try on the next iteration.

After enough cutting and taping, you get this:

Definitely pick black foam board, as it just looks better and white is going to get grungy super-fast.

It’s not a Games Workshop table, but it’s solid and works at right around my craft level (I’ve only levelled craft once, ever.)

Hope that helps all my Dungeon Tile using brethren!

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