Dungeon terrains

Scratchbuilding terrain modelling Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy

This article is about basic dungeon terrains; If you have any terrains for roleplaying purposes, they are much likely to be stone wall -terrains like these!

Lidda's bad day

My terrain buildling hobby began years ago, inspired by Warhammer(link is external) (which I've never actually played) and D&D 3rd edition(link is external). I had plans of creating my own miniatures from scratch(!), and in addition to them, started to create some trees, dungeon walls and miniatures. I had made some wireframe structures for miniatures and started applying filler to them - this wasn't my first time doing that, I had earlier created a model of a 20's beach scene with a lot of scratchbuilt characters in it. I had read battle descriptions of some Warhammer battles and got excited, even bought a Warhammer rulebook, but was turned down by readability and complexity issues of the old book.

The project advanced slowly. Only when cheap prepainted Dungeons & Dragons miniatures(link is external) came out, and a friend of mine decided to order a bunch, I ordered a few boxes at the same time - after which I was hooked. While I had bought the minis for RPG purposes, I got excited about the miniatures game too, and I had to collect enough miniatures to get decent warbands for each faction, including a few different leaders, and when the second set - Dragoneye - came out, I had to order a bunch of those too. Of course. Collectible games can be quite hooking.

Anyway, with appearance of DDM, my terrain building project got quite a boost. I finished my first set of terrain, self-made resin-cast dungeon walls, boosted with pillars & some DDM terrain elements (rubble, sacred circle, blood stones). While I made the tiles and other terrains myself, I'll have to say Hirst arts(link is external) was a great source of inspiration for me. I decided to go 2cm tiles instead of 1", which doomed any chance of buying later some HA molds and combine with my terrains.

Overview to DDM dungeon terrain.

I didn't paint them all at the same time, and didn't pay close attention to colors. Therefore there's some difference in wall colors.

A hall with pillars - a classic!

The terrain can be used to create very atmospheric sceneries, a hall with pillars is an excellent example of this. And while I've learned to like paper terrains too, they can't reach the feel of real 3d -terrain.

Another view to the DDM dungeon terrain

Quickly made pit terrain wasn't very successful... works best as printed.

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