I have a real soft spot for nostalgic themed games, papercraft or artwork, this little build fills two of those. Ever since Inked Adventures released their basic Dungeon cup setup I’ve been wanting to build enough for a dungeon layout. So I put some time aside over the past few weeks and have now built enough tiles to populate a fairly decent sized dungeon, I can see I need to create a few more tiles but for the most part I’m done. As you can tell by the release date it’s taken me a fair bit of time to get around to building these, some of this relates to me trying to find a good material to mount tiles to but I’ll mention more below on that.
All Inked adventure tiles are hand drawn which I find a very nice look. There are 41 pages of dungeon goodness contained in this pack; rooms, corridors, stairs, trap tiles, 2d doors and 3d standup doors multiple versions of both. The beauty of the Dungeon Cut-Up set is even if your not into altering dungeon segments using GIMP/Photoshop, Billiam from Inked Adventures has created this set so you can use a pair of scissors and glue to create your own custom tiles. There are 4 pages of “extra” bits which you can use to either decorate your tiles permanently by sticking them down directly to the tiles or by turning them into loose tiles you can add mid game.
Layout Example – From an angle
For my set I stuck with components that are multiples of 2inches, 3inches or 6 inches. This will make it simpler to use for Dungeon plungin and Basic fantasy, although I might make a few special rooms that don’t conform to these sizes later on. For the moment I’ve created 8 – 6×6 rooms, 8- 6×2 corridors, 2 – 6×1 corridors, 4 L and T junctions, 2 X junctions, 4 dead ends, 14 small doors, 2 double doors, 2 double joiners, 4 double rockfalls and 2 large pit traps.
Bits created so far laid out
The rooms I created from the parts supplied by Billiam although I did a fair chunk of altering in Gimp to make them fit a 6×6 square. Other than the room with blue squares you could replicate most of the room designs with a pair of scissors, glue and a little ingenuity or simply use the ones that come with the bundle (12 rooms included).
Example Layout – Top Down
I mentioned at the top I’d been putting of creating these as I’ve never really found a suitable substrate for mounting tiles to. I’ve tested quiet a number of crazy ideas in my time from rubber carpet tiles to magnetic sheet. Not sure if it’s just the extreme weather down under but I’ve found all glues that are easy to use for tile creation (read spray glue even the good 3m stuff) do eventually fail, 3m takes the longest at around the 1-2 year mark.
Kitchen mat backing, simply double sided taped on
After years I’ve finally narrowed it down to two methods, the first I mentioned in my city build thread 8mm PVC foamboard. A little heavy duty for this application plus chews up extra storage space so I’ve simply used grey boxboard 1400gsm (basically what commercial game boards are made from) and printed directly to sticker sheet, stuck the tiles down then cut around the whole lot giving a nice neat tile. To prevent slipping on smooth tables I used double sided tape to a fix non-slip kitchen mat to the backs. Nothing to out of the ordinary and it’s been done before but I’ve found this one of the better solutions for DIY tiles; No spray glue mess, No warping from glue, No lifting , Reasonably slip proof on a table and lastly they don’t take up to much room to store. My current dungeon tiles fill about 1/3 of an A4 document box. To give the doors some weight I stuck them down to some thick (2mm) magnetic sheet, this will also let me stick them to the inside of the lid of the storage box later on to protect them during storage.
I’ll add some dividers etc later on but just to give an idea on storage
If your not sure you like the style of the tiles or simply want to give them a try there is a free sampler pack which should give you an idea of what to expect. I did this myself while experimenting with tile mounting techniques, once I had a solution I grabbed the full set and haven’t been disappointed. I even grabbed the square tile version although I haven’t used them. I should probably mention that Inked Adventures has released some freebies for this set so grab those as well as they’ll give you more options.
The whole example layout – yep missed a door on the right
As always have fun building and gaming and I hope to get some more posts up shortly, I have 6 projects 90% complete….I should probably focus on one project at a time rather than starting six at once :).
Sirrob01 