Glue wooden coffee sticks on the other side to make them 2 sided, perfectly to-scale floor boards. Snap them and place in a random staggered pattern for extra dungeon-y effect.
Sweet idea! You can use a Dremel or sharp scribing tool to add some over-enhanced wood grain lines, to give better contours for your wash to settle in.
I am a back pack dugeon master. Or at least that's the style I call how I run games. One back pack for the whole game and these are absolutely amazing thank you so much
Thought I'd tuned into the wrong channel briefly because the auto-caps made Professor DM say "... today on Dungeon Cr@p" and, if there's one thing I know, this channel ain't cr@p! Anyway, thanks again Professor, quality content as always!
I’ve been wondering if there is a way to do something similar with dungeon furnishings (easy, compact, versatile)? (DM Scotty kind of did it with dollar store jenga pieces)
You rock sir.I love every single one of your videos.We live in a apartment we have outgrown many years ago so I dont feel I would have any room to store terrain or create it but I enjoy watching and learning just the same. Who taught you how to build these creations or was it trial and error?
Great video and explanation! Quick question, when saying the combo of Liquitex and water should be closer to 60/40, what's the 60? Water or Liquitex? Thanks!
I would like to see this with some pieces to add to the sides with one end slightly curved up to suggest sewers or dungeon walls. So that there would be more of an underground tunnel-ish feel without obstruction of actual walls...
You could separately craft your upturned pieces like drop-in terrain. Something I thought of about a year ago was using black pipe cleaners to show the lines of walls of you want rooms smaller than your tiles. You can cut a few different lengths and store them in a ziplock bag with your tiles for transport.
While I love the idea and design of UDT, I like these tiles even more since you can fit them into a small box like that for easy storage and travel. Another great video Professor!
Great stuff! Honestly, the matte medium doesn't really do much for the wash. It's just acrylic resin medium, and rather unnecessary. You can add matte mod podge in and there would be no noticeable difference, as they're both just a matting agent. Add surfactant (dish soap), water, and you're done. For colors, just grab some Daler-Rowney Olive Green, Payne's Gray, and Sepia (or Brown Umber). It gives a MUCH more richer-looking tile than craft paint (and is cheaper than using anything from Citadel), and after all is said and done, you've got awesome stone tiles that match, but which have slight variations in color (as stone tends to have). You can even dab multiple washes on at the same time to increase that effect. Lots of ways to do this, this is just my alternative.
I mix paint colors in very small amounts because there is apparently nothing I hate more than reproducible results. I’ll be sure to try it for these new tiles!
They do kind of look like paved roads, but if you mean open land thats more like a battlemap then dungeon tiles. "Ultimat dungoen terrain" would be nice for this just make it green/Yellow/Brown and not so obviously squared 👍
If using the cheap ReadyBoard, I would peel the paper off of both sides. That paper doesn't hold well and I'd be afraid that the tile would REALLY only be glued to the paper, thus peel off the entire thing eventually.
This is perfect!!!! I have a different painting method that works better for me but the construction materials and method are on point. I will be adopting this for my own table. Thank you very much!!!!
Thank you! I concur. Did you see my The Lost City video yet? I collaborated with DM Scotty and It's the best thing I've ever done: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-MGeXZcuI3No.html
Excellent video and explanation. I've built 6 full sets of modular tiles and these are quite nice. I would humbly suggest that you could skip the black-bomb and make your 'protective layer' by mixing mod-podge with your tan base-coat. Any missed spots will be filled in with the wash. Again, great craft and explanation.
Awesome video! I have recently started to look into ways to make tiles, including the method of vinyl floor tiles adhered to shelf liner, a method I found from Tabletop Engineer! These look great, I may have to make some of these with some dungeon walls! Thanks for the video! I also loved your Dungeons of IKEA video!
I've been using 1" Grid graph paper tiles with a double covering of clear plastic laminate (front and back) over this cut piece of graph paper glued to a heavy cardstock backing. My system is equally as cheap but not nearly as durable as your tile system. I like this form of your terrain because it's easily transportable. The spinning round mat board is cool but too hard to transport when you have a bunch of other stuff (like minis, dice, and books) to move as well. The REAL QUESTION now is... when are you going to develop a method of mass-producing these tiles so we, you're loyal followers, can buy a bunch of them and make you rich?
There are a lot of mass-produced options for dungeon tiles you can buy, but as soon as you put profit in the loop, that can price people out of the idea. Often the same people for whom this low-cost method is for.
There's a pretty cool turn-based boardgame called Heroscape from Hasbro if you wanna check it out. It's discontinued, but you can get a base set pretty cheap!
Prof DM. I no longer use Facebook and your Reddit page seems inactive. I can't direct message you on youtube, so I will leave this here. Notice me senpai You've discussed setting a room difficulty for the purpose of playing faster, such as a DC13 room where every skill, AC, or save is 13. well, I had been exploring this idea quite a bit because I liked it very much, and I wanted to present something you should try if you haven't already. I apologized if you have talked about this before (maybe in passing), but I don't think I've seen you really focus on it. are you ready??? SKILLTRAPS I've been doing this method for a table I'm running, and it really seems to scratch that gambler's itch for my players. In my board game, the players must run a 12 map gauntlet jumping thru portals into one of 6 terrains chosen randomly by the dice. They cannot long rest, but they can use a "mana" (souls) mechanic to buy back hit dice, heal an injury, enchant a weapon, or purchase spell slots and long rest features. The player cannot share mana or buy perks for other players. To win the game they have to meet a quota of "mana" at the 13th gate. To earn "mana" they can land the killing blow of a monster, or solve puzzles and investigate lootable sites. The basic principle of SKILLTRAPS is that skill checks are a fixed luck mechanic, especially investigation. The better you roll, the better the outcome. This replaces traps entirely. Players know this and they know have to decide if they want to stick their hand in and let the dice determine if they grab something wonderful, or activate something deadly. GENERAL GUIDELINE: 1-5 Trap requires DCXX save or condition & damage outcome. Crit Fail= no save chance + automatic maximum damage. 6-10 nothing happens. 11-15 minor positive outcome 16+ major positive outcome Crit 20: miracle Example 1: Abandoned Caravan Wagon: 1-5: it's a mimic 6-10: nothing worth keeping 11-15: a trinket/poem/photo that inspires you. Cantrips and Melee attacks are ADV until (time/condition/event) 16+: an old canon. Enough arcane power to shoot 1x lvl3 fireball at 150' range before breaking. The wagon cannot be moved. NAT20: an old canon. Enough arcane power to shoot 3x Lvl 3 fireballs at 150' range before breaking. As a DASH action, the wagon can be pushed 10' per person per turn for a max speed 30'. Example 2: Fallen Hero: 1-5 rot bomb. maggots and worms explode from a cadaver. CON save XX or (condition) for (time) 6-10 nothing worth keeping. 11-15 Fleeting wild enchantment. Your weapons or focus becomes +1 magic weapon for (time) 16+: Hero is still alive! hero begins to whisper a string of magical words and numbers before dying and instantly turning undead. You curb stomp hero instinctively. Hero has suffered enough. The words linger in your mind's eye. Roll 1d6 and gain that number of spell slots back at cost of one per level. lvl1 slot cost 1, lvl2 costs 2, etc. Non-spell users can gain 1 resource point and 1 inspiration instead. NAT20: Hero was carrying a magical item from DMG loot table. Also take 1 inspiration.
That’s cool! I had a similar idea for a random trap chart I was working on-only mine has 20 random results. My players also love stuff like this. I’m Thanks for sharing & watching DungeonCraft. Cheers!
older video, but if you can get your hands on those vinyl counter cover mats, they have stone textured ones, and you can make a 2'x3' set of tiles, with some foamcore, and one of these cheap (they sometimes have them at dollar store) mats. I used these kinds of tiles when in college, because it just worked well with my budget.
Instead of making a wash, then varnishing, I use Minwax Polyshades Tudor. It's a great blackish tinted varnish (just slightly more brown) for a single wash and varnish in one go. I don't have to worry about trying to reproduce the same colour each time, and it's a single step rather than two. It's also a good shade for the dip method of painting if you are so inclined...
@@zombielandiii2711 The Tudor is my favourite colour by far. I have used Antique Walnut, but it is a brown, and I've not used it for a few years now. I've used this on the UDT, walls, tiles, stairs, and on my out doors generic side of the UDT and tiles. I use the tiles to achieve different elevations on the UDT. The out doors side is sand, painted brown then dry brushed, larger grains are picked out in a grey, then dry brushed. Then I apply the minwax polyshades. Once it dried, I put glue on in patches and add a green turf flock. Once the flock is dry I apply a clear varnish by brush to the flock alone to make it more durable. The result is a muddy surface with patches of vegetation which I find great for a variety of encounters. Think of it as the "devilin mud" of terrain building.
Hello Professor Dungeon Master, I was re-watching your magic rules and spell casting class videos and i was curious how would you run Paladins and Rangers in one of your games. I've been going back in forth on what to do, but i can't come up with a way that make them feel unique. The best i could come up with is treat them like prestige classes, maybe when the fighter becomes 3rd level instead of taking a martial archetype he swears an oath to find the holy grail (or something similar). Even with that idea however I don't know how to explain where the magic from the smite or other spells come from. Will you please help this confused DM?
@dungeoncraft I like (love) the end result, but it is unclear to me what the laminate flooring tiles add to the tiles to make them better than just foamcore tiles. Plz enlighten me senpai!
Basically just weight. All foam tabletop terrain is improved with a solid base, otherwise it has that "foamy" sound and gets knocked around too easily. You can use thick card too -- I've used ~2.5mm mounting board from an art supply store to achieve a similar result. The precut tiles look great if you can find those though because cutting thick card accurately is pretty tedious
A great project! Super handy. I've been thinking about doing something like this for dungeon crawls; lay out the tiles, let the players map on graph paper if they want, without having to have a back and forth dialogue with described measurements.
I think this is almost perfect. I love how you can fit all those tiles in a small box and how they can be rearranged for different dungeons. I admit the dedication to do this is noteworthy but I dislike the finished product. I see all those small stones and know many careless people will misplace miniatures off what should be a precise 1 inch square grid. Other careless players will push a mini around and again result in misaligned placement of other miniatures. Now arguments break out about if someone is truly a 5' step away from a full attack sequence. Maybe filling in the 1 inch grid with red lines might make it more clear but then that takes away from the immersion.
Thanks for the excellent ideas, Professor! ;) I was wondering about buying some Dwarwen Forge material, but when i see how simple and cheap it is to make some dungeon floors... I don't hesitate anymore!
Sad news (for me, at least) is that I've been to every Lowes and Home Depot in three counties, and it looks like they've all done away with these tiles. They still have samples, but they're thick, rectangular plaquards with the tile on one side. I had to resort to buying 100 3" Wooden Squares from Amazon, but they seem to work well too. So far, so good. 😊
This is a great idea and a fantastic project! When I make my washes (the formula from Jeremy also) I mix it in 8 oz. plastic twist-top bottles, and I have marked on the side some lines for each component in order. It is an idea I borrowed from those salad dressing bottles where you mix your own oil, vinegar and water with a packet of seasonings.. - I also mark how many drops of ink I used to make the color I want. So the information is there at hand every time I need to make more.
I really like these the best out of all the DIY tiles I have seen. They will have some weight (biggest downside I see to XPS) but not be too thick. I take it these are the "floating" type of laminate flooring as opposed to the self-stick type? They do see awful thin for "floating" type though? (This is where I intended to post! 😉 they both have Ultimate Dungeon Tiles in the title, must pay more attention to detail).😁
A friend of mine used ceramic bathroom tiles. They make some varieties of 1" tiles that come on 1 square foot plastic sheets that are really easy to cut. He cut out as many 4x4 sections as he could, glued them to masonite, and job done. A little more expensive, but given the variety of ceramic tile that's out there, he could have anything from a marble palace floor to a dark dungeon.
An update and an option. First, I still adore the tiles. Thank you again Prof! I thought that I would add an option to this design. I found this product on Amazon: tinyurl.com/y54pqkjy This is called "Wooden Dungeon Tiles Gaming Terrain" on Amazon. On their own, these tiles are not a product that I'd strongly recommend. While attractive, they suffer several shortcomings that I noted in my Amazon review. But those shortcomings are fixed by incorporating them with this build, which is what I did. So the steps are: (1) get the big box store samples, (2) cut them to the corresponding sizes, (3) glue foam board paper size down, (4) sand foam down so the height will match your other tiles with the fake wood attached, (4) paint the edges of tile and foam a desired color (I went with craft black paint), (5) glue on wood terrain, (6) spray protective coating (perhaps I should have done this before putting on wood but it doesn't matter too much). One thing I might still do is give the wood a dark wash. The wood is super nice, but it seems almost too clean. A wash would probably remedy that and would take just a moment to do. The advantages of this process is that it is much easier and faster than the tiles I previously made per the Prof's recipe. It cuts out a load of steps and significant sums of effort. It does add some cost, albeit too much for what the product is, but if you have a plastic printer that cost would go down to a buck or two. One step that I still struggled with was cutting the tiles. It's hard to do. I did it better this time with a heavy blade, but I still regard it as difficult and slow. Some type of power saw is recommended. Prof, if you have any insights on this step please share. Thank you.
You do fun videos,but one build I dont see any of would be....ships for sea adventures/encounters....would love to see those.....like a sea UDT platform,docks,and like I mentioned earlier some sailing ships....cant forget pirates,and coastal raiders in any fantasy settin... go Saltmarsh.
Awesome looking tiles. My first set I made was just dollar store foam core. Needless to say, they slide all over the place and are slightly bowed due to the moisture warping. ☹️
So on these, as I was doing them I put the adhesive onto the paper of the foam board. So, it’s tile - adhesive - peelable paper - foam board. After I left them to cure I got to thinking and couldn’t remember if you peeled off the paper before you glued it to the foam. After seeing you glue it onto the paper I was extremely relieved lol. I crafted up like 12 6x6 rooms, 24 4x4 and a shiiiiit load of hallways
I'm having a problem finding dollar store foam core. Does anyone know a suitable replacement? I found a similar foam board at Craft Stores but it was closer to 7$ a piece. Any help appreciated.
Another awesome video. Now here in OZ I've only been able to obtain black foam and was wondering if I could skip to the tan paint process, or does starting with white foam obtain a different "black" paint undertone?
Thinking of taking a swing at this project. What thickness of vinyl tiles did you use? Are the completed tiles still serving well now after all the time since posting? Thanks
Diego Arellano Artista Still a thing. I’m literally editing version 3.0 today & tomorrow. It is super light, smaller, & thinner than a thin crust pizza. You can see pictures on the FB group.
LOVE these build videos! Great balance on this channel of game-changing, game-bettering advice for DMs and players plus great, accessible build/crafting projects. Keep 'em coming!
I carry all my D&D stuff in mobile file boxes and was considering making dungeon tiles and terrain suited for storage in such a container. Looks like this is the way to go! Thanks for your videos; you've really inspired me into making my own dungeon terrain.
Tip: don’t use vinyl tiles. Mine have warped pretty significantly, otherwise I followed your instructions to a T. I got some cheap vinyl tiles and they have warped pretty hard. It’s a bummer because I was really looking forward to using these. This is my first time crafting terrain. I’m going to try ironing them over a damp towel and then immediately putting them under some weight again for a few days. The first day or so after I finished with the kwik seal, they were flat. After a few days of the kwik seal really curing, I guess the adhesive warped the tiles. I ordered some rubber sheeting off Amazon and I’m going to glue it onto the backside of the tiles to see if it will offset the glue. In reality, I should’ve let them cure under weight for a few days and they probably wouldn’t have warped. If you use vinyl tiles, DO NOT take them out from under the weight until at least 3-4 days
We all go with what works best for each of us, with compromises for resources and space. If your gaming group is happy with the way they play, it's perfect.
Tried the Army Painter Matte Varnish. Bad move. It can seep into an unnoticed pinhole and cause bubbling and/or collapse of the foam, which is not much of a problem because my tiles were well coated. The biggest problem is the stickiness of the varnish. I stacked my tiles and they stuck together. Peeling the tiles apart caused little tears in the tiles down to the foam. Is the polyurethane non stick?
If you were using the spray can version, the seep-and-melt can be a danger no matter what brand you use...lots of aerosol sprays will contain chemicals that will eat the foam if it's unprotected. Best to either be SURE you've completely sealed with the ModPodge, or use a paint-on matte varnish. As for the stickiness, that can come from excessive varnish coverage (which stays sticky and is hard to fix) or also from not giving enough time for your climate for the varnish to cure.
@@josepinto1545 I made 4 large tiles (4x4”), 8 small tiles (2x2”), 4 pillars (1x1x2”), and 4 walls (2x2”). All of those pieces are 1/2” thick except for the pillars. If I were to do it again I’d skip the walls and replace them with more pillars, since the walls were tedious to keep upright at that thin size. I also made some large and small stairs (2x2x2”) & (1x1x2”) but they don’t fit in the 4x4x4” cube.
