Sean Does Games

Making a Mimic Trinket Box Inspired by posts on various social media platforms, I decided to try my hand at crafting a trinket box that looks like a mimic  from the Dungeons and Dragons role playing game. I don't do a lot of sculpting and I'm definitely not the best at crafts but I really wanted to make a DIY analog of this classic D&D monster. The Mimic Source: The Monster Manual Like many others, I started with a pre-fabricated box. I picked up mine from Michael's for around $1.00. This was the most important step in my artistic endeavor and I failed to put any thought into it. What I didn't consider at the time was how the box's shape would force certain design decisions later on. For example, with a typical "treasure chest" the lid sits on top of the base and has its own sides. For the box I purchased, the lid is inset. While the design makes for a nice box, it pulled me away from the classic mimic form and changed how I sculpted that form. Live a...

Making Trees As I’ve mentioned many times before on this blog, I use Heroscape map tiles for my Dungeons and Dragons   homebrew campaign, Skyfell . A  large number of locales in Skyfell are in dense jungles and forests. While the Heroscape trees are great, I simply don't have enough of them to really drive home the flavor of many of those settings. Unfortunately, the original Heroscape terrain is now pretty pricey on eBay. So I decided to pull up my big-gnome pants and set into a little bit of do-it-yourself crafting. After a some looking around, I found  trounistro's   30-palm-tree set for a pretty good deal. This set includes a variety of types and sizes. They are also plastic, which appealed to me because I didn't want to fuss too much about storage and handling. The only drawback was that while each tree had posts to anchor it into either a base or a diorama, the set came with no bases. I didn't want to damage any of my Heroscape tiles either. So, I kne...

Making Tiles A vast majority of my RPG map bits and miniatures are hold overs from my Heroscape obsession from a few years ago. The hex tiles have enabled some fairly epic maps.   While I love the miniatures, their bases are a bit larger than the standard RPG miniature base. Top: Heroscape Figures Bottom: Bases from WizKids Miniatures This is a non-issue for exterior terrain builds because the Heroscape hex tiles are properly scaled for the larger bases. It’s problematic for interior terrain builds though because the standard 1-inch squares for your typical table map are just too small.  Heroscape Hex Tile Compared with Standard RPG Map Grid I got around this a few years ago by making my own square map tiles properly sized to the Heroscape hex tiles. They work great not only for Dungeons and Dragons tabletop terrains but also for the Heroscape game itself. This makes it easy to use both in a single map without much fuss.   ...