15mm Dungeon: Steppin’ out….

 

Having had a go at carving out some terrain pieces from blue foam in the last post, I was considering how the Dungeon might have multiple access points, or entries to differing levels, so looked around for something to create more steps. Some time ago, I’d picked up a giant bag full of small foam ‘bricks’ on EBay with a view to using them for scratch building projects, so thought I’d have a go at some building work and see how it went.

From the Lead Mountain, I pulled out an old resin set of steps of unknown origin that seemed to be a fit for 15mm, and then roughly duplicated them using the bricks…… I wish I was going to continue with some clever tips or hacks on how to make easily homecast duplicates in resin or plaster - but why be sensible when it comes to the Hobby ? …….. so…….for a project that was supposed to be simple and easy, I actually went about constructing the staircases, to coin a phrase, ‘brick by brick’ - I think I need my head examining…..!

How many bricks does it take per tiny staircase ?…… well, about this many: (sigh)…..

So, tweezers and smears of ModPodge (I really should buy shares in that company) at the ready, I painstakingly, or should that be painstupidly came up with the following:

At least I kept true to the simple ethos by basing them on cut up scraps of old store and discount cards !

Some precious time had elapsed, but I now had three staircases, a collapsed stair, a rubble filled corridor type thingie and a brick walled well/water feature of some sort.

More ModPodge  mixed with black paint was applied overall to bind everything together and harden it off some, then as per usual, drybrushings of various greys and greens, and just for fun in this case, some greeny-greys….. !

A couple of scrap plastic shards were thrown into the ‘water’ to represent maybe the ruins of a broken statue, and then a bit of vegetation added to help break up the blocky outlines a bit:

For a long time, I was considering whether to include walls to the dungeon set-up, but for now, I have decided to keep to these stand-alone pieces that can be placed as and when required - with a sort of 2D Dungeon, a suspension of disbelief is always required, seeing beyond the flat outlines and filling in the confining walls in your mind’s eye….. it will also mean I don’t have to do any more bricklaying with tweezers !

Next time: what to do with these foam offcuts?