Savage Tide in 3D: Bullywug's Gambit: Kracken's Cove

[Morgenes]

Note: Sorry about the links to images, I thought I could post the images here originally, but apparently not.

Hi, it's me again. I posted earlier here about using 3-D terrain from World Works Games to run the Savage Tide Adventure path. Well, it seems I completely missed posting pics from the Beneath Parrot Isle and Lotus Dragons portion of the first chapter. I did far more work on the Beneath Parrot Isle portion, even custom-drawing my own tile to handle a water area shown on the map. The Lotus Dragons portion I used the Minichunk 1" dungeon tile floor pieces to create the map. I tried using the doors from the Minichunk set, but the players still had issues with seeing over them, so I created door floor tiles that look a lot like the map symbol for doors.

The second chapter of the Savage Tide adventure path starts with the players trying to chase down Vanthus who has gone to Kracken's Cove to set fire to ships to later steal their contents. The players arrive too late, as told by the plume of smoke visible a mile from the cove. When they arrive, the find they were too late:

Image of fires burning on skull cove

Beyond the burning ships was the Sea Wyvern. It was far enough out that it wasn't caught in the flames. The Sea Wyvern will play an important part in future chapters of the story, and so I went ahead and photo-shopped the described blue wyvern onto the front sails of my Maiden of the High Seas model, turning her into the Wyvern of the Sea.

The Sea Wyvern at Skull Cove

I used 'Skullcove', 'Maiden of the High Seas' and 'Bits of Mayhem' (for the fire transparencies) sets to complete this set piece for the start of the 2nd chapter of the AP. The flat paper ships were downloaded from the Wizard of the Coast site, resized to 1" squares and printed out to represent the burning ships.

One of the things I've been working on is gluing the ground tiles to flat sheets of magnets rather than dealing with other suggested methods for keeping ground tiles together. It gives them a fairly good weight even if you didn't have a metal board to set them on, and almost works too well on a magnetic surface. Here's what one looks like:

Magnet Tile pic

And here it is being laid in:

Magnet tile being laid in pic

For more pictures, check out my gallery.

[carborundum]

Absolutely fantastic!
I've got the Maiden too, all built and ready for SWW. The players have no idea - they've just used a whiteboard for years, and now I've joined and started making maps and stuff they're all a bit less jaded! (All 33-38).
I've also got the Minichunk but didn't have time to make the Lotus hideout - they'll be there next week. I've been thinking ahead to do Tamoachan with it though.

Now I'm off to browse your gallery :)

[Shade325]

Hey what are odds I can get copies of you wyvern sails. Too cool. Would love to use them on my maiden.

Here's a link to some photos of my Maiden just to show I made one as well.

http://games.ph.groups.yahoo.com/group/savagetide-dc/photos

Later,

Shade325

[Morgenes]

Shade325 wrote:

Hey what are odds I can get copies of you wyvern sails. Too cool. Would love to use them on my maiden.

Here's a link to some photos of my Maiden just to show I made one as well.

http://games.ph.groups.yahoo.com/group/savagetide-dc/photos

Later,

Shade325

Shoot me an email and we can talk about it (morgenes (at) gmail.com)

[carborundum]

You mentioned a minichunk version of the Lotus Dragons base - have you posted any pictures of this anywhere? I'd love to see it.

[MrFish]

Wow is that ever some nice work.

Sigh...my pcs are not into figurines and models--I just use pictures for them. However I applaud you taking the time to do this and hope your folks appreciate it.

[Morgenes]

carborundum wrote:

You mentioned a minichunk version of the Lotus Dragons base - have you posted any pictures of this anywhere? I'd love to see it.

I'll see if I can find what pictures I took, if nothing else I can throw it back out on the board and snap some pics. It's really not as visually exciting because we stopped using the wall pieces. When you're dealing with that twisting of a structure, with that narrow of gaps, it's really hard to work out all the walls that are needed as well as to even see what's going on. Minichunk (with walls) works best where your dungeon is relatively open, with large corridors. So I made a bunch of different sized corridors and room tiles attached to magnets that I could lay out as they explored. We actually got to the point where I'd call out what they needed and they would lay the tiles.

Also, as a teaser, I'm currently in the process of building the Vanderboren Estate, using Shellendrak Manor. It's a truly massive build, the first floor fitting on a 29 x 22 inch foam board base. I plan on building the three above ground floors and using Minichunk for the basement.

[Morgenes]

carborundum wrote:

You mentioned a minichunk version of the Lotus Dragons base - have you posted any pictures of this anywhere? I'd love to see it.

I have posted my pics of Dead Dog Alley, using VillageWorks from World Works Games.

Gallery for Dead Dog Alley

I didn't have the time to pull together ground tiles for this, so used a plain vinyl mat for the ground.

I spent a good bit of time making interiors for all the houses based on discussions in the WWG's forums, which were extremely helpful. Of course, that meant my players didn't try and go inside.

For the special maps (the Taxidermist's shop and the Gauntlet) I blew the maps up from the PDFs and printed them at 1" squares. Then cut out and glued to foam board, then cut the foam board out. A couple of magnets and it was quick and easy to put together as they explored. You can see the start of the Gauntlet in the last picture (the warforged standing on the die is hanging from a rope, about to realize there is a carrion crawler waiting underneath the waters, as well as a bunch of crossbow weilding snipers). I did some extra careful cutting to make the illusory wall and arrow slits not 'as noticeable' so the players took a while to figure out how to get out of there. I made it so that when they did find the other side of the illusory wall, the cardstock floor at the wall overlapped onto the foam core of the lake portion, so that it worked right. I know...it's confusing to try and type it too. Needless to say, I thought a lot about how to hide that.

[carborundum]

Nice! Thanks for doing that! It makes such a difference (if your group uses minis) to see everything to scale like that. I'm so looking forward to springing the Maiden on my players when they start SWW.

Your magnet idea is genius! No problems tearing stuff with that nasty velcro! How much does that stuff cost?

[Morgenes]

carborundum wrote:

Your magnet idea is genius! No problems tearing stuff with that nasty velcro! How much does that stuff cost?

For my foam-core based pieces (minichunk and custom maps printed to scale), I bought a long strip of 1/4" magnet. I got it at my local A.C. Moore (Arts & Crafts store) for $6/25 feet. I cut it into 1/4" squares then use Zap-a-gap (or any other super glue) to glue it to the foam core. What's really nice is when I get the 40% off coupon (sent to your mailbox every week if you sign up on their web site) and use that to cut the cost of the more expensive supplies like that.