Evolution of an Adventure Pack

I thought you guys might be interested in how I design one of my Adventure Packs. If you’re not familiar with them yet, they’re paper-craft accessories that can add theme and function to battlefields you create. You can check out all of my AdvPack creations on my HeroScape site:


Like all things, it starts with an idea. For a long time I thought HeroScape needed some sandbag bunkers. In the past I’ve used the cheap variety you might find in packages of plastic army men. They worked well but I couldn’t share them with others. You either had them or you didn’t. I’ve also built bunkers just out of HeroScape tiles; like I did in the Guardian Bunkers Battlefield but they didn’t quite look like sandbag bunkers. So, one day, I decided to make a Sandbag Bunker Adventure Pack.


The sketch comes first. Often times when I’m at work I draw up a sketch of an idea on a scrap of paper. Later, when I’m home, I flesh out the idea. Here’s a sketch of my initial ideas for the bunker.

The next step is creating a mock-up. Using good-ol’ pencil and paper (cardstock actually), I draw up my design to scale. After carefully cutting out all the pieces, I put them together for an initial fit. When my wife first saw the bunker at this stage she said, “What is it? A fruit stand?” It did kinda look like a fruit stand. That’s because it was completely white. But, after a little work with a magic marker it looked much more bunker-ish.


After that stage comes making the model in the computer. For the rough framework I used a very high-tech program called Microsoft Paint. I convert all of my measurements to pixels at a scale of 100 pixels-per-inch. It’s nice and neat and I thank the designers of HeroScape for making the hex dimensions so easy to convert.

Next comes the hard part – texturing. Finding textures is hard. Google is your friend. I love Google. While searching, I found some nice pictures of bunkers that gave me a good idea about the direction I wanted to go with my bunker. Many of the texture images had to be modified a great deal to make them work; for instance, making them tile properly (or at all). Paint Shop Pro is my method of choice for this daunting task.

Once everything is said and done it’s time for printing. Then the model gets all glued together and I make the final changes (and there’s always some). In the final step, I set up a nice backdrop, snap a few photos, then it’s back to the Paint Shop again, then off to Microsoft Word for the write-up, the wife to proofread, print to a PDF using PrimoPDF, upload to HeroScapers, wife proofreads again, update all of my pages (I’ve got a lot of pages), and - boom - it’s done!


You can download the finished Aventure Pack by following the link below. Enjoy and Happy 'Scaping!