UPDATED 12/07/09 Grishnakh's Custom Dungeon Plans

Grishnakh · #1 August 22nd, 2006, 09:45 PM

Grishnakh's Custom Dungeon Plans

The original reason I purchased Heroscape was to play an old favorite RPG game of mine (Melee/Wizards) on the hex tiles. With that in mind I have been steadily working to customize my tiles to allow me to play both Heroscape and Melee/Wizard on them. Melee/Wizard can be played as a classic (as in late 70's) dungeon crawl. I have been working on ways to utilize the Heroscape hex tiles to create rooms with some success. The walls that travel with the "hex spine" can be represented using the bridge sides. The problem is the walls that run opposite the hex spines. You either zig zag this wall so you have complete hexes or you just cut straight across the center of the hexes which creates "half hexes" every other hex row. This makes the room square but you have to make a rule about entering these "half hexes". (Our group says you can not enter them.)

Now that the castle set is out it occurred to me that I could use the battlement walls as room walls. OK, it looks a little strange, but I got used to it very quickly. My hope is that someday Hasbro will mold these little pieces as wall sections. They are very easy to use. Here's what they look like in the corner of the room. The space on the right represents a doorway.

(By the way this room was created using approx. 3 road sets. I make no attempt to layout any rules to play Heroscape in a dungeon setting. I'll leave that up to others to do. I just hope that what I'm showing here will help spur some ideas in that regard. And sorry but I'm showing old Games Workshop figures here as well. These could have been Heroscape figures but they were packed away at the time I shot this.)

Here's a photo of the entire end wall of the dungeon room. You can see the doorway (more about that later). The gargoyles are store bought from a Michael's craft store and repainted to match my columns. Also note the "orb" on the rock pile along the center wall. This could be an quest object for an adventure. The blue orb can be removed and stuck to the base of any figure to represent that figure carrying the orb. (It's held in place with the sticky white stuff you can buy to put posters up on a wall.)

Here's two over head shots of the entire room:

I'll be putting up a tutorial on how to make the columns in my customized terrain thread as well as some tips on repainting the lava you see here soon.

Here's a close up of the orb:

In Melee/Wizards rooms and corridors are separated by "curtains of darkness" At the start of the room you are currently in all of your figures (1-up to a max. of 4) step through this curtain and arrange themselves on the four entrance hexes. The room is then laid out with any obstacles and foes. Here you see the curtain of darkness being represented by the black glyph. The wizard and the elf have just stepped through.

Using the rocks that I created from one of my earlier tutorials I can easily lay out obstacles in the room. I can also stack hex tiles to represent various levels and if I want to make the upper levels out of bounds I simply cap the stack of tiles with rocks (not shown).

Here's some various shots around this dungeon room. You can see a capped rock pile on the left hand side of the first picture.

Melee/Wizards uses 3 and 4 hex (up to 7 hex) figures. Here I've used a Cerberus figure made by Papo glued to one of my 4 hex bases and flocked.

I'm always on the look out for anything that I think would work well as items in my set ups. On the way to GenCon we stopped at Cedar Point amusement park in Sandusky Ohio. I spied these dragons in a gift shop there. The good news is they were only $3.99 each. They fit perfectly on the hex and I will be using them as guardian statues in a future game. (These have been repainted to look more like stone.)