Hirst Arts: Dungeon Building Molds

My late Christmas present was waiting for me when I arrived home from work today.  25 more Hirst Arts molds, for building dungeon and tabletop-gaming scenery out of plaster blocks.

We already have 20 Hirst Arts molds, plus several custom molds we built to speed dungeon construction.  This gives us a total of 45 Hirst Arts molds.  Now we will need to wait until spring to get some use out of these, as it is too cold outside for the plaster to properly set, and I'm not mixing plaster inside where it will make a mess of the flooring.

More Hirst Arts Builds

 

 

Still working on more Hirst Arts dungeon tiles.  This set of four 10' x 10' sections (3" x 3" square) feature the 2" arches from Hirst Arts Mold 44, a mold I only recently purchased.

 

My biggest challenge so far has been getting the room and hallway corners to fit the way I want them to.  These are not bad, though i'm not entirely satisfied with the results.

 

 

 

Even though I spent signficant time during the summer casting more plaster pieces, I am quickly running out of the arches and pillars.  I guess that means making even more custom rubber molds of arches and pillars this coming springtime.

Gothic Panels For Hirst Arts Dungeons

Here are some of my favorite Gothic decorated plates from Scibor Miniatures,

 

 

 

 

I'm intending to place an order with Scibor in the next couple of days, as i've got some paypal money that is just crying out to be spent.

The above pieces should make quite an impact on the look of my Hirst Arts dungeon.

Any recommendations on other manufacturers of interesting gothic wall accessory pieces?

A Hirst Arts Christmas

I can't possibly complete with others who deliver a more compelling Merry Christmas message: the angel of death is a poor substitute for the christmas angel. 

Still, these images represent some amazing Hirst Arts dungeon porn.  Full disclosure, i`m not responsible for the following dungeon pieces, nor the accompanying embellishments.

You can find the embellishments here, at Scibor Miniatures, and the forum thread at the Hirst Arts site, both of which you will find quite inspiring, if only from a Hirst Arts construction standpoint.

Hirst Arts: Pairs of Stairs

I have a small box of Hirst Arts stair elements, so I decided to build a couple of 10' sections of dungeon stairs. 

The front-most staircase is made from Hirst Arts chipped stone stair elements, while the staircase in the rear is built from the smooth, marble elements.  The stairs descend at a 45 degree angle. 

You'd need to put three of these staircases together to repesent your typical 30' staircase, found in many dungeon designs.  Suddenly a 30' staircase seems awfully imposing!

Hirst Arts: Platform

I'm still playing around with the Hirst Arts construction elements.  Here is a raised platform, with two sets of stairs on either side.  With so many elements at my disposal, I am trying to find ways of using up all of the excess pieces. 

The platform comes apart in four sections, and each is 3" x 3", which is my favored scale for 10' x 10' dungeon tiles.  Using a scale of 1" = 3'4" allows for walls on the section, while still permitting two miniatures abreast on your typical hallway.

More Hirst Arts Scenery

With the summer winding down, and autumn arriving, we come to the end of the Hirst Arts casting season in Canada.  Good weather is required for plaster casting, as the heat is needed for the plaster to set up.  It gets too cold in the autumn and winter to do much casting.

Most of the Hirst Arts molds have been put away, as well as the plaster and the related paraphernalia.  A couple of days have already been spent on scenery building.  The above columned chamber will serve as a "throne room of the gods" in an on-going campaign.

The second piece of Hirst Arts scenery is a traveller's bridge, useful as a choke point over a raging river.  This will be brought to bear once we return to our Lord Of the Rings tabletop battle games.

I've got my eye on a couple of additional Hirst Arts molds, but there's no hurry buying them, since I won't be getting back to casting until next summer.  Hopefully the Canadian Dollar continues to ride high, making the molds more economical to purchase.

Terrain For Skirmish Games

I enjoy an occasional LOTRSBG skirmish. I was introduced to the tabletop battles hobby late in my roleplaying game career, sometime in 2003 if memory serves. It was Games Workshop's Lord Of The Rings miniatures, and the related strategy battle game, that led me there.

Once you are introduced to tabletop skirmish games, there's a natural progression towards the other facets of the hobby, including terrain-building. This is a work-in-progress; a rocky outcropping that can be used as cover and visual interest. I think it needs some grass and foliage to finish it off.

Here are a couple of additional photos of the same rocky outcropping. I added some miniatures to provide scale.

Hirst Arts: Wooden Doors

Here's a photo of some painted Hirst Arts wooden doors. I'm not entirely happy with the wood. Next time i'll go for something with a little more red. I was experimenting with the metallics, trying out the bronze and iron looks.

I'm going to build some wall sections next, and play around with the look of those.

Hirst Arts Elements Part III

My first Hirst Arts elements post was dominated by doors. This post features pillars.Here we have a corner pillar, a crate with a removable lid, a keg and a pillar section.
Here are two additional pillar sections, a plain pillar and a 3/4 corner pillar.
The top corner pillar has some interesting runes on the edges. There is also an alcove pillar, a pillar with a hooded figure, and a tubular pillar in the bottom corner.
Here are some other interesting elements, including another crate, various sacks of grain, a crystal ball and a lion's face.
Finally, we have a pile of coins, a broken barrel and pail, a pile of bones, and a campfire with flames.

Hirst Arts Elements Part II - Altars

I promised I would post a couple of pictures of painted Hirst Arts elements. Here are a couple of altars that I built and painted. These were my first efforts at building and painting.
The great thing about the Hirst Arts elements is that the configurations are endless. Here is a 1 1/2" x 1/2" altar, painted brown. The corners, edges and centre blocks are separate pieces and in 1/4" sections, so you can make something as small as 1/2" x 1/2", or as large as you want.
Here are two 1" x 1/2" altars painted blue and white. I laid the white on too heavily, but it's easy to build new ones, or repaint these.
My favorite altar of the three, and i'm sorry that the picture is so grainy. This 1 1/2" x 1" red altar will be perfect for an evil shrine or the sacrificial altar for a death cult.

Hirst Arts: Three Dimensional Dungeons

I've been spending much of my time, lately, casting Hirst Arts blocks.

Hirst Arts is an web-based company that offers a line of rubber molds. Those molds produce plaster-of-paris blocks that can be used to build castles, dungeons, buildings and table-top gaming terrain elements.

From the 20 Hirst Arts molds that I currently possess, I am creating a set of three-dimensional dungeon tiles, complete with walls and dungeon dressing, to add some visual interest to our dungeon-delving sessions. Thus far, I have produced nine different kinds of dungeon floor tiles.

Each dungeon tile shown below is 3" x 3", comprising a 10' x 10' section, so that the tiles can fit together to make hallways and rooms. The walls will sit on the inside edges of the tiles, providing sufficient room in the middle of the tiles to have two 28mm miniatures walking abreast down a hallway.
The above picture shows my favorite set of tiles so far. Those dungeon tiles have a decorative edge running along the borders of the tiles. The edging appears to be made of runic script. I will use those tiles when the players find a section of dungeon that is more skillfully hewn from the surrounding rock, and the path of the runes will carry them to specific encounter or dungeon elements.
Most of the dungeon tiles will be comprised of these chipped stone numbers.

The benefit of this tile configuration (with the one-inch blocks in the center and smaller blocks around the edges) is that you can put the tiles together and the half- or quarter-blocks on the edges create full blocks when placed side-by-side. Those tiles can be used both for room and hallway tiles.

For a time, I agonized over the configuration of my dungeon tiles. Based on the design, the floor scale is 1" = 3 ft. 4 in. Compare that to 28mm figures, which translate to a vertical scale of 1" = 5 ft. Ultimately, the convenience of laying out connectible dungeon tiles (with the walls internal to each tile) won out over my need to keep the horizontal and vertical scales congruent.
This 10' section of dungeon tile is for cobblestone floors. It has an irregular edge so that the seams between floor tiles are less obtrusive.

I envision using this style of dungeon tile for hallways such as the entrance to the Tomb Of Horrors. In the ToH, a path of differently-colored stones winds its way down a 20' wide hallway.
Here is a dungeon tile with a herringbone pattern. The tiles lock together. This particular set will take some time to produce, since there is only 1 of the 1" blocks on the Hirst Arts mold, so I need to cast that mold 9 times to create one 10' x 10' section.
The same is true of the above tile. This decorative tile will be a good choice for royal chambers, temples and other lavish rooms.
The above dungeon tile has a neat octogonal pattern, however, the seams between the blocks is too pronounced. I'm still trying to find a way to fill those seams so that they don't distract from the tile pattern.

Don't ask me to tile your home. As you can see, I didn't do a very good job of laying down these smaller blocks to create floor sections that have tiles set at a 45 degree angle to the direction of the hall or room.

The first of these two tiles is of chipped stone, the second in smooth tiles.
This last dungeon tile is made up of cracked, smooth blocks. I prefer these less than the chipped stone blocks, since it's more difficult to give the final, painted version of these tiles visual interest.

My next task is to start working on the walls and dungeon dressing. Fortunately, I have well over 120 different elements to choose from, based on the Hirst Arts molds I already have access to. I will post some pictures of some of those other block elements so you can see the breadth of elements available in creating a three-dimensional dungeon environment.

Dungeon Scenery

I've posted before about my new-found interest in Dungeon Scenery. Dwarven Forge is well-known for its pre-painted dungeon scenery and tiles. Perhaps lesser known, but equally good, is Thomarillion, which sells unpainted scenery and other gaming elements and hails, if I understand correctly, from Germany.

Despite its continental location, it appears to also supply to North America. Here is an image from the Thomarillion website. It is a picture of five treasure piles, one of which would be fun to place in the corner, as a placeholder for whatever treasure is in a particular room the characters are exploring.

Dungeon Scenery

I am intensely jealous of those of you who have the pre-painted Dwarven Forge or Thomarillion dungeon and outdoor scenery. As someone who came late to the miniature battles hobby (the last couple of years), I had never felt any need nor desire to buy dungeon scenery: in the 70's and 80's, all of our D&D games were either miniature-less, or we used miniatures simply as placeholders, to show our position in marching order.

It was rare that we actually worried about tactical placement in combat. It was standard operating procedure to inform the DM that we were positioning ourselves in combat in a way to ensure the casters were protected from melee.

After playing my first miniature battle game, I began to appreciate the appeal of this form of gaming, and how it ultimately begat the role-playing form. RPG's will always be my favorite form of gaming, but miniatures battles have their own appeal. While similar to chit and hex boardgames (Squad Leader being among the closest in form) miniature battles give you complete freedom of movement, in 360 degrees. And directing whole hosts of combatants, rather than your character alone, creates tactical options that you might never otherwise consider.

Having come to enjoy miniature battles, I naturally began thinking about creating my own "sandbox", not with actual sand, of course, but a table upon which to play miniature battles. While the sandbox project remains unfinished, I did come across the Hirst Arts website, which has molds from which you can create your own plaster-cast dungeon and outdoor scenery.

I purchased several of the molds. Now, one of my ongoing projects is trying to create my own dungeon tiles, from which I can build dungeons. I have been building several 10'x10' sections, that can be put together in a myriad number of ways (the picture above is nine 10'x10' sections that make a 30x30 room, with two doors). As you can see, I have not yet painted the tiles.

I invested a not-inconsequential sum of cash in the Hirst Arts molds. They were well worth it, but sometimes I wish I had made it easier on myself by going the pre-painted route!