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6 June 2025
Let’s take another walk on the wild side and through The High Forest, but this time with Dwarven Forge as our delightful wilderness guide!
As longtime readers know, we’re playing a single campaign but with two different game groups. Our 3DRPG Studios office crew is leading the way, but our family home game gets a little extra TLC for going second. It’s not often that the gold medal goes to second place, and we’ll show you why in today’s DnD blog post.
So here at 3DRPG, DM Ben’s office is a thing of beauty. He has a splendidly large conference room table in it, which is ideal for a post-work game day sesh. So, when the group was traveling through the High Forest to confront the Night Hag and capture its first Bastion, DM Ben had ample space for a dynamic woodland setup.
The goal was to create a gameboard that simulated a challenging woodland journey through a series of mini encounters fraught with peril. If you have some solid, lengthy tablespace, you’re in great shape to do something similar in your DnD campaign!
Setting up this same sort of nature vibe on our marvelous Wyrmwood gaming table at home had three advantages the second time around: (1) the table is a little shorter, but it’s wider, (2) there are two game setup areas – the tabletop and the space underneath it. (3) DM Ben can revise content that didn’t work as planned the first time around (and that’s what we’re going to focus on today).
Our featured DnD terrain will be the stunning Wildlands pieces from their Gamefound Kickstarter. These sets will form our base, but then we’ve already made a slew of home-brewed DnD encounters and a random d20 Wilderness Trek Wandering Monster Table to boot! Even better, we get to sprinkle in all our amazing completed 3D prints, too!
Here’s what we came up with for Take II of the home players’ first extended wilderness journey. We tried to build out distinct zones that DM Ben can place the party miniatures, depending on the encounter at hand. So, don’t think of it like one single scenario (although it certainly could be played like that). Instead, this gameboard is designed to immerse the group and make them feel as though they’re embarking on a long, perilous journey through a dense and treacherous forest.
So, let’s zoom in on a few areas here and give you examples of what we mean, starting with the gameboard’s entry point. The players will be utilizing a crude map from Oman Dran that details the approximate location of the Night Hag’s spooky house of horrors in the woods.
The players will be on a main road before their map points to a semi-hidden path that must be traversed to zero in on her cabin. DM Ben will place their miniatures on a narrow path containing a nasty spike trap (Investigation or Perception DC 12).
The traveling time from Waterdeep to their end destination is a minimum of three days’ travel. Hence, once the players go off the road and detect or disarm the trap, he will have each player in the party roll a d6. If any of them roll a six, then he will roll on our random Wandering Monster table and have it take place in the spot where the trap was located.
Side note: DM Ben will use small pieces of black cloth to cover unused areas of the map and create a sort of fog of war initially until they explore more areas of the map. Seeing the entire gameboard in one shot can overwhelm the senses a bit. 😉
As we mentioned and shared previously on 3DRPG, this isn’t just about wandering monster rolls. We have a series of home-brewed encounters included in their travels. We’ll pick a particular section of the table to place the encounter and drop down the one-shot pieces accordingly.
DM Ben even has a few more content ideas up his sleeve, including dropping more hints about the new Forgotten Rails Hovertrain tech revolution that’s about to overtake Waterdeep.
So, now here’s a new look at our gameboard, but with some handy dungeon master labels to indicate where certain events are likely to take place (including wandering monsters and preplanned homebrewed scenarios).
See how flexible our setup is now? Additionally, the most challenging TTRPG prep work is already complete. Now, DM Ben can focus on ensuring the specific encounter pieces are within arm’s reach by start time.
Also, see how inspiring this DnD setup is? After a long day at the office, sometimes DM Ben grabs an ice-cold beverage and has a seat at the table with his DM notebook in hand. A new narrative or encounter will suddenly pop into his head because he can see things so clearly in front of him. He might think of a new trap, skill challenge, another NPC meetup, a fun new combat, and on and on and on.
Some of you may be wondering what specific sets we used to create this table setup, so here is our DF master list. It’s worth noting that we didn’t utilize every single item from this list, but we selected pieces from pretty much each set.
Also, if your hobby budget doesn’t have a lot of wiggle room right now or you’re a slow-roll Dwarven Forge collector like us, you can always print insanely good complimentary wilderness tiles from Milestone Heroes and Aether Studios and then simply use Dwarven Forge’s robust paint guides to match them up.
Pretty darn fun, right?! We’re looking to showing off some Dwarven Forge terrain-inspired DnD one-shot and companion 3D prints in follow-up posts!
Until next time!
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