Tomb Thursday P37: Earth, Wind, and Fire

Greetings, fellow sandmen and sandladies. We’re getting ever so close to another swell weekend of gaming, and today’s picks are sure to come in handy, so let’s get to it!

DM Ben has been thinking more about potential tomb hazards, traps, and unexpected spell effects lately. So, the crew suggested we run some pieces through our fab Prusa MK4 FDM printer. We found some versatile scatter that certainly works in an Egyptian-themed gameboard. You just have to envision the final outputs and trust your instincts! Self-doubt is a real creativity killer.

Our 3D print premise makes total sense here, right? Tombs are sacred, well-executed, and heavily guarded places. Hence, you don’t just walk right on in and take whatever you like. Crypt architects are no fools. They’ve taken the right precautions and made finely detailed plans to thwart grave robbers at every turn. We just needed a way to demonstrate high-stakes security to our players.

Enter good ol’ Hayland Terrain and their marvelous selection of TTRPG STLs. They have a couple of nifty spell effect packs, and today we’re going to highlight two desert-ready FDM prints from their Spell Pack 2 set. We’ve actually printed all of these – a mark of a great series, right?

What’s especially cool is that you can use this first featured piece to build up the second piece! Meaning, we start with DM Ben describing how the tomb the party just entered has gone from eerily silent to a sudden gust of wind circling the chamber.  That mysterious whoosh of air needs a focal point on your gameboard, and that’s where you drop in this beauty.

Nothing fancy on this paint job either. DM Ben just used the same steps as our previous air elemental, and our usual trusty sandstone base color. Easy peasy.

Next up is this double-wall of sand STL. Funny enough, we originally painted the single version of this spell effect in the traditional water effect theme (which turned out great). And then it just dawned on us, hey, this 3D print could easily just be a wall of sand, so let’s give that a go!

We used that same slick, sandy look (by Galladoria Games) with three simple Vallejo paint color steps. To help make it look like this wall of sand was violently moving, DM Ben left a little more white showing through than usual. Then, he applied sand flock and a couple of desert grass tufts to the base to bring it home. Fantastic.

With our earth and wind portions out of the way, we couldn’t resist sprinkling in a little fire. And for that, we spun up this red-hot sparkplug by mz4250. Check out this amazing Jackalwere!

Now, we adore this immensely talented creator and his absolutely stunning free library of almost endless DnD 3D prints. His Patreon was going through it, though, as his download links kept returning a painful 404 Not Found error. We’re happy to report that his URLs seem to be humming along again. Praise Pelor, all is right in the world again.

As we mentioned in an earlier hot-take post for our beloved ongoing Train Tuesday series, DM Ben is finally starting to get the hang of a good flame effect. Some of ya might be snickering a little here and saying to yourselves, “Dude, what’s the big deal? It’s just fire.” Well, we’re always striving to do better, so it feels good to show improvement. Keeps us motivated, ya know?

• Prime Flat Black | Slap Chop Base.
• Flame P1: Layer on ASP Zealot Yellow.
• Flame P2: GSW Gloss Varnish.
• Fame P3: ASP Blood Red edging.
• Flame P4: Circle back and add edging to avoid any blotching.

Apologies for the stringing here. This is an older 3D print we pulled from our staggering Pile of Shame, and we hate wasting prints. So, we just clean ’em up as best we can (Arm’s Length Rule for the win, baby). To finish it off, we sprinkled a little black stone flock to seal the deal.

Until next time!