Train Tuesday P42: Clues For You’s

Train Tuesday hovers into the station with a slick teaser terrain piece for our inquisitive adventurers. Let’s see what sort of clues DM Ben will begin sprinkling into the campaign as we get closer to our inaugural rail line opening!

The Forgotten Rails is a revolutionary hovertrain system, and DM Ben doesn’t just want this technological wonder to appear out of thin air suddenly! We gotta tease our new train and all its Construct workers in a fun, cool way, right?! Shrouded mystery for the win!

DM Ben will start by putting the Waterdeep rumor mill on full blast, as there have been increased sightings of Constructs in the wild (poorly disguised to look like humans). Still, this is all tavern talk, so some physical proof has to come to light sooner rather than later!

So, we decided to sift through our STL library to see if we could find some robotic scatter terrain and miniatures for our game group to begin stumbling across. Our file search brought us to Loot Studios and their must-own Planet of the Beasts set. We’ve featured numerous models from this collection on our daily Facebook group, and this Robot Debris 3D print is one of our recent favs.

As you can imagine, our pile of shame backlog is tremendous, so the gang pressed novice painter DM Ben into service once again to color our poor, disabled construct. This particular robot prototype is from Collis Strutt’s early building days. It’s big and bulky just how cell phones started, right?

The story goes that our engineering mastermind was so frustrated with his first attempts that he repeatedly walloped this poor android with his huge wrench and demanded that it leave his sight forever! Strutt’s assistants didn’t think it through that someone would eventually uncover this experimental model when they haphazardly dumped it with other testing metal debris deep in the woods.

So, we were really going for an earthy vibe to convey that this disappointing prototype was discarded by its makers deep in The High Forest, where various rocks and plants began to absorb and swallow it whole. The only thing we might still do here is add a blackwash over it.

In terms of integrating this dilapidated scatter terrain into our campaign, the players are already battling the Night Hag in deep woods, so DM Ben plans to place this 3D-printed piece in some thick overbrush once they do their reconnaissance around their (hopefully) newly acquired cabin.

We’re hoping our ongoing Hovertrain 3D-print series inspires you to eventually introduce a railroad setting and, at the very least, some cool new constructs into your campaign. Gnome tinkerers are such peculiar characters and really liven up a game, especially when their mechanical inventions start to go astray!

Until next time!