Plenty of Bones About It

The mini dungeon crawl inside Acquisitions Incorporated D&D Beyond 5e Module is no slouch. Let’s start to build out yet another room inside Tresendar Manor.

This ransacked Acquisitions Incorporated Franchise HQ is no walk in the park. It’s got 12 white-knuckled events in all, and it’s a fun delve for the players to race through. Initially built for second-level characters, DM Ben is upping the ante for his level five players to ensure they experience full dice sweats.

Today, we’re looking at Area 4: The Crypt. Four damaged coffins litter this barebones (pun intended) cellar room. The module’s description is short and sweet: “Three smashed human-sized coffins and one intact smaller coffin lie on the floor here. The larger coffins are carved of fine mahogany and lined with rotting silk.”

Ongoing readers often ask what DM Ben prefers to prep first: the miniatures, the scatter terrain, or the room terrain? No magic answer here as it’s just whatever pops into his head and he runs a memory inventory check. Miniatures are certainly easier, but building the room out helps plan the rest of the encounter.

For the coffins, we could utilize this marvelous Coffin Workshop Furniture Set by Infinite Dimensions Games. Their STLs 3D-printed like a champ, and the stacked versions are super cool. However, we had a couple of old-school pieces in our collection and wanted to walk those out to our DnD game table.

First up are these banged-up, pre-cast coffins from an early-on Gen Con pilgrimage. They had empty and banged-up partial bone versions. We love ’em, and our only wish is that we had grabbed even more of them at their fun booth.

Next, DM Ben pulled this metal version. This find was also from Gen Con and came from one of the large booth vendors that had countless containers of metal pieces at silly discounts. Makers would often overproduce a lot of pieces, and if one didn’t sell, it would ultimately go into the discount bin.

DM Ben would grab certain re-usable pieces and then pass them to a pro painter to bring them back to life (pun intended). Yes, metal pieces can be a bummer because they can get chipped easily and require a lot of TLC, but sometimes it’s so worth the extra trouble.

The module also calls for bones to be littered all over its grimy dirt floor. The bones are tied to a mimic with a bit of a sense of humor, so we needed to get a nice mix here. Some of these are from our bit box jar, a few from Cons, and the rest are by Hirst Arts.

Lastly, we need a coffin mimic, and shockingly, we didn’t have an existing one in our MMF library to 3D print. So, once again, we dug into our mighty Dungeons and Dragons collection and found this adorable coffin “miniature.”

Here we go with another Gen Con reference: Cons often have fledgling vendors who are just trying to get their foot in the DnD door, and DM Ben found this charming vendor who made a couple dozen fun miniatures. Naturally, he bought them all, so it brings him great joy to use this adorable mini 15 years later.

Until next time!