Bug Crossing

Today is a tying-it-all-together post where we combine all our concentrated prep work and share what the final gameboard looks like for one of our upcoming Tresendar Manor Dungeon Delve encounters — so, getting ready to roll those investigation and stealth checks. 😉

A brief recap for any first-time readers out there. We’re building a mini dungeon for D&D Beyond’s Acquisitions Incorporated free module and thought y’all might like to follow along. We’re mixing our 3DRPG homebrewed content with this excellent 5e module and hope we inspire you for your campaigns.

To this point, we’ve 3D-printed and finalized all our bad guy miniatures for the upcoming battle. We’ve got our Wasp Queen, her Swarm of Insects bodyguards, and then a slew of Flea minion soldiers by her side. DM Ben scoured our DnD library for the appropriate terrain for the corresponding gameboard, so let’s see where we netted out there.

We’ll start with a high-level view and then highlight the shining scatter terrain stars. This TTRPG setup breaks out into three core areas: (1) Party Entry Point, (2) The Pit, and (3) The Boss side. Our floor tiles are Hirst Arts casts, with the darker tile representing the typical stone and the lighter tiles representing a more natural cavern segment.

We’re using numerous legacy collection pieces to save some hobby time and to warm our nostalgic hearts. Our wooden bridges are also from Hirst Arts casts (with a couple of dowels). The earthy walls are foam pieces with paper mache applied over the top. This is what we went through before 3D printers blessed our lives. 😉

We wanted the room to convey severe natural damage (like a mini earthquake), environmental aging, and incomplete abandoned work.

Here’s the module’s room description: “The smell of death is strong in what was probably once a large and ornate hall, long since fallen into ruin. Not only are the walls and supports crumbling, but a ten-foot-deep rift has opened up in the floor. Two wooden bridges span the rift, whose floor is littered with skeletal corpses.”

This room is totally in our wheelhouse, especially the pit. We start by placing down one of our fog of war black cloths (for extra spookiness) and then place some cavernous floor tiles over the top. From there, we added a few fallen adventurer bodies (e.g., the bugs’ dinner), a picked clean animal carcass, and our non-flight fleas. DM Ben isn’t quite sure yet where his bug swarm will start the encounter.

The room description above describes this area as a great hall that has fallen into grim disrepair, so we grabbed a couple of these Hirst Arts gothic columns from Mold 42 to hint at the area’s original grandeur.

Lastly, DM Ben added a few oversized boulders here and there to provide some interesting combat tactical options. The module’s authors had this mindset, too, because their map even includes a couple of oversized rocks.

This is one of the bigger battles inside the Tresendar Manor mini-dungeon, so it needed to be memorable for the players. Even better, this gameboard has levels to it, and we looooove those types of layouts.

Regarding the room loot, the module doesn’t call out anything (boooooo), so we’ll certainly do some coins since bugs couldn’t care less about money and don’t even have pockets. Depending on the final post-battle investigation roll results, DM Ben will let the players draw a card or two from Nord Games’ nifty Treasure Trove and Underground Objects of Intrigue card decks.

Until next time!