Hanging Out

We’re in a bit of scatter terrain mood today, so let’s take a gander at a few handy pieces that will help us build out our witch’s backyard scenario.

Here’s a very brief recap to get everyone up to speed: there’s a Night Hag masquerading as an old woman and snatching up children in Waterdeep. She uses the youngling’s tears to keep her illusion up and magical powers at full power. Our adventurers are going to storm her cabin in The High Forest and if they’re victorious, have an opportunity to secure the deed to that property.

The group has to rescue one child in the basement and another in the backyard by using the right key in a hectic race to free them. We already built the creepy basement but now need to create the outdoor backyard game board.

For starters, we need a big ol’ scary tree and for that, we’re leaning on a terrain legend in Dwarven Forge and their wicked Wildlands release. Now, it’s not always easy being a Dwarven Forge collector as their online store is almost always sold out of just about everything, and their Kickstarters can go 12 to 18+ months before the mailman finally visits your door.

Still, DM Ben considers Dwarven Forge to be the Ferrari of the terrain world so their amazing work is worth the wait. However, there was very little wait on Wildlands. A second Gamefound campaign delivered lightning fast and many of its pieces are readily available on their online store. We don’t like painting outdoor terrain so we went all in on this set genre.

Our absolute favorite piece of the Wildlands set is the modular trees. You can easily swap out different trees from their silly-good bases based on your desired forest or encounter setting. The pegs just screw in or out with a few simple turns.

Since this is a Night Hag’s backyard, we’ll utilize the dying forest tree toppers here. The branches are long and scrawny, perfect for hanging a creaking metal cage from.

So that leads us to our second piece of scatter terrain by super STL creator in Crippled God Fondry. We printed up this hanging cage from their mighty Dungeon of Despair Kickstarter. The core set was paired with 34 unlocked stretch goals, so you definitely get plenty of bang for your buck here.

The cage itself has excellent detail, including a bucket and skinny bench inside its heavy iron bars. You can’t open the jail and slip a mini in and out of it, but there’s enough of a shadow effect to keep the fright on full blast. We just slipped a couple of skinny branches right into the 3D-printed cell, and just like that, we had a suspended prisoner.

Regarding the encounter mechanics, the cage will be suspended about 40-ish feet in the air (or about three floors up). Any player can make an Athletics check (DC 13) to climb up to it and try one of the five keys they found earlier to unlock it. An Acrobatics check (DC 12) will be needed to balance on the swinging tree/cage to slip the key in and turn it without falling.

Our flame is from Galldoria Games, and the firewood base is from Hirst Arts.

On our next Miniature Monday installment, we’ll look at the monsters our wicked ol’ witch conjured up to guard this young prisoner and what it will take to defeat them!