It’s Really Dark Down There

Our nifty Night Hag encounter is turning into a fabulous one-shot for any DM, so let’s get some 3D-printed details going for her dark and dingy basement!

Today, we’re going to call on a couple of our favorite creators to build our creepy cabin cellar: Milestone Heroes and Infinite Dimensions Games. DM Ben doesn’t have any sort of methodology when forming a new encounter room. He simply scans his shiny new painted STLs and grabs what “speaks to him.”

Let’s focus on a couple of core pieces – our main floor tile motif and another key accent scatter terrain piece. We started with the witch’s ritual table earlier in the week, so let’s build on that! We just want to be careful not to overcrowd the room with too much stuff.

First, let’s chat about this floor tile. Our Night Hag has a poorly hidden basement to her cabin in The High Forest. Our encounter gameboard needs to evoke a feeling of darkness, mustiness, and downright fear. That made this 6×6 floor tile from Milestone Heroes Cavern Bandit Lair, Set 20 an easy pick. We especially dig this one because it does a perfect job mixing stone with dirt or, as we like to say, “Pretty much any old basement from the Midwest.”

We primarily used ZorpaZorp’s brilliant Dungeon Grime paint steps to get our grime look (with Black Magic Craft’s easy-to-follow blackwash recipe over the top of it). We then accented the piece with some AK Interactive’s Wet Effects Fluid and Puddles products (along with some basic flock) to finish it off. We plan to show you this grime scheme once we wrap up our Village Inn Interior Paint Guide.

Let’s talk about our other primary scatter piece: the oven. This quaint little STL is from Infinite Dimensions Games’ excellent Lumber Mill set. We didn’t want to crowd the cellar with too much stuff (as that can bog down any combat). The main room will contain a ritual table, a small heater stove, a glass enclosure, and a small crate filled with boots.

To catch you up, our Night Hag has been snatching young townsfolk from Waterdeep and using their tears via an arcana spell to stop her aging process and help hide her natural, hideous appearance. She typically puts her next victim in the cabin’s secret basement behind some clear glass (like the pic above) and then gets her scary on. Any prisoner’s boots go in a bin for Terry at the Troll Bridge, and then, sadly, she ultimately has to get rid of the “rest of the evidence.” #gulp

So, next week, we’ll complete the rest of this witch’s cellar with a few more Milestone Heroes tiles and show you how it all comes together.