Terrain Tuesday! Boxed In

Good ol’ Terrain Tuesday – this weekly post typically culminates in many individual pieces, so we’re always feeling the heat to deliver especially good DnD scenes for thee. We had to think a little “out of the box” on this one, so we hope you like our creativity here.

We’re starting with the simplest piece for our Night Hag’s cabin basement, and for that, we needed to hunt down an old dice set. That see-through rectangle is what we have our eye on here. Typically, DMs will use that clear piece to represent a character flying, but we have another idea.

First, let’s catch the new readers up! An “old lady” has been hiding her real appearance as a Night Hag by abducting Waterdeep’s younglings and extrapolating their tears to bolster her illusion and evil powers. However, our adventurers are closing in on her hideout in The High Forest. She has a hidden basement where she keeps her latest victim behind glass, so we want to show you what we came up with for a creepy cellar layout.

We’ve got a great supporting cast of scatter terrain: an old stove, a disguise kit, a voodoo-style table, and even a mysterious case of potion bottles. We just needed to represent the basement cell with our empty dice container.

Our locked cell can be opened with the right key or a tougher lock pick with a DC of 17. If any adventurer steps into any part of the cell to rescue the child, they will immediately be hit by a terrifying set of nightmare visions (howling spirits, snarling animals, etc.) and must make a DC 15 Constitution saving throw. A failure results in being incapacitated for one minute while taking 2d6+2 psychic damage. A successful Con save means just half damage.

DM Ben still felt the dingy basement was missing something, so he perused his painted 3D prints and found a gem from Cast n Play’s Laboratory Furniture set. The barrel lept out at him as something our meanie Night Hag would certainly build to extract what she needed from her young captives.

Thankfully, Kimmy Utah used her magic and created a beauty piece here. Our franken-barrel has so much mystery and intrigue that DM Ben had to think of a way to incorporate it into the encounter.

DM Ben then thought that our mechanical barrel could levitate over the glass enclosure and serve as an arcane extractor of sorts. The Night Hag runs a series of scary scenes for each new captive, which causes them to naturally sob in horror. Then, our sputtering, whizbang barrel pulls those innocent tears into its innards for the witch to incorporate into her sustaining magic potion shots.

Lastly, here are a few more interesting miscellaneous notes on the terrain here. The tiles are from Milestone Heroes Dungeon Burrows set. All those pokey rocks and branches just spoke “shadowy cellar with the scent of mildew and damp earth” to us. For the exterior walls, we called an audible and went with our old Hirst Arts dungeon walls because they just felt extra stony to us.

Of course, we have nothing against the Milestone Heroes walls, as we use them often (and love their magnetic clips), but these alternate, old-school casted pieces looked especially good in this case and meshed well with all the other pieces.

Next week, we’ll share a few alternative ways to demonstrate a hidden trap door that the adventurers need to find and unlock to access our hidden underground chamber of doom!