Tomb Thursday P8: Behind Closed Doors

Ahhh, here comes another Tomb Thursday for your reading pleasure. Feels good, man. Let’s see what sort of DnD scatter terrain we can feature this week!

Any DnD Tomb Crawl is undoubtedly going to require many mysterious doors to open. You don’t instantly get unfettered access to the place the second you descend its spooky starting stairs. Well, good news…good ol’ Aether Studios has our backs. Let’s explore further, but first, check for traps.

Doors are critical for any dungeon, so we’re starting to hone in on our options and get them 3D-printed. You might recall that we already featured this slick open doorway in a previous Trusty Tiles Tomb Thursday post. However, we need something that indicates the desired path forward is blocked and requires effort and skill to open. Thankfully, the amazing Aether Studios Discord group was quick to point out another fab option.

These slick movable Wise Horus Doors are from Aether Studios’ must-own Throne Room Statues set. They print well in FDM as long as you give the skinnier upright door pieces a super sturdy brim. No big deal, as we just ensured each piece’s brim overlapped during slicing so that there was a single, connected footing on the print plate.

We’ll showcase several door options in the coming weeks, but we’ll start with our go-to door pick. Meaning, this is the most common door one will interact with inside the Tomb Crawl. Think of this pick being equivalent to a standard trusty wooden door. This Desert doorway is also wide enough to place a single miniature and looks great.

The best part of this 3D-printed Egyptian door is that it contains two swinging pieces that firmly snap in and allow the Dungeon Master to easily convey whether the door is open or closed during the encounter (which means one less bloody thing for DM Ben to keep track of at the table).

Apologies in advance for DM Ben’s Wisconsin sausage fingers taking up some of the frame…but you gotta love the paint on his thumb. It’s the mark of a good hobbyist, right?

Now, we’re making a concerted effort to maximize efficiency during this ambitious 3D-printed project. In other words, we print out multiples of our core pieces and then batch paint them in a single afternoon sitting. Thankfully, our desert paint guide makes coloring these tiles an absolute breeze.

We’ve got eight of these door tiles to get us going. Since we plan on showcasing other door options in future posts (secret doors, anyone?), we think this starting quantity will suffice. We can use them in a hurry, though, if a particular room has multiple exits so we’ll probably run a few more off our FDM 3D printer.

Also, we thought we would share our starting light source piece as well. This one comes from Aether Studios Middle Kingdom set. We’re trying to use half-height pieces whenever we can, as it saves on filament and paint while also making it easier for everyone to see the gameboard from a sitting position at the gametable.

No fuss, no muss on these babies. We continued with our existing Egyptian paint scheme and then did the wall sconce in Army Painter Fanatic True Copper and the flame in Zealot Yellow Speedpaint. So simple. Sadly, we only did three of these initially, so we’ll probably end up with a total of 20 3D-printed pieces. The plan is to use as much of our Wyrmwood table game space as possible. 😉

Pretty great, right?! Our initial goal is to identify all the core, print-in-bulk STLs, enabling you to plan your Tomb buildout accordingly and operate as an efficiency juggernaut. We’re well on our way, my friends!

Until next time!