WIP Wednesday! A Tomb with a View

3D Printing gives us access to sooooooo many marvelous tiles! That immense variety can quickly turn into sudden gluttony and basically, paralyze you in your tracks. So, today we thought we would check in on the progress of our Egyptian forgotten tomb gameboard and share a tip on how to print as smart (and efficiently) as possible.

First things first – you’re going to need a party folding table-sized workspace. This could be in a spare bedroom, your garage, a multi-level game table (aka “the wife saver”), or if you’re a lucky enough bastard, a dedicated spot in your beloved basement. We happen to have an extra cube here at the office but honestly, any ol’ space will do – the key is you have to ensure it can stay up undisturbed for a longer period of time.

The next step is to come up with a starting set of desired rooms. Shoot for the moon and determine what the party could typically encounter over the course of several sessions. Many tomb raiders think these mysterious world wonders are mostly trick passages and a few burial chambers but there’s way more to it!

We settled on the following:

• Entrance Area
• Mummy Prep Room
• Worship Area
• Grand Gallery
• Pharaoh’s Chamber
• Pharaoh’s Treasure Room
• Storage Room
• New Chamber | In Progress Room Build
• Passage Ways (skinny and 2x for better monster fights)
• Secret Passages
• Traps
• Cave-in & dead ends

Then we just start to get after it and let the printing begin. Each morning, we take our fresh tiles and plop them down on our table. As you start to assemble each room, it’s insanely obvious what you need to pump out next and even how many initial tiles you’ll probably need. To keep the variety meter on high, we generally tried to complete one room before moving on to the next.

We’ll make little room name tags so we can tell at a glance what is what. This was very handy during our Village Inn gameboard exercise so we’ll be following suit on all our future large environment prints. You can also start to drop in your scatter terrain and this print method technique helps with that task too.

Our core Egyptian tomb tiles come from Aether Studios fantastic Pharoh series. No one has really come close to pumping out as many sandy tile sets as this talented crew. We’re also sprinkling in some accent pieces from Iain Lovecraft’s Desert Adventures Kickstarter. Plenty of mini choices out there (WotC, Brite Minis, Lovecraft, etc) but we’re pretty intrigued by Miniatures Craze Back to Egypt Kickstarter series.

But do you see how those painful empty spots tell you exactly what you need to print next? OCD, anyone? Now you’re a DM on a mission. Crafting and pivoting on your weekly print plan is so much easier. This big-picture view also keeps you motivated…especially during the paint phase slog.

So we’re done, right?! Well, every time we think we’re juuuuuuust about done with our core tiles, good ol’ Aether Studios releases some more for its patrons. And then we can’t resist running off some additional tiles. But we’re close! Next stop – the paint scheme!