Cave tiles - A New Way (Part 3) - Finished Tiles and Extra Features

Here are the cave and mine tiles, pretty much finished.  If you missed them, the other posts about them are here for part one and here for part two.

This is the whole set spread out waiting for the varnish to dry.  After a session of play I realised the polystyrene ceiling tiles were a bit fragile, even after a coat of Mod Podge, so I gave them a coat of matt varnish.  

To the right you can see some of the extra features I have been working on; rock pillars and pools.

The rock pillars came about as I wanted something to break up line of sight and make the interior of the caves a bit more interesting and natural looking.  They are simply a roughly circular or oval shape of ceiling tile stuck to a thin base of cardboard.  Painting is just the same as the tiles; they get a black undercoat, then the edges are sponge painted and the top is given a coat of Barely Black, and finally a varnish.

Here's a reconstruction of the dining cave in the Lost Mine module.  It looks a bit different from the published version, but it provides the same challenges, and certainly worked well at table last night.  I have added quite a bit of extra terrain from Terrain Crate for this picture.  We just had the tables in play last night.  The cliff edges and the pools are clear overlays.  I got the idea from a recent DM Scotty build where he was showing a rising water level.  At first I thought to use this just for the various water features in the dungeon, but then I realised it worked well for other features such as patches of fungus and the cliff edges and steps in the cave above.  Rather than using cutting boards I found some clear plastic open sided pockets.  These are cheap (50p for five) and easily cut, but tough enough to stand up to use in play.  They have a shiny side and a matt side, The matt side takes Sharpies and similar permanent markers well, and placed shiny side up gives, I feel, the right look without being too obtrusive (or taking too long to craft).

I found the tiles easy to use at the table.  As each one represents 20 foot square, I don't have to place too many at once, and the party mapper seemed to find following the layout pretty easy.  Of course, the party split up into two groups, meaning that we ended up with two seperate areas of tiles.  I never intended to create enough to lay out the whole dungeon in one go, so we reuse tiles when necessary.

As a bonus, the whole set at present fits into a 9L 'Really Useful Box'.  Just.

I may still need some narrow winding passages for the later part of the dungeon, and there are some more artificial areas, but my dungeon set will do for those (and I think I need to add to them as well).

As I mentioned before, I may well revisit these tiles and do more robust and neater versions, probably including a cardboard lock system and using stronger XPF rather than ceiling tiles.  That's definitely something for the future though.