My Very First Tabletop Terrain Piece

I have recently decided to try my hand at DMing after being a life-long player.

I gathered a group of people new to the game using facebook and we had our session 0 about a month ago.

I was so inspired to give them a good experience I decided o try my hand at crafting a little bit of tabletop terrain.

Here is what it looked like on the table.

I created several 'stone' pillars placed on the edge of a chasm. The middle one had a rope tied to it, probably used by previous adventurers to repel down into the ruins below.

The 'wow' sounds my players made as I took it out was very rewarding and I'll definitely try to keep crafting. It's fun.

Since I didn't have any XPS foam (nor do I know where to get large chunks of it here) I used wood.

At first, I thought I'd use a chisel or saw off pieces but the pillars were too small so I ended up using a rotary tool.

Eventually, I got them looking pretty good. It helped that I was trying to create random patterns so there was no way to make a mistake or 'ruin' the piece.

Now that I had them looking right it was time for painting. I started by mixing black acrylic paint with some PVA glue and giving them a thorough coating.

As you can see the glue didn't really mix in with the paint so I did it again with just paint this time. I also ran out of black halfway through so used dark purple as it was the darkest color I had.

I let it dry for a while and then tried my hand at some dry brushing. First a light coating of a mustard color and then light brushing with white to bring out the highlights.

It came out looking pretty great even though you could still see the wood texture underneath. It was really starting to look like old, worn stone.

Here are a few closeups.

I did a very basic black wash - some color diluted with a lot of water and a bit of dish soap - to make it look a bit more worn and that was it.

I tied up the rope and it was table ready.

Again, here are the pillars I used on the table.

Let me know what you think and if you have any questions about the process.

I'm going to try my hand at other projects and I'll be happy to share the results.