Cave Tiles and Walls for Vertical Play for Tabletop Gaming

is it possible to create a tile system that doesn't waste any space with exterior wall scatter terrain but still gives you that awesome dungeon feel is modular allows you to play horizontally and vertically easy to set up take down modify with infinite layouts you can set this up to look like a cave dungeon and castle walls as well it is and i'm going to show you how to make it this week on table top [Music] witchcraft hey there and welcome back to tabletop witchcraft this week kicks off my four-part cave series here in the channel it's a series that's been requested by quite a few people and i put a lot of thought into it because i wanted this to be the most modular cave series or tile system that i could come up with so i started thinking when somebody makes a cave tile or cave setup or system or they're setting up for an encounter how are they making that they're taking some xps foam most likely and they're making a whining path they're making a large chamber for an encounter and you can line those up in the future in different ways but it's really limiting right if you have a certain set path that you now have to try and connect these kind of random pieces so the solution that i came up with to that is to not have random cave tile floors my floors are just a six by six tile the secret is in the walls that's how you get your infinite layouts for your cave adventures so with a couple of magnets you can have vertical gameplay so this could pretend like it's a mountain face or a high cave wall that you've entered this large chamber you can very quickly pull these pieces off again they're just held on by a magnet and you can see how quickly you can change these up for a different cave adventure so this system allows you to place two six by six tiles right next to each other with just one wall in the middle now you can create a winding corridor so it's a lot of really cool possibilities again it eliminates that need for an exterior wall on the outside of the tile taking up unused space on the table so if you're ready to find out how to make these let's go grab some supplies and let's get crafting all right so you might notice something a little funny here going on in this video already my proxxon is out of commission for this video what i'm going to use is a hot wire knife for this entire thing so if a proxon is out of your price range you don't own one you can pick up a hot wire knife for like 25 bucks it's a great time to buy one i'll have an amazon link to that in the description of this video where you can pick one up and it's going to make doing this build very easy along with that framing square we can use that to cut out all of our 6x6 tiles and i'm going to make this little jig right here out of some chipboard and i put a really nice grid making sure i was accurate with my one inch grid placing a few thumbtacks in there we can now use this to mark out our line work for all of our tiles now all i had laying around was a little bit of painters tape i wouldn't really recommend using that something more like duct tape would probably be a little bit better to use so now all we got to do is just place this right on top of our foam press into it and we'll have a nice grid that we can follow when time comes to put all of our line work on the tile all right now here we go this is the first application with the hot wire knife it comes with a whole bunch of different little pieces that you can use to burn into the foam this one right here is really nice because you can get really thin defined lines deep into the foam and i really like the way this looked the only problem is it did take quite a while for the foam to melt um you know go in this method in just a minute you're gonna see a different attachment to the hot wire knife that i'm gonna use that's going to make this a lot quicker now we want to rub this along the edge of the tile as well to give that really cool stone cave look to the tile one thing to note is the i guess all the little ridges that you can see that are going into the foam with this smaller uh attachment to the hot wire knife you're not going to get that as much with the larger attachment that we're going to use here in a minute but it cuts down on the build time of this craft by probably a good 50 so here's the other attachment that i was talking about this one you need to be careful because this gets really hot so as you're gonna see i'm gonna turn it off as i'm working so i can do probably one or two lines on this turn off and that heat is gonna last for quite a while where i can go and add all of my grid work once the foam starts to slow down from melting or you know burning i can turn it back on and continue that way if it gets too hot you're going to burn really wide gaps in the foam and you don't want that so now you can see this is a lot smoother of the edge work on there but it still looks good and now we take some aluminum foil and roll this on there real nice now these are going to be cave tiles that's why i didn't use a razor blade to cut these lines i wanted it wavy to look more like a cave we're going to use some aluminum foil this is heavy duty aluminum foil i find it lasts a little bit longer than your standard thickness foil then i just beat it up with the end of the foil there to add some divots and use a toothbrush to kind of clean up all the little hairs that are left over because you're going to have quite a bit of those now the vacuum the reason i'm showing this here is it's going to be very integral to this build you're going to be left with lots of little pieces so you're going to need a vacuum preferably a shop vac for this video now you know i like to go to my clay sculpting tools to add a lot of detail we're going to use this to add some deeper holes into the tile as well as just shave off some small layers across the face of the tile as well all right that's it for the tile now we're going to move on to the walls all right this is really the the main integral part of this build of these walls it's what's gonna make these tiles in this system so awesome once it's all done and put together so as you can see i'm measuring this out so that i'm keeping everything within a one inch grid either one inch two inch three inch or four inch so here i'm starting at about two inches in width and i'm going to bring it all the way up now to the top of the block and then i'm going to trace it all the way back down to within an inch of the other end of the block here now you don't have to be that precise i did that so that i can get the most amount of grid space out of this on the game board but you can really just make any type of you know wiggly line across here to make your cave walls here we go with our third attachment on the hot wire knife we're going to use that to cut all the shapes out of the wall now as you can see i want the full width of this block but i'm still running the wire along the edge of that to keep consistent with the shape and texture i guess of the wall and don't worry when you're using the hot wire knife if the angle is a little bit you know if it's not 90 degrees it's fine it's gonna look really good when you're done now i didn't have the video recording when i did this piece but all i did was pop a little section out to make the players be able to access and move up further on these walls that way we can use these walls not only to keep players kind of in one area or in one path but now they can play vertically as well and all we're going to do here is take an alpha knife and cut a bunch of horizontal lines through this foam to make our rock texture this was done by eric in eric's hobby workshop he had a really cool video where he showed this he made a bunch of really big mountainous pieces of terrain made a really cool craft so head over to his channel check that out and all i'm doing here again is i'm just kind of chipping away at the cuts that i made with the alpha knife on the top here i'm just kind of cutting into it very shallow i know it doesn't look like much but these little pieces that i'm cutting out are going to stand out big time after we've added texture and washed it and painted it now we just use the clay sculpting tool to really scrape into the face of all the foam and that's going to give us our rock texture now as you can see there is a ton of you know bits and pieces that are going to come off of this have a nice big wide open workspace otherwise they're going to get stuck to everything and just go for it don't worry about making a mess and again having that shaft back handy is really going to be awesome here and as you can see not only for cleaning up the table but rubbing it along all of the uh the foam as well to suck up all the little pieces of foam that are stuck to the walls now all i'm doing is just a little bit of a layering effect on some of these wider pieces of the wall all right so as i mentioned we're going to take a little bit of aluminum foil again textured up real nice beat this thing up it's going to look that much better once it's done and it's painted and obviously don't forget to texture the face of it as well as you can see here simply by adding a few steps and ledges on these we're going to be able to stack these up and you're going to have all kinds of height and i guess verticality if you if that's a word that you can have your players uh adventure on now we'll move over to an end piece this is a you know pretty important piece here that we're going to make to basically give some dead ends to our caves and then back to the hot wire knife this is a two um two inch wide section that i'm cutting out these little uh archways and it's gonna be a little secret uh door uh for these people to find for um you know we're gonna pop these out a little bit of uh paint on here is gonna help us mark where we want our magnets you don't have to put the magnet in here these actually slide in pretty tight but you know just so that i don't have to deal with them falling out from time to time we'll throw a little magnet in there and that'll keep him in place all right so back to the hot wire knife slap this attachment on there and we'll use that to burn a hole right where the paint is and we'll throw a magnet in a little hot glue and we're all set you can see i'm using a few different types of foam in this video my neighbor had some left over some of this blue foam it's uh you know i find it's maybe a little bit softer than the pink i don't know if that's just my imagination it was fine to work with but to me i did notice a little bit of a difference when working with it now once this is all painted up it's going to be really hard to see those that archway right there so it's another cool little feature i mean obviously you can see if you're looking for it but i just thought it was kind of cool all right now we've got another jig we're going to work on here now we need to add some magnets to the walls we want to make a jig it's very important because we want to put all our magnets within a half an inch of the edge centered on each edge of the wall that's going to make it so that we can just grab these walls and throw them right onto any of these six by six tiles they're gonna snap solid right into place and it's gonna allow us to build an entire cave to adventure in just minutes all right so now on to our magnets this piece on the left that six by six tile i kept that there for the entire build it's because i have the polarity set a certain way on both those magnets so that they snap in correctly and now i can put magnets every time i move on to another tile i always snap two magnets onto that to make sure i got the polarity the same so every single tile in this entire build is interchangeable we don't have to worry about polarity i want to make a note that i do put the magnets on the top as well some people might say well look just you know put like a little wood screw or something in here save on the magnet it doesn't have the same hold and the same strength as another magnet would have in there so that's why i opted to go with two magnets these things are really cheap i think i did this entire set with magnets for like 10 bucks if that probably not even that much and that's going to give you 16 tiles so that's pretty cheap and if you want to take it a step further as you can see i'm just putting one magnet which really is enough um on each side you could spread it out and maybe put two magnets then these things really aren't going anywhere but to be honest one is plenty all right now i just wanted to point this out you can see that magnet in the background about to pick up you want to pick it up and flip it over right because now this is going to be the bottom of one of the walls you just want to make sure that the polarity is right on all of these now i did mess a few up and you got to put it on there and the whole base shoots away from you if you got to do that just hold the nozzle the hot glue gun on the magnet for about 10-15 seconds it'll heat up enough that you can spin the magnet around and you don't have to worry about gouging it out all right now we're finally on to the mod podge portion of the project it's just a little bit of mod podge some black paint mixed up and we're gonna slap it on there you're gonna have to let that cure a little bit longer than usual because all the crevices now for the paint we're gonna make some burnt umber and black do a nice base coat that's top left top right we're gonna hit it up with some apple barrel pewter gray then bottom left we're going to do a nice dry brush with linen i know it says warm white but it's not it's a linen color and then finally we're going to hit it up with a black wash for the first tile i wasn't crazy about the black wash on this uh that's what you see right here i ended up going back this was my test tile but i wanted you to see this for an option in case you like the more gray color here so again this is with a black wash black wash on the right brown wash on the left i opted to go with the brown wash because it's more of a cave look more brown more dirt so for the rest of my tiles as you can see right here i just took a little bit of brown wash and that's the step where we're at so after we do all the painting hit up with the brown wash then use that linen to do a nice dry brush and you'll be all set now finally for a nice little effect on these one-inch walls i'll put a link up above to my led torch video this is absolutely perfect video to add some really cool light effects to all of your cave tiles simply just insert that right in there you can make that hole a little bit deeper if you want to hide the battery even more or you could take a little bit of paint to match the tile paint up one piece of the battery i even dry brush it if you want to go that route but to be honest i wouldn't worry about it [Music] so i'm really really excited with this cave tile system for the video i took about 20 photos of just a whole bunch of different setups that you can do in a just a four square foot area with the 16 tiles that i have and i did that in about 15 minutes including filming and every single layout was completely different think about that and think about the possibilities and i mean i could have just kept going on and on now another cool thing is these don't have to just be cave tiles i'll put a link up above to my xps foam roller video i'll show you how to make one of those where you can do brick or stone and turn these into castle walls or dungeon walls the fact that this system lets you use every square inch of your game table is really cool so if you liked the video you took anything away from it please hit that like button leave a comment check out some of the merch below head on over to patreon and check out some of the cool tiers i have over there we're starting some craft offs here in just a few months where the winner is going to get a really cool gift from me so i hope to see over there and until next time i'll see you around

Channel: Tabletop WitchCRAFT

Views: 117,202

Keywords: Cave Tiles, Cave Walls, modular cave tiles, d&d cave tiles, tabletop cave tiles, cavern tiles, rpg terrain crafting, rpg terrain building, rpg terrain tiles, tabletop terrain crafting, dnd terrain build, dnd terrain tiles, d&d terrain crafting, modular cave, dungeons and dragons, d&d, dnd, tabletop gaming terrain, tabletop gaming table, tabletop witchcraft, modular crafts, vertical play, cavern

Id: md16ridn3iA

Length: 18min 16sec (1096 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 20 2020