Ye Olde Inn

by **DungeonTiles** » November 16th, 2013, 3:06 pm

Hi there!

We would like to introduce ourselves to all the community of Ye Olde Inn.

We are a couple of long time fans of HeroQuest and other dungeoncrawling board games from Spain that, some time ago, started making conversions, house rules and sculpting our own scenery in order to personalizing and improving our games experience.

In this direction, our main goal has always been the creation of a perfectly modular dungeon/board, but retaining all the scent of a true diorama.

Recently, we have been considering the possibility of selling some of our creations to all the comunity of HeroQuest and dungeoncrawling fans. Right now, we are finishing the details of our new online store: http://dungeontiles.urbecom.com/

By the way, we are shipping worldwide.

You also can find us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/DungeonTiles), where we have just created a group/page with pics and news about our modular dungeon we have created (an ever growing up dungeon). We will also upload conversion and painting tutorials with the clear purpose of making your dungeons as astounding as they could be.

The basic idea of our shop (and our modular system) will deal with selling individual tiles, made in high quality resin with different patterns, allowing you to make as many different halls, corridors and passageways as you can imagine. Given the high number of different patterns we have sculpted, the halls can be personalized and modified "to the infinity and beyond", allowing the Evil Sorcerers/Game Masters creating immersive environments and completely different game sessions. The board turns itself into a narrative vehicle at disposal of the Evil Sorcerer, helping him to confuse, deceive and entrigue the heroes.

The board grows at the same pace the story does.

Some of you maybe are used to Hirst Arts and Dwarven Forge scenery so we would assume you know perfectly what we are talking about. In this direction, our models are fully compatible with those brands, so fans of Hirst Arts and Dwarven Forge systems could integrate our tiles and scenery with much ease.

At this very moment we are selling (in fact, preordering) a basic kit composed of all the tiles needed to recreate all quests from the Basic Quest Book of HeroQuest. Although, in the near future, we would be selling new types of tiles with which you could increase and "upgrade" these basic kits. We are selling, in the near future, some types of scenery designed to be used both with our tiles or the basic boards of most dungeon crawling games.

We are launching a limited preorder campaign for the first kits. All of you interested in buying a kit can get into our shop and make a preorder. Once we have achieved the minimum amount of kits needed to beging the manufacturing (50 kits) we would start to produce them. Only then we would collect the payment of those kits.

I would like to say, too, that the company in charge of the manufacturing of the kits (given that the minimum quantity are achieved, of course) will be Andrea Miniatures (http://www.andreaeurope.com), one of the most fabled spanish miniature company. This is a clear certainty of the quality and durability of our products.

If you have any question about our products, the operating of our online shop or, even, about hobby issues, don't hesitate to contact us on our email (dungeontiles@gmail.com) or in our Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/DungeonTiles). Feel free to write us in english (even when our shop and our Facebook page are still only in spanish... we are working on the translations).

We hope you like the system and our products in general, so we can start the manufacturing of the basic kits.

Best wishes:

Dungeon Tiles
:skull:

Real Dungeons for Real Gamers :blackshield:

dungeontiles@gmail.com
https://www.facebook.com/DungeonTiles

Hi there, YeOldInners!

We'd like to share with all the comunity our present hobby project. It's a multi-game modular board (for HeroQuest, Descent, Dungeon Explore and the rest dungeoncrawling games around there) we have been working last months.

Each tile is painted individually, before being fixed to a base, so we can make as many variations of the board needed in each quest. Once painted and varnished, the tiles are fixed with blu tack to wooden, cardboard or similar bases. This allow us to compound all the rooms and corridors before the start of the game session (so the Evil Sorcerer doesn't have to loose his gaming time preparing the tiles and interrumpting the pace of the game).

For some time we considered magnetizing the tiles. It's another option, but we chose the blu tack option for simplicity.

Beforehand, we'd like to make some tecnical clarifications:

- All the board tiles have been scuplted and casted in resin by us.
- Spray primer and dual varnishing (brush and spray varnish were used in subsequent layers).
- We used acrylic paints, washes and quickshade for painting.

Below are some pics so you can see our progress.

FIRST PHASE: Some halls and a corridor. Estimated time of painting: 6 hours.

SECOND PHASE: Minidungeon fully functional with different types of halls and corridors. Estimated time of painting: 20 hours.

THIRD PHASE: Coming soon. New halls, special tokens (like stairway and fallen rocks) and modular dungeon dressing (custom made and bought in equal shares).

We also have created a Facebook page where you can find many more pics of the same project.

We hope you like it and we would apreciate any comments and feedback so we can improve our modular gaming board.

Thanks to everybody and best regards.

by **chaoticprime** » November 24th, 2013, 3:49 pm

These are pretty cool, but your painting estimates surely have to be off. Spray-painting them black, laying on the base color with a wide sponge-brush, blending/dry-brushing and then highlighting/dry-brushing shouldn't take more than a couple hours. The black & white tiles could quickly be achieved by using painter's tape, also. With the proper technique it'd take maybe three to five minutes per tile.

by **DungeonTiles** » November 24th, 2013, 6:05 pm

Thanks for your reply, chaoticprime.
Of course, the first phase took longer (per tile) than the second one. At this very moment, our times are very simmilar to those you state. But it's hard to estimate, because we use to paint great amounts of tiles in a mass-production style, so all the timing is arguable.
Anyway, some of the techniques you mention are way interesting. We still paint with techniques biased to miniature painting. We, definetly, should try the sponge-brush, for example.

By the way, we often used washes and quickshade to emphasize cracks and relief (not always, but very often). This was one of the most time consuming techniques we used, and a big part of the time stated is because of the need to wait until the inks or quickshade completely dried. Army Painter Quickshades, in spite of it's name, have a specially slow drying.

Some color schemes are much more time consuming than others, too. We tried to add small details to spice up the dungeon and to distinguish some of the more frequent tiles. There is a small 3x2 cell with little pieces of Woodland Scenics "Clump Foliage", for example, and things like that. Such things add a lot of flavour to the dungeon, but it also add hours to the basic painting.
About the basecoat, we started using black basecoat (in spray) but, later on, we changed to grey basecoat because we needed fewer layers to propertly cover it with some kind of paints (like "bubonic brown", for example). This reduced drastically the time needed to paint some rooms.
As I said before, thank you for your advice on painting techniques, chaoticprime.
Best Regards.

by **chaoticprime** » November 24th, 2013, 6:39 pm

Okay, couple of things.

A sponge-brush WILL NOT apply paint to recessed areas. Instead of washing, you base-coat dark black, and sponge-brush on your color. You'll get the hang of it very quickly.

Alternatively, if washing is your thing, there's no need to go with Quickshade. That *lemony goodness*'s too expensive. Buy a bottle of Pledge/Future Floor-wax (http://www.idealtruevalue.com/servlet/t ... 7AodETwArg) and a pot of india ink. Dump out floor wax until you can poor the ink in without having it overflow. Once combined, shake until it becomes a mixture. If you want it to be less black and more brown, buy a couple of cheap brown markers and pull their filaments out and immerse them in the wax BEFORE you add the india ink. Add ink to taste. Its basically what GW ripped off for their new washes, only you can "dip" like with the army painter crap.

You should buy cheap paints, also. Don't use citadel paints for mass-productions like this.

When you're done, buy some manner of poly-vinyl acetate (mod podge, white glue) and brush on a couple of thin clear-coats. PVA makes things damn near indestructible.

Go out to an art store and buy some cool stencils to add quick dungeon details. Get a stiff-bristled straw stencil-brush and go nuts.

Also: viewtopic.php?f=193&t=1956

by **DungeonTiles** » November 24th, 2013, 7:16 pm

Thank you so much for your tips, chaoticprime.
We must consider them for future rooms/corridors. Our dungeon is designed much like the old HQ board, so we can use diferent schemes for different rooms and we also take advantage to this fact for trying different techniques.
By the way, I must say we never use Citadel paints. I only use the Citadel names because they come faster to my mind.
We are Vallejo fans. Their paints are cheaper, bigger and last a lot more. And, given we are from Spain (like Vallejo itself) their paints are much easier to find and cheaper than most alternatives. Also, we use them for our army miniatures and stuff like that, so the whole thing is much more useful this way. I know we could use even cheaper paints, but that means we have to double the space needed to store paints and that could be a true problem.

I'm sure we could paint the dungeon much faster with all the information you have posted. Thank you so much.
Best regards.

by **DungeonTiles** » December 25th, 2013, 2:03 pm

Hi there, YeOldInners!

We want to share with you all some new pics of our hobby project and how it's growing.

Although we already have a larger amount of tiles that give us the oportunity of building a bigger board, on this occasion we have prefered making a mini-diorama (tiny, indeed) with miniatures and some scenery. We have done this with the aim of making better pics. With bigger dungeons, pics are more disjointed and it's much more difficult to distinguish details properly.

In the end, the main feature of this set of pictures is scenery, not tiles (that are all well known thanks to previous pics). There are both scenery modelled and cloned by us (like the stairway, that fits equally well in the original board, replacing the cardboard token), custom made not cloned scenery (like columns), and purchased scenery (like minis recycled into statues, minis from Bones Reaper and so on).

As you can see in the next pic, when the diorama is gathered up, it needs minimum space and it can be stored into whichever hobby bag.

I must say we have more scenery on the way (both three types) but, because of our lack of time, by the moment we could only upload these pics. Our proyect never stops growing and, because of that, I encourage you to visit our Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/DungeonTiles) because you can find there much more pics (we don't want to saturate the forum with our pics) but, also, we upload pics more often (with WIP, previews and so on) and you can find comments and tips in each of them (with the aim of helping anybody making the best of their modular boards and comments about the most helping miniature brands in the market). All comments are always both in spanish and english and, please, fell free to post any comment in whatevever of both languages.

We hope you like the pics and thanks for any comment or idea that help us making the best of our modular board.

Thanks to everybody and happy holidays.

by **chaoticprime** » December 25th, 2013, 6:09 pm

Using pillars in HQ is a great idea that I seemingly overlooked. I would cap off their height at no greater than three inches. Another front you could advance on would be new inserts for the furniture pieces. If done well, they'd sell.

by **DungeonTiles** » December 25th, 2013, 7:03 pm

Thanks a lot, chaoticprime.
I'm glad that you like the columns. But I must say that the "perfect" ones are 3 inches long (in fact, they are a little shorter, but still quite near to that number). "Damaged" columns range from 1,5 to 2,5 inches, more or less. We seriously considered making them shorter, but I must say that I didn't like the general appearance (they felt a little fake-ish). So we used "damaged" ones, that are shorter (so they don't make the game sluggish) and look faily authentic. It was the easiest solution to these problems. :lol:

I am working on some furniture pieces too and I would be eager to sell them, of course. But they are still on a WIP stage (in other words, most pieces hadn't been cloned yet and some other are still being modelled).
For the moment, the stairway and the fallen rock markers are the only ones of such pieces available... Well... :roll:

there is something on the way, but I prefer to wait until it is completely finished to show it properly (still half painted).
I am posting some new pics as soon as possible.
Best regards.