Newbie story time!

So I'm running a D&D campaign using the Savage Tide AP. It's a sort of swashbuckling high-seas heroism sort of campaign, and eventually my players will have access to a pretty sizable sailing ship that, gods willing, should serve as their main transport for most of the rest of the campaign provided they don't smash it up or anything. As you might imagine, that line of thinking led me here to WWG and the Maiden, which I pretty much immediately bought and started building. That subsequently led me to find TLX, and I decided to put together a TLX build for the next gaming session (wherein the party raids a pirate hideout). Now I'm not entirely new to papercraft, but I'm new enough that I did not really know what I was getting myself into, building a 36"x24" two-and-a-half-level TLX layout entirely by hand (no robocutters or anything). As such, the Maiden build is sort of on hold at the moment, because I ended up frantically scrambling to complete the TLX stuff in time for the game. (I've got the hull done, but need to fix some damage to the walls)

Anyway, Friday was the session. I didn't really get the whole thing complete, but all the basic necessities are in. I handed one of my players my camera and told him to take pictures. Here's the results! (They only made it into the first cave room before we stopped for the night.)

http://seregsarn.net/DnD/kraken

A lot of my gripes/comments are covered in my little blurb at the top of that page, but you guys are likely more interested in the details of the build itself:

• The whole "first floor" of the layout is actually some custom TLX tiles I threw together, using a bunch of textures I had lying around. My artistic skills are not great but they don't look TOO terrible as long as you don't put them directly next to the WWG tiles. Since the WWG tiles are all on the 1.5th and 2nd "levels", that never happens.
• The second floor is, of course, Hinterland Cliffs and TLX, and the walls are Cliffs walls. I was looking for "cave" originally, but Hinterland Cliffs actually has exactly the look I was hoping for-- though they're intended as cliffs, they make a perfect fit for the whole "damp sea cave" look. The tiles on the top floor aren't actually linked, so that I can remove them one by one as the party explores nearby areas.
• the "middle" floor is basically just a place for overhangs and ledges inside the caves. The internal walls are all single-height, and I have some of the areas covered up by TLX tiles on the inside, forming little sub-caves and so forth within the main cave.
• The furniture was going to be Shellendrak Props, but then just as I was about to get started on the furniture, I saw that Inn of the Feisty Friar had been released in the interim, and the props there have a much more "weathered" look that fits much better with the setting. So now I own that too.
• only about a quarter of the stuff is actually edged, because I just didn't have time. A lot of the furniture wasn't done on time, but luckily I have at least three weeks or so to finish up the furniture before the next session. I'm not sure I want to dismantle the whole thing to edge it all though.
• Yes, for some idiotic newb reason I put anchors on all the ocean tiles. I didn't realize what a huge mistake that was until I had them all printed out and cut and realized, hey now I have to cut out 104ish anchors for no good reason.
• I also seem to have put a lot of the anchors a couple millimeters too far from the edges of the tiles, because the 4-way posts have a hard time sitting comfortably on most of the intersections, as you can see in some of those photos. I've been trying to carefully tear some of them off and re-attach them closer to the edge, and that seems to help a bit.
• Two of the tiles came out a little discolored (printed just as the ink cartridges ran out-- if I'm going to keep this up I should probably look into one of those CISen). I figured "eh, it's just two tiles and they're not completely ruined, I'll just use them anyway, nobody will notice." Naturally, those two tiles are the two that my photographer got extreme close-up photos of.

In addition to comments and such regarding the build, I'd appreciate any advice on general TLX issues like the ones I just described. My biggest gripe so far is that, as you can see in a few of those photos, some of my double-high walls are already warping pretty badly only a few days after I finished them, even with the anti-warp ridge thing on them. I've tried a couple of different types of glue sticks, liquid glues, and liquid-glue-pens, and haven't yet found a glue that seems to work well without warping. I sifted through the "which glue to use" threads and so forth on these forums, but I can't seem to find anyplace that sells any of the glues people have recommended here. :\

One thing I noticed on your build is that it looks like the anchors are a bit to far form the edge of the tiles. This keeping the posts from setting all the way down so can't use the middle anchors to help keep the wall straight. Other than that nice build bet the players loved it.

Looks like you guys had a ton of fun! Thanks so much for sharing, especially with such a detailed post to go with it! I can't wait to see more.

This is a great picture and the Steel Reserve made me LOL.

For a rushed job the set looks good.
Looking forward to more internal pictures later please.

Two tips:

1) EDGE!

2) For warp-free large, broad, flat objects like double-height walls, I find double-sided tape works much better than glue (except on the sides where the tabs are, glue those for sure).

We finally managed to get together for another session last night. On the plus side, the long delay meant I had time to tear down the whole layout, edge everything (a bit haphazardly in some places), and reposition a few of the most off-center anchors. So now it looks a lot nicer and is a little sturdier.

Anyway, last night my players got a lot more actual adventuring done, so interior photos are now available:

Kraken's Cove Expedition, Day 2

Some more build notes:

• I know, the cage wall in the gaol looks ugly as sin. I only decided to make it late thursday night, so I hurriedly dug up a picture of some iron bars on google image search, and slapped it inexpertly into a TLX 6" wall template. Then, I used way too much glue on the sandwich fold, so it warped severely as it dried. But of course, by the time I got home from work and discovered the warping, I had only about half an hour before game time, so I tried my best to bend it into a roughly straight shape and used it as-is.
• The terrarium was made from all scrap-- I keep all the half-tabs that I cut out of the TLX tiles, because tiny foamcore rectangles seem like they have to be useful somehow sometime. So for the terrarium I took one of those and scribbled on the top with a couple of different shades of brown marker. The sides are a strip of scrap transparency from the edge of my Maiden's "window" transparency sheet, with a little hole and "cracks" cut into one side before hot-gluing it to the base.
• The chef hat is just a little strip of cardstock, sandwich folded and fringed, then glued into a cylinder shape. Nothing fancy there, I just eyeballed it to fit the heads of the miniatures.

I am in love with this build. It makes me want to build a similar setup and take my group to the Lhazaar Principalities..

Wow the Principalities... I haven't thought about them in a Long time... I may have to pull out one of my old gazetters and see if I can gain anything out of them. I know I used some of the tree of life stuff from Elfhome a few campaigns ago, but I haven't looked at any of the rest of them in years.

Oh and seregsern, nice build....

I can't help but jump to the Principalities when thinking about pirates due to DMing exclusively in Eberron for the last few years...

Nice layout - and I enjoyed the story! Thanks!

Really nice build! Cant wait to see when you guys get to the maiden fight and sail away.

Nice build! I could have used this 3 years ago

I am running my players through Serpent Skull, but I have set it in Eberron. The Lhazaar Princes are one of the factions in the game.

Unfortunately, last night we got all excited and totally forgot to take photos during the final encounter (which, due to a number of environmental, behind-the-scenes factors our players never knew about, ended up being far easier than perhaps was intended.) So I can't show you the final two unexplored "cells" in that pirate hideout. As consolation, I offer you two photos of the whole thing after I dismantled it to pack it away this afternoon:



You didn't miss that much in terms of pretty stuff: One room was an opulent (for a pirate hideout) bedroom with a savagely cannibalized corpse and blood splattered all over everything, for which I used the bloody variants of the Feisty Friar furniture. The other room was a natural tide pool, so the only furniture in there was a table that the last living, not-mutated pirate had propped up to use as cover while she fought off the horde.

Sorry to disappoint you, canopytheory, but the players didn't have time to take the undamaged ship and sail away-- None of them knows how to sail it anyway, so they'd have to bring in a hired crew. And they don't have time for that, because they learned that one of the surviving pirate crew is headed back to the city to exact a misguided revenge against their employer. And since they camped out up on the cliffs last night, they are a day behind him.

So they rushed back to the city at top speed with a note from his captain telling him to stand down (they're pretty good at sweet-talkin' NPCs, it turns out), only to find it in the midst of an annual festival-- so now they have to make their way through the congested crowds and parades and chaos, to get to their noble patron's manor and save her. Naturally, there are a few things they have to deal with on the way.

I really want to do a shoreline as well.
This is quite awesome! I'm really blown away by the scope of it.
What did you use for your water/sand?

I'm glad folks like it! Being my first foray into building WWG sets, as well as by far the largest papercraft project I've ever embarked upon, it was a huge learning experience for me. Although it was a hit with my players, I'm looking forward to applying a lot of the lessons to the rest of my Thoumonts/Himmelveil build. (Which has, sadly, languished for quite a while now due to unavoidable Real Life Stuff(tm). My players have been making do with dry-erase-grid maps for the mansion thus far, which makes me sad. )

As for the water, sand, and rock textures: I had a couple of textures lying around from an abandoned videogame project, so I mocked up a TLX tile template of my own and used those. Alas: it didn't occur to me that my textures were designed for screen resolution, so they look painfully low-res compared to the (gorgeous!) WWG tiles and cliff walls/etc-- or rather, by the time I realized the discrepancy, I'd already put together almost half of them and, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er. :\ Fortunately for me, the entire first floor of that layout was made of my low-res tiles, so there were at least no glaring transitions where a high-res and low-res texture were butted up next to one another, and it all looked okay in the final event.

When I need more ocean/beach tiles for a larger(!) beach-and-Hinterlands layout I intend to put together later on, I am tentatively planning to buy Atlantis and TLXify the beach and water tiles from that to replace my existing ones. (Then again, at the pace I'm going, a native TLX beaches-and-oceans set might have been released by the time I get around to that!)

Awesome. I have Atlantis, but I think the sand and water is too Aegean Sea for my needs. Hmm... We'll see.