Right after I got CWU I built a simple Wizard's Tower - using three levels for the tower and attaching it to a two story building.

Sunday I started writing an adventure involving a lighthouse. I looked at the floor plan I had created for the lighthouse and attached keeper's house, sitting on its lonely rock,, and looked at my wizard's tower sitting on its lonely hill...

I added one more level to the tower and then pulled out the windows transparencies that Lord Abbadon so kindly made. A snapshot from Acrobat, a quick trip to paint and I had doubled the size and attached eight windows together and added a yellow tint to the glass, using up my last sheet of transparency plastic. I also printed a fence onto the transparency to go around the top of the tower in place of the crenelations (time taken drawing said fence - maybe ten minutes, I didn't need to be too careful about the size - I wanted there to be a gap.), and four of the round windows from The Maiden, tinting one set bright red.

I folded up the eight windows to form an octagon, then used some pebble patterned craft paper to create an eight pointed 'Christmas star' decoration that I had lurking on my computer as a .bmp with the arms of the star shortened, set so that the points of the windows matched the folds in the star. If anyone has skill at making a better roofing texture you may want to give it a try - the shape is right, but the craft and construction paper has no texturing whatsoever.

I set the fence around the top of the tower, and added a ladder down to the catwalk on the roof of the house. Both catwalk and ladder come from CWU. I set the gap in the fence to match where the ladder was going.

I printed up one of the Grand Columns from Gothic Realms, after sending it to paint. reducing it slightly so that it would fit inside the beacon house and cutting it down to a bit less than an inch in height. I added circular holes to match the windows from The Maiden. (Actually I cheated and took a snapshot of the the windows, and used them directly from Paint to lay out where I wanted the holes..) On the inside of the column I glued the windows themselves. I do need to find a way to light it, I am thinking a simple watch battery and grain of wheat bulb should turn the trick. I set this directly on the top of the tower, then plonked the beacon house right on top of it, then called it done.

The planning of this project took almost no time, I knew exactly what parts to use and from which sets - which makes me think that my back brain was already planning this when I started mapping out the lighthouse. This is the way a project should go . Actual execution took maybe six or eight hours, with a meal tucked in there somewhere.

The Auld Grump

*EDIT* Looking at the shortened star I realize I could have trimmed some time by simply setting two squares one on top of the other, set at 45% to each other. Instead I was 'clever' and shortened a longer armed star... and ended up with almost exactly the same thing.

Hi TheAuldGrump,

Please beg borrow or steal a digital camera! We want some pix!

If I don't manage to get access before then one of my summer students has one - I asked Jim to forward some to me least year, but I am not sure he remembered my e-mail address. (The funniest was one of the players caught in the middle of a victory dance...about twelve frames worth.) This model will see dual duty in both my RPG and my Mordheim game. Even if it gets damaged I am likely to rebuild it - it was an easy model, though I need to do something about the beacon house roof. Perhaps I can do something with a vertigrus green... The blue pebbled paper looks a bit like... blue pebbled paper. I need to get better at texturing, perhaps I will end up getting an upgrade to my ancient copy of Corel Draw Select Edition.

The Auld Grump

*EDIT* I made the hill/island it rests on about ten years ago, so far two parts of the model have been recycled, first the hill, then the tower...

I am redoing the light portion, using a eight sided lantern this time, the square just looked... dull. And the octagon will allow me to have some of the faces darkened, so I can say that it flashes white, red white then pauses before flashing white, red, white agan.)

And I decided that the lighthouse in at least one scenario is a wizard's tower... Who says that the lighthouse keeper can't be a wizards? (And that makes four scenarios that I have thought of for this building... not bad for a quickie...

The Auld Grump, Oh, me father was the keeper of the Eddystone light,
He slept with a mermaid on one fine night,
And from this union there soon came three,
A porgie and a porpoise, and the other was me!
Yo ho ho! And the wind blows free,
Oh for a life on the rolling sea...