Lmst

My planned #OSR West Marches campaign will most likely be hobgoblin-heavy, so I'm printing up a small army of paper hobgoblins from David Okum's collection.

#TTRPG #PaperMiniatures #papermini

Some paper miniatures of Hobgoblins in armor. Based in plastic stands.

A magnetic dungeon board for Paper Miniatures

I’m currently planning a West Marches campaign using an OSR rule set (most likely Basic Fantasy). I’ll be running the campaign using miniatures, specifically paper miniatures. A good portion of the campaign will be set in traditional D&D style dungeons, and I wanted to find a good way to physically represent them.

I could use a dry erase battle map, but I wanted something a little fancier. I could make dungeon tiles for each room, but that would be time consuming and take up quite a bit of storage space.

My plan was to make a magnetic board, and use magnetic scenery on it, so I can make any number of rooms out of a few bits of paper. Everything will have a magnet, so the scene won’t be constantly knocked over by people bumping the table, or any stray gusts of air.

The Board

First, I take a basic cheap magnetic white board. I used a simple 14″x14″ square board. If I need it, I may get larger ones.

Then I printed out some dungeon floor tiles. For this project I’m mostly using stuff from Fat Dragon Games, specifically their EZ Dungeon line. I used some spray glue to affix them to the white board.

The Walls

For the walls of the room, I could have created full 3-D paper walls. However, in practice, I think that gets in the way of player’s sight lines. The whole point of the miniatures is for everyone to be able to see what’s going on.

Instead, I’ll be using low magnetic strips that will represent dungeon walls,

I pasted a dungeon pattern onto some black foam board, cut it into 1/2″ wide strips of various lengths. The strips were then attached to magnetic tape.

Scenery

I’ve been collecting all sorts of paper scenery over years, some of it from the aforementioned Fat Dragon, among other sources. All I need to do is attach adhesive magnetic strips to the bottom of each of these bits of scenery, and arrange it as needed:

Since it’s all magnetic, I don’t have to worry about any of it being knocked around:

Next Steps

I’m pretty happy with this so far, but I’m planning a few possible upgrades:

Magnetic bases for my paper miniatures
Larger whiteboards.
Alternate magnetic boards for other terrain types – forest, grasslands, cavern, town streets, etc.
Instead of gluing the dungeon floor to the whiteboard, I may just make flat magnetic tiles.

#dnd #Minis #PaperMiniatures #RPG #ttrpg