This venture was recommended to me by a friend. He’s looking for a dice tower to use while playing Ancient Terrible Things. I’ve never played it, but the artwork looks awesome, so I readily agreed to the project. One drawing shows a stony cliff with a skull carved out of the rock. With that picture and some guidance from my friend, I got stuck in.
I opted for pink XPS foam as the rock with a modified Pringles can as the chute for the dice. Foam baffles were glued in place on the inside of the can with somewhere between 4 and 25 different glues. I don’t expect they’ll go anywhere. A coat of Mod Podge on the baffles and can should keep them from falling apart for about 12,258 rolls of the dice. That assumes my calculations are correct. It definitely looked fine for the dozen rolls I used it for.
I’ll point out that after gluing the foam layers together, I gave it a rough cut with a handheld hot-wire foam cutter. From there, I crosshatched shallow cuts vertical and horizontal across the entire rock face. I used a wire brush to scour those crosshatches and used tweezers to pull out random groups of squares.
The whole thing got a coat of watery plaster. Once dried I used a stiff fiber brush to remove lots of the plaster and re-expose some of the rock face.
I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves for the rest of the process.
As it’s a lost jungle destination, most of it will be overrun by vines and roots. This piece will be handled frequently, so I’ll have to balance durability with detail. Stick around to see how it turns out. This one is building itself, so I expect it to be done relatively soon. After all, baseball seasons is just around the corner…
Modeling and Storytelling 