Hi all,

As you know, I’ve got an ongoing project on whereby I’m making my own dungeon crawler game. Aside from rules, I’m also manufacturing as much of my own physical materials as possible.

One of the things I started with was the humble dungeon tile. It was really important to me that the tiles were both functional and looked realistic. To that end they needed to be large and flat enough to accommodate a standard 25mm square base, but they also needed to be textured and coloured in such a way to really capture that centuries old subterranean architecture feel 🙂

This post is going to be about how I made these tiles, starting with how to make the all important master!

First step was to visit eBay where I found that you could buy 2mm thick 30mm square laser cut MDF tiles. They were pretty damn cheap for 50, so I went ahead and bought 200!

Next I made sure I’d stocked up on greenstuff. You’re gonna need lots of this. Gradually as you get better you’ll use less per tile, but if you’re like me, that frugal skill is gonna take a while to sink in!

With these two crucial ingredients you can make your masters. To begin with you take a small ball of green stuff and splat it on an MDF tile. Then spread it with a tool, or your thumb so it covers the whole tile. Life is easier if you keep the greenstuff wet, this stops it sticking to your fingers. You can also trim any excess that overlaps the tile.

Next you want to take a rolling pin and create a perfectly flat surface to your green stuffed tile. Again, remove the excess that overlaps the edge.

After this make sure your greenstuff is wet, then splat your perfectly flat tile against some nicely textured stone.

I’m lucky in my 200 year old cottage, in that we have tones of exposed stonework. If you don’t have that luxury, concrete paving slabs outside might serve just as well.

Peel the tile away from the stone carefully and you should find your perfectly smooth tile now has a stone texture. Win.

The final part of creating your master is to take your sculpting tool and define out the edges of the various flagstones that make up your tile. Irregular squares beats regular squares. But it’s really personal preference.

A good tip for using your tools is to again, keep them wet. Also, instead of dragging the tool across the greenstuff surface, you want to push down instead. This stops you from warping your tile by smearing greenstuff everywhere.

Leave your masters in a safe place to dry/cure for about 24 hours then you’re ready to create your mould!

For creating a mould, you’ll have to see part 2, coming soon!

If you’ve got any questions, please drop me a comment below the line. If you’ve found this useful, you’d be doing me a solid by visiting and joining my Facebook page by clicking on the button below.

Jimmi Waz ‘Ere

Thanks for reading,

Jimmi