I love them. Is that short enough? Yes? Well, too bad. I plan to ramble a bit further, though the good news is there will be a few poorly staged pictures to go along with the poorly written bits.
First off, per the Inked Adventures website;
"Inked Adventures produce accessories for tabletop roleplaying games. Our popular printable PDF dungeon tiles and cut-up sections can be found on RPGDriveThru and Paizo.
May your dungeons be beautiful!"
The first set I grabbed was the "Hand Drawn Large Geomorph Tiles". These tiles are, as the name suggests, hand drawn. They have a lot of character and I've always been a sucker for geomorphic tiles because I like anything that minimizes the ability for me to place it down wrong.
These tiles are ten inches square and printed on two sheets of paper each.
You then cut them out and glue the two pieces together to make one ten by ten inch tile. Easy enough with the right tools!
But what do you print them on? Cardstock is one choice, but I felt it may still suffer more damage, dog-ears, and tearing than I'd like. So I decided to print on regular paper then affix the tiles to foam-core or foam-card if that's what they call it near you. My local Hobby Lobby sells 30x40" sheets of Foam-core which, math demands, divides up into twelve 10x10" squares.
If you want to get a really clean cut on your foam-core, I can't recommend FoamWerks Tools enough. You can get pretty fancy, but they have a straighedge and a cutter that slots onto it to make the straightest, cleanest foam cuts you'll get without using a light saber or something similar.
The next step involves glue. I tried at first to use a product called Mod Podge but the moisture content was a little high so there was some minor warping after the paper was glued to the foam-core and dried. So I found this stuff...
It's a good idea to read the warnings on the label as this is a serious adhesive product. I'd recommend spraying outside and into a box or other container as shown below.
Yes, it's indoors for the photo-op. I like to keep my bad lighting consistent for photos! Still, you can see the two halves of the tile cut out and placed into the box. A quick spray with the adhesive and they will be good and tacky. For a short time you can place and remove them, but after they have been adhered for a while, they are good and stuck on.
Here is a shot of the first half placed on the foam-core. Note that one half has a bit of extra material. This is so you can glue the two halves together even if you are not attaching them to anything. I could cut it off for this method, but chose to leave it on.
I like to line up the edge closest to myself then work my way forward. It helps me keep the tile straight as it goes down on the foam-core.
After the first half is down, I rotate the tile 180 degrees and place the other half on using the same method.
Close counts, so I'd not get to fidgety and stress about perfection. These are hand drawn, remember, so computer precision was never the goal. Character is the goal, and the tiles have tons of it.
Here are a couple tiles together to show how they fit.
Is the cavern just inside this dungeon filled with Kobolds? Maybe a troll? Who knows, but the neighborhood is nice! The set is 64 tiles, with mirror images included for a total of 128 tiles of dungeon. Each tile being two pages means printing it all out can get ink/toner heavy, but you can always print them out as you need them as opposed to every tile at once. Or, if you work in IT, you can send a couple hundred pages of "test prints" through a repaired printer... or so I hear.
Inked Adventures also makes a series of Modular Dungeon Cut-Up Sections that are in color and offer a ton of options for building a dungeon out of tiles. I use a similar method to mount these to foam-core, but I use black foam-core as I feel it looks a bit fancier that way.
The Modular Tiles have several inter-related products that are all compatible. There are also several free sample sets if you dig around a bit. They are all pretty and make me want to play HeroQuest something fierce!
As an aside, the Large Geomorph tiles inspired me to make some tiles of my own to playtest a Sci-Fi-Dungeon Crawl-RPG-Boardgame I've been working on. With just nine double sided tiles I can create a LOT of maps...
Thanks for having a look. It was fun hopping back on the ole' blog for a morning. Maybe it will inspire me to blog more than once a year... maybe...