Dungeon Setup

As noted, I've been running Seekers of the Ashen Crown for my players, and they seem to be enjoying themselves.  So far, they found an old tomb complex while searching for a tangle of kruthik warrens.  In the tomb, they found an artifact that attracted the notice of just about everyone in town.

Before that point, however, they are looking for the kruthik egg chamber so they can destroy the kruthik eggs and eliminate the kruthik problem in the slums.  The kruthik egg chamber is a darkened cave.  Kruthiks secrete mucus as a way of nesting, so the chamber has eggs, slime, and sheets of mucus strewn about.  The mucus sheets act as walls, providing cover and blocking line-of-sight, though they are destroyed either by attacking them or simply by powering through them.

While reading through the encounter, it became pretty obvious that erasing walls on a battlemat would be pretty tedious, so I made some terrain.  Eggs were just pennies, areas covered in slime were represented by numbered tokens, and the walls were composed of wax paper and tape affixed to toothpicks (broken in half, because a whole toothpick was pretty unnecessary) with Sculpey bases.  Pictures of the setup (during the battle, mostly) are available after the jump.

Setup at the beginning of the fight.

Setup at the beginning of the fight: second shot.

Closeup on the cluster of PCs and kruthiks.  Also: beer makes everything better.

Second closeup on mucus wall, PCs, and kruthiks

Wider shot of the board, post-fight

Closeup of the board, post-fight

Unfortunately, the PCs kept movement to a minimum, like good Spartans, so only a single wall was destroyed during the fight.  Still, the effect worked, and the players were suitably shaken by the intricate setup — obviously, this fight is important somehow.

Fortunately, though, the fact that so few walls were destroyed means that I can use them again.  A fight in a Japanese-style tea house, perhaps?