Some time last week, I decided that I was going to bite the bullet and get back into D&D, so I started doing some research. I’ve got the 4th Edition books, but since this was going to be my first time DMing in a few years, and I wanted to be able to get a few newbies involved at some point, I decided on the Pathfinder system. More specifically, the Beginner Box.

This comes with lots of resources for starting out as a DM or player, and the two books, the Hero Manual and the GamesMaster Manual, are fantastic, giving step by step instruction, and even a sample DM campaign to run through with “speak this out loud” sections.

I managed to get a few of the regulars from Friday Night Gaming involved, and even went so far as to draft in some old friends from Manchester and Winchester interested, so long as they could connect in over Web Cam.

I’d got hold of the Print at home version of the Beginner Box, so set about printing off the resources, the books, as I said, are fantastic, the Map however came to be a bit of a problem. It’s probably more down to my printer, and my desire to run campaigns that allowed me more control over the ‘Fog of War’, but I couldn’t get on with the map they provided, I had lots of issues trying to get it printed correctly to scale, and my OCD kept getting in the way. The only answer I could come up with was to make some tiles myself.

So, breaking out the hot glue gun, and having researched DM Craft on YouTube (Hats off to DM Scotty and his amazing videos) I set about re-creating the beginner box dungeon in cardboard and paint.

I must admit, I forgot how much I loved doing this, and breaking open my old Warhammer box to nick the paints, and make sure the scale was correct (OCD strikes yet again) reminded me how many mini’s I still had to paint, but they can wait for another day….

Before long, I had created all the basic tiles as I wanted them, and they even fit together to form the very basic outline of the dungeon that Paizo provides you with, and then it was time to get creative…

I finished the dungeon entrance first, and I was very pleased with my first attempt, I was really beginning to enjoy this, so equipped with my two cans of spray paint, I set about the other tiles, and got them prepared for some more detailing.

Armed with my hot glue gun, and a bag of gravel, I set about lining each of the tiles to give them a more authentic feel, empty spaces are scaled to allow miniatures through them, and I added the detailed paint to a few of the others to really enhance the tiles, once finished, I out the entire dungeon together to make sure it all still fit, and hey presto, one Pathfinders Beginners Box Dungeon!

Thursday night rolled around, and we got down to the nitty gritty of rolling the characters, we had to fall back to Google Hangouts in the end, as Skype was trying to charge me for multiple web cams in a single call, but we were pretty impressed with the outcome.

So far, we have 2 rogues rollled and ready to go (one is mine though, so won’t make an appearance….yet….) and an Atheist Cleric, which is going to be interesting….We also have a Wizard in the making, and two more players yet to complete their characters ready for next week.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with how the prep has gone, and I am really looking forward to making the rest of the dungeons for this ongoing campaign, my only issue is going to be the fact that most of the players will end up on Hangouts, and I’ll have made a massive pile of Dungeon Tiles….ah well….