If you were born in the material plane and are not currently undead, you probably need sources of light and warmth. Not wanting my NPCs to suffer needlessly while waiting around for attention from the players, I made some of those.

Let there be light!

I made a handful of candles by starting with a few short pieces clipped from several different thicknesses of round wooden craft sticks. I grabbed a few little metal jewelry rings as well.

For each candle (or cluster of candles) I dropped a blob of hot glue onto some parchment paper and inserted a stick while the glue was hot. On a few I stuck rings in as well. After the initial pieces were dry, I used the glue gun again to paint little melted-wax textures down the sides. Lastly, on some of them, I put a bead of glue on top, then held them upside down and stretched it away to form a teardrop-shaped flame.

The candles themselves, and the areas where I wanted melted wax on the surface beneath them, were painted white and dabbed with a little parchment color. The bases were painted with a couple of different metallic shades. A few dabs of red, yellow, and orange finished off the lit candles.

This all ends in fire

I already had a campfire I made a while back, but I wanted at least one indoor fireplace and maybe a fire pit with a spit mounted over it.

To get started, I sliced some small bricks from XPS foam. The fireplace would be free-standing, but for the pit I cut a little oval piece from a slice of ePVC left over from another project to use as a base. I used tacky white glue to put the basic layouts together and let them dry overnight. A pair of the rings I used for the candles were hot-glued to the ends of some short pieces of toothpick, the other ends of which were jammed into some leftover foam bricks. Those were glued inside the pit, which was then filled with little bits of broken-up scrap foam and a bunch of PVA to hold it all together.

I initially stuck a nail through the rings to serve as the spit, but later switched it out for a paper clip bent into a shape with a handle.

I tossed in a little bit of grout-and-soil mixture to add a little texture where the ashes would be on each piece.

I fought with the ring/toothpick connections to try to minimize the hot-glue globs. Trimming them down kept resulting in broken-off rings. Super glue didn’t hold, and some E6000 stuff I tried didn’t seem to do the job either. I ended up re-hot-gluing them together. The blobs are back; I’ll live with them for now, but will probably tinker with replacements at some point.

Bricks were painted in shades of gray, spit and supports with a wrought iron color. Flames were shaped out of hot glue, and the fire pit base got a coating of grout-and-soil mix. My wife has offered to make a tiny little roasting chicken out of air-dry clay for me to mount on the spit, so the fire pit might get a slight upgrade.