With my outbuildings… outbuilt? … and platforms made and the giant tree stumps created to mount them on, I still needed some finishing structural pieces for the Wild Sheep Chase build. The platforms are connected to the ground and each other by walkways, and the largest platform has interior walls dividing it into several rooms.

To the walls!

In keeping with the idea of limiting the presence of walls so as to maximize visibility and minimize obstructions, I decided to build half-walls to break up the rooms inside the big platform. These will hopefully convey the presence of walls, but without getting in the way.

To keep things simple I cut a bunch of narrow 2″ and 3″ strips of foamcore and scored one side of each lightly with a wire brush to add a wood-like texture. The walls are supposed to have been magically shaped from the natural wood of the tree, so I used my makeshift plank-making tool to draw some lines slightly unevenly, hoping for an effect that looked like branches formed together rather than flat planks. In retrospect a good idea might have been to use a nail file to sand the lines down a little deeper and round off their edges a bit.

After gluing similar sized, textured strips back-to-back, I painted the sides with more or less the same color scheme I used for the bark on the outside edges of the platforms. I wanted to have some raw wood exposed along the top, so I added some of the suede color and a dribble of brown wash across the top to match the center colors of the platform. I ended up adding little wooden discs at the bottom as well, so the pieces stand up better.

I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the look at that point, so I pulled a few little sprigs of leaves off some small clearance-sale-at-Walmart plastic plants and jammed them into a few spots. Little buds continue to occasionally sprout from these living walls, it seems, and the room’s current occupant hasn’t kept up with trimming them.

Out on a limb

The walkways between platforms are described as, like the walls, being shaped from the living wood of the trees they connect. I approached this look by first using more foamcore strips for the flat, walkable areas. I hand-drew wood textures on them and put them through the paint/dry-brush/wash process. For the railings and supports, I gathered twigs from the neighborhood while walking the dog.

My crafting assistant, Sadie

The only way I could get everything to glue together and stay that way was with hot glue. Its fast drying time made it the best choice for putting all these pieces together, so I would just have to deal with its stringiness and my tendency to leave oversized visible globs of it around.

Next I wanted to create some vines to thread through them, both to achieve the “living tree” look and to mask some of the visible glue. I initially tried to do this using twine; I tossed a bunch of cut pieces into a bowl, then squirted in some super-cheap green poster paint and some water.

After a vigorous stir and some soaking time, I pulled out my newly greened twine and let it soak overnight. The next day I dabbed all along the threads with a sponge dipped in several other colors of green, to end up with twine-vines looking something like this:

I interlaced my vines through the railings in various different configurations, using dots of hot glue to anchor them underneath where they wouldn’t be seen. (One exception had just a few vines laced straight down the sides between the rails.) Then I proceeded to completely forget to take pictures of them before I decided the vines made them look shoddy rather than natural and ripped them all off. (Except for the vines-down-the-sides one, which would have been too hard to de-vine without damaging the structure and was intended as a spare anyway.)

Instead of the vines, I clipped of some more tiny plant pieces and glued them on to look as if they were sprouting from the wood itself. This provided the more living/growing look I wanted, so I stuck with it.

Dragon myself out of bed

(Beware – this section is slightly more spoiler-y than previous ones!)

Near the end of the adventure a wizard will use a very powerful (but damaged and dangerous) magical weapon to transform his bed into a creature called a Bed Dragon Wyrmling. I looked around for an image to represent this creature on a printable paper mini, but couldn’t find anything I liked. I resigned myself to just re-using the green dragon I printed for Phandelver.

Then I ran across a Reddit post by someone who had built her own Bed Dragon. I stole her idea with her blessing and built my own, using the same fabric I’d made some of my beds from, painting it with the same color as the bed I planned to place in the wizard’s room.

Beware the Bed Dragon Wyrmling!