My Very First Tabletop Terrain Piece

I have recently decided to try my hand at DMing after being a life-long player.

I gathered a group of people new to the game using facebook and we had our session 0 about a month ago.

I was so inspired to give them a good experience I decided o try my hand at crafting a little bit of tabletop terrain.

Here is what it looked like on the table.

I created several 'stone' pillars placed on the edge of a chasm. The middle one had a rope tied to it, probably used by previous adventurers to repel down into the ruins below.

The 'wow' sounds my players made as I took it out was very rewarding and I'll definitely try to keep crafting. It's fun.

Since I didn't have any XPS foam (nor do I know where to get large chunks of it here) I used wood.

At first, I thought I'd use a chisel or saw off pieces but the pillars were too small so I ended up using a rotary tool.

Eventually, I got them looking pretty good. It helped that I was trying to create random patterns so there was no way to make a mistake or 'ruin' the piece.

Now that I had them looking right it was time for painting. I started by mixing black acrylic paint with some PVA glue and giving them a thorough coating.

As you can see the glue didn't really mix in with the paint so I did it again with just paint this time. I also ran out of black halfway through so used dark purple as it was the darkest color I had.

I let it dry for a while and then tried my hand at some dry brushing. First a light coating of a mustard color and then light brushing with white to bring out the highlights.