Mansion Map

This week I am working on a few different projects for my husband's Pathfinder game. The main thing is mapping out a mansion for his next adventure. There are three floors and a basement but right now I'm focusing on the main floor and basement. I know that some of the players for that game read my blog so I don't want to give too much away. I will be drawing out the others floors as well but they are less likely to be needed. If I can finish it in time I plan to add a little bit of color. You can't see it in this picture but there is a courtyard that I'd like to fill in maybe with watercolor.

Entry and Front Stairs

I've mentioned before that they are not using a grid for most battles so I also worked on making sticks to help measure movement. Using leftover dowels from our Pi Day invitation I marked off one inch increments and filled every other space using acrylic craft paint. I had previously tried just coloring them with Sharpie markers and while it worked alright the paint looks much nicer and is much easier to see. I will probably add an extra coat of paint later but one seems to be enough to do the job. If you wanted you could use colors to somehow represent each character, like use the colors of a knightly order but I just chose red because it created the best contrast with the color of the wood.

The final I'm working on is horses for the party. A while back I came across a post through Pinterest talking about Dollar Store items for use in games. One of the things it mentions is using small toy horses to represent the players when they are on horseback. I've never been able to find any at the dollar stores around us but I got lucky and found two of these tubes on clearance at the store where work.

When you set them next to a regular mini they seem a little big but they only take up two squares on a game mat so they are actually about the right scale. We just need to find some kind of base to glue them on so that they are a bit more stable. There were eight horses in each pack so we have sixteen which makes enough for the party plus ten extras for villains or other npcs.