Bricks, Bricks, Bricks

  I've been building bricks from molds this last week and a half. I'm finally building the foundations for the Wizards Tower and the Octagonal Tower. It's obvious, and I knew this prior to doing these molds, that I need to get multiple molds of the same cast in order to mass produce them.

   On another note, Gen Con registration was this week and I managed to get into an advanced blocks building seminar using Hirst Arts molds. I'm hoping to pick up a few tips and tricks there. Gotta wait till early August though.

It's Not a Home Improvement Project...

   ...I said that at least three times today.

   A Menards opened about 2 weeks ago in the area. A big thing for a town of population 12k and that's the big city in this area. So it had it's "Grand Opening" all last week. After the all the hub-bub died down I finally decided to go check it out. Very nice. Big.

   My motive for this was that as I'm formulating the plan to build the HCT, there are things I realize I'm going to need, mainly materials and tools. Now, I am not and never have been much of a "Tim the Tool Man Taylor" kind of guy and probably never will be. I barely built the dust pan and wooden clock in Jr. high industrial arts class, so when I'm walking around I fully admit I was like Bill Gates hanging out with the Chicago Bears, the two just didn't go together. For example, I would end up in the power sander area asking where sandpaper sheets were. It turns out they're in the painting section. I was also looking and pricing metal files, and trying to find hydro-stone, the material I'll build most of the HCT out of. Inevitably the friendly neighborhood Menards assistant would ask if they could help. I would say I'm looking for a particular thing and they would ask what I'm trying to do to my house, particularly when asking about the hydro-stone and blue board insulation (used for sculpting lanscape and buildings) and sounding like a broken record I would say that blessed statement that makes one feel even more out of place than I already had.

   It does sound like an opening of a joke... "A geek walks into a home improvement store..."

   On the other hand, I spent the weekend drawing and measuring the foundations for the Knight's Spur section. I do need larger graph paper than 8.5x11. I have seen 17x22 online to buy but I want even larger if it can be found. I had to tape together 9 sheets in a 3x3 grid to get the actual miniature size of the building on paper. It took time drawing it and there are just as much eraser marks as there are lines drawn. I'm gonna need more erasers!

Maps, Maps, Maps

   Part of the fun about playing D&D as a player and DM is all the maps involved with the game. As a DM, TSR and later WoTC made extensive maps for modules. Inevitably the packaged adventure you bought would end up in dungeons, or a castle, or a cave complex. The players exploring it; fighting enemies be they people or monsters, avoiding or disarming traps, and finding treasure. Ultimately the players would sit there with their own graph paper and draw their own map of whatever they were exploring. I've done this many times myself.

   This was the case with TSR's Dragonlance module DL8 Dragons of War. It came with a full sized poster map, one side has a top down view of the High Clerist Tower (HCT) and the other side is a breakout of the HCT level by level, inside and out. I mention this because this poster map is the basis I'm using to help develop and draw the plans for this project.

I can't imagine trying to build this without that poster map.

Fan for Years, Decided to Do Something About It.

   So the first time I ever played D&D it was Dragonlance and for a kid, it was epic. To this day, it remains my favorite setting. One of the more memorable moments in the game (and the novels) was the battle at the Tower of the High Clerist. Now many, many unsaid years later I find myself running a Dragonlance campaign.

   With the release of D&D 3.0 (later 3.5) in 2000 the system laid down a rules system for using miniatures. Because of that the industry that produces those mini's saw growth and continues to do well. Along with that was the scenery to set those mini's in, Dwarven Forge is what comes to mind for me. A few years ago at Gen Con I bought fabrication molds from Hirst Arts that lets you build buildings and other structures out of a plaster bricks you make. Since that time I've always thought how fun it would be to have a full scale model of the Tower of the High Clerist. Now I have the people willing to play and the tools and method to build it and that's what I'm going to do.

  The tower is 840 feet wide from mountainside to mountainside and stands 1000 feet tall. In my model the scale will be 1 inch = 10 feet.

To be sure this is a massive under taking and I have never tried building something like this but I'm determined to do so. This is going to take a lot of planning and follow through and I anticipate at least 2 years for this project. I see it broken into 4 phases; the battlements, the tower itself, the knights spur (the building on the right side of the picture) and the surrounding landscape. Within each of those sections will be planning, drawing, building, and painting it.

   So as I said before, here we go...Phase 1, the battlements.