Mastermaze
Produced by Dwarven Forge
$60-120
Cavernscape
Produced by Geo-Hex
$145
Hands up, everybody who still uses 25mm miniatures in roleplaying sessions only to specify a party's marching order.
If there's one thing that's kept me from using them as anything more, it's a lack of scenery. Oh, sure, any miniature gamer will tell you that these days there are companies aplenty producing some of the best scenery the gaming world's ever seen. But I'm talking about the serious kind of underground scenery that can be thrown together in an instant - a priority during dungeon crawls when you're never sure down which corridor the players will turn.
Save for starting a session with the entire dungeon built and ready to go, which is every bit as impractical as it sounds, I'd pretty much given up on representing underground adventures in miniature. Like many roleplaying gamers, I'd relegated miniatures to a kind of second-class status during gaming sessions: it's cool to have a figure for your fighter-cleric, but it'd be nice if you could so something more with it than just have it sit in front of the DM's screen, dictating your place in line.
A few companies have produced modular dungeons that are perfectly serviceable, if unexciting: some are simply cardboard cut-outs, others are magnetic, allowing you the luxury of walls. And let's be frank: those plastic battlemats are about as easy to set up as they come: as long as you've got a washable marker handy, you're in business. It's . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: April 24, 1998
Copyright © 1998 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.