Designing modular terrain for rpg games - Our perspective

What makes a good miniature terrain and why to use it?

We made that question to ourselves, while we were designing our own modular tiles.

We started playing RPG games in the way they are also known: with pen, paper and lots of imagination!

The simplest and by some the purest way of experiencing the magic world of RPGs and Dungeons and Dragons in particularly.

Also we were into dungeon crawl board games like Hero Quest and Legend of Zagor.

The use of miniatures and terrain in those games, felt as it gave breath to our heroes and their quests…and our imagination was ignited even more!

We loved the sight of well painted and detailed miniatures in rooms filled with treasures or engaged in glorious battles, but the choices were slim.

So we took a step in to create our own. The idea was a terrain that is reusable, easy to transport and store, game-friendly with durability and most importantly, with very fine detail in order to be fun to paint and why not, to convert!

In order to make a terrain to be more appealing for gaming, is the ease of use.

Ease of use means to us:

-that you will able to position and move your miniatures easily,

-put any scenery pieces on the terrain without much effort and

-have a reusable terrain that can be used in any different setting imaginable.

We tried to achieve this by designing a “modular terrain system”, as we call it, with square tiles to suit those needs. The traditional grid that 28mm miniature games using, is 1” or 25mm each square. We felt that using a bit larger square will be more useful for easy miniature handling. Each of our tiles, measures 60mm x 60mm, translating to have 4 squares with 30mm side.

As awesome and cool may seem, having full walls and roofs, adds reality, but does not allow you to easily move and position miniatures and dices, on your gaming terrain. To solve this, we decided to cut the walls and to allow each tile and were is necessary, to have a small wall in 20mm height.

You will be still adventuring in an ancient dungeon with your imagination !

Reusability is an important factor for using terrain in your games. It makes it affordable to own and removes the need to buy special pieces that will be used one or two times only. Our modular tiles are created in equally square size and can be combined with each other, which allows you to build any fantasy terrain you can imagine! Also their small size (60mm on each side) makes them easy to store.

For a special touch,we added a soft anti-slide base, to allow each tile a firm grip on the surface you place them, when you build your gaming terrain, as an optional feature. This is our take on providing an exciting modular terrain, with many features and fun to have at your gaming table. We believe that we have just scratched the surface.