This is my 2nd attempt to start this thread today. Let's see if it works this time.

I'm bad at maintaining momentum on my builds, so I'm posting this here in hopes that it drives me to keep making progress every day.

So, I'm GMing the Curse of the Crimson Throne Pathfinder AP for a group that meets once a month at my place. I haven't used much cardstock terrain for the game thus far, but I really wanted to come up with something. They're about 1/4 into the 5th book of the AP, so I'm looking towards the finale in book 6. Since one of the last sets WWG did was Pharaoh's Descent, I wanted to tackle Castle Korvosa itself.

The castle was built upon a site that was previously sacred to the native tribes driven out of the area around 300 years earlier. That site had a massive flat-topped sandstone pyramid (called the Grand Mastaba) that dated back thousands of years. No one knows what it's origins are. Of course, it's revealed in some of the sourebooks to date back to the Thassilonian empire. (I won't say more than that) It's meant to be massive, imposing, and dark.

Some pics of the artist's interpretation of the castle:

Some of my recent progress:

That should be around:
88 6" External Walls
4 3" External Walls
16 Corner External Walls
44 3x6 Tile Wrappers
44 6x6 Tile Wrappers
15 4-Way Posts
24 3-Way Posts
27 2-Way Posts
(not all the posts are pictured)

And the 44 6x6 and 44 3x6 foamcore tiles are in the works.

And all that is just for the pyramid itself. I still gotta come up with an evil looking castle to sit on top of it. And I'm hoping to have the time to build something of a city in front of it, as well.

I'm doing 1.5" squares 'cuz anytime I've used cardstock terrain with 1" squares, I keep having issues with minis not fitting well when there are walls and other minis around them. Paizo and WotC keep making their plastic minis way too large to fit into 1" squares. This is going to limit me on the scope of the build a little bit, I think. My table that I'll eventually be setting this on is only 4' x 8'. I might have to come up with some creative ways to extend that out beyond 4', though.

For the street level, I've been playing around with a few options in the TLX Planner. Man, it's really frustrating how limiting the road options are within the Himmelveil Streets set. I just want to build a city square at the foot of the steps from the pyramid.

(I'm not aiming to get the whole pyramid filled out on the inside right away 'cuz this is a rather large project already)
Option 1:

Option 2:


Not sure which one I like more, but these are 2 of the best ones I've come up with so far.

I like the 2nd one. Nice work!

O.o ooo la la !
What a project!

...and (if I am interpreting your plan correctly) I just realized your topside castle is 3' x 3'. This thing really is HUGE!

Well, the pyramid base is 4' x 4' and will be 4 levels. So, that should make the base of the castle 2' x 2'. That's honestly not as big as I'd like. The thing really working against me here is that I'm using 1.5" squares, sadly. The actual maps of it are roughly 25 five foot squares on each side. There's a LOT of wasted space in that layout, though, so I can probably manage to fit it into 2' x 2'. I'm thinking I maybe can squeeze in another 6" each direction on the pyramid base so I've got another 6" each direction for the castle. I'm not 100% sure yet.

Ah! I was counting the 1st level open space...

Sorry, I didn't indicate how many levels I was going to have for the pyramid itself.

Great progress so far and it is shaping up to be an amazing build!

I got rough cuts of the foamcore for the pyramid done last night.

Tonight, I'm planning on doing the final cuts of those. I'm not enthused to do so, though. Because I'm using that FlexIron stuff on my foamcore, it requires more force to cut through and dulls blades more easily than foamcore alone. So, it really ends up being work and it's rather hard on my hands.

You are seriously productive! I am envious.

Personally, I have been lacking motivation and am instead enthralled with the Bones 3 Kickstarter.

I'm honestly really bad at maintaining momentum on a cardstock project. Most of those slanted exteriors were done over the last couple of months. I'm hoping that maintaining this thread and my progress keeps me motivated.

Anyways, I've been busy this week with sessions playing through The Emerald Spire in PFS mode, so I haven't gotten much done. A word of warning for anyone else who is going to play it: levels 1 - 9 feel easy and short--too short for a whole module. Level 10 is where hard mode starts. We had 1 PC die--not once, but TWICE--on level 10. We just finished level 11 and we thought 1 encounter was going to be a TPK for sure.

Oh, and let's see... I finished cutting out all that foamcore. (well, I still gotta cut out the notches for my magnets, but I gotta give my hands a rest) I had to take some time to refresh the Krylon Easy Tack on my carrier sheets for my robocutter. I'm so glad that I gave up on using cardstock for carrier sheets and went to using cheap, plastic folders. Starting on the posts that still remain:

I've been surprisingly busy with other stuff lately, but I finally got some work done on this. I've got all the magnets glued into my posts now. Just need to glue those bottoms on the posts. (photos all turned out surprisingly crappy)


I also spent some time finishing up cutting the notches in my foamcore for magnets. Got about 1/4 of them done tonight. Realized that my template for magnets is off center on the short sides of the 3x6s, though. Gotta fix that this weekend.

Excellent stuff Ninevah. Keep up the good work.

Frank

Glad to see someone being so productive, when I sure havent been. Looking good!

I made some good progress this weekend. Got the notches for magners on about 2/3 of my tiles cut out now. Hoping to finish the rest in the next day or two.

I got all my 4-way posts for the pyramid glued up, as well. Should have the pyramid done by the end of this week, I hope. (Aside from the stairs and a few walls. I think I'm gonna kitbash the default stairs to make them seem like they're one big continuous set of steps, rather than having breaks at each floor.)

I really like what you've done! Your magnet bottomed posts were a direction I thought long and hard about.

That is really cool... I keep meaning to read that adventure path but I never have gotten around to it.

Those players will almost NEVER take that expected (GM-desired) left turn at Alberquerque!

I finally have the notches for magnets on all my foamcore tiles cut out. And I just finished the last of my posts:



I'm going through cutting out the fridge magnets that I'll put on the tiles and the TLX wrappers. It's so nice to be able to do that with my robocutter. I'm hoping this works well. It should allow me to re-use the tiles and magnets with other sets I build. It's especially worthwhile for something like Pharaoh's Descent, which I will probably not re-use that often in the future. And that should save me a lot of the cost of those magnets, which really adds up.

I've already started playing around with modifying other sets to come up with an evil-looking keep. (it doesn't have a curtain wall according to the maps, so it's not technically a castle) And I'm really liking what I stumbled across tonight. It'll take a bit more work, but it's some some real promise.

Looking at all those posts and how much work goes into making them ... yeah, glad I moved away from that!

To be honest, it's not even as much work as the original TLX posts and anchors. I know, that's not exactly saying much. If you can skip posts completely, you save A LOT of work.

@Ninevah - looking at your last pic reminded me of the Chinese terra cotta army...

I've been rather unmotivated the last couple of weeks, sadly. It seems the home games that I GM always messes with my momentum. I'm finally gaining steam, though. Should have the tiles for the pyramid all glued within the next day or so. I

ended up giving up on the idea of using refridgerator magnet material to make the wrappers swappable. It would sort of work, but it seems that the sheets of magnetic material tends to actually have magnets positioned only in certain spots along its surface. So, when 2 pieces of it would come together, they won't necessarily stick together in the position you want. Though shaped exactly the same, they might insist upon being 1/8" or 1/16" offset. This just created more and more frustrations, so I'm giving up on it.

Ever wanted to see a picture of $400 worth of magnets? Well, here you are:


Yes, that's really $400 worth. I figured I'm gonna need them all in this build, so I may as well buy them at the best rate. I'm thinking I might want to go to a little cheaper magnets in the future, though. Might be fine switching to smaller and weaker ones. Or going with another company that sells them a little cheaper, even if they only sell in bulk.

I tried it, but it really didn't work well. It makes the tile a little too thick for the standard 1/4" thick wrapper and the bond between them isn't strong enough to hold it--especially with the additional pulling from it being too thick. I considered stripping the 1st layer of paper off of the foamcore to save a little space, but then it starts becoming more work than it's worth, I think.

I've been looking at this: http://www.hobbylinc.com/htm/k+s/k+s87163.htm

It might be a stronger magnet/metal bond than magnet/receptive sheet.