D&D Arena Board 2

This is the second of the two D&D Arena boards I built for the charity event, this one being my suggestion - somehow the word 'lava' popped into my head and I just had to build a lava board. Unfortunately, it didn't see any use in the event as they ran short on time, but it ended up as a prize for one of the winners, so hopefully it will see some use still.

The design considerations were the same as with the previous board, so I ended up with a design that is geometrical and symmetrical. the paths linking the corner islands to the central island are set differently to break up the symmetry a little.

The lava texture was from an image I found on google image, and the "land" texture are once again from Heroic Maps, this time their Volcanic Fields set. The printed maps were glued onto 5mm cork sheets, which are then roughly trimmed, and the exposed edges then painted with a dark brown paint, followed by a dry-brush with a lighter shade of brown.

My original intention was to have the whole board being flat, but some error in the alignment resulted in the central island being too big to fit. I tackled the problem by stacking a smaller cork square under it, thus elevating it a little above the pathways - as it turned out I think this added character to the board.

To prevent characters from having lines-of-sight to each other at the start of the game, I made some rock pillars (from the same 5mm cork sheets) and set them such that when the characters from the same team are placed vertically opposite each other, the characters from opposing teams cannot see each other.

Building these boards had been a fun and educational experience. I had other ideas for arenas, but ultimately the end products had to be something that were visually appealing, yet unambiguous and easy to use, without undue bias to either a melee- or missile-based character.