This shot is from the end of our game last Thursday night. The Urdesh bard, Shashi, has just finished off an errant water elemental on the island in the center. Their companions, the Kamion sorcerer/motivational speaker Paklehm and the Shafor warlock Asteh with her mastiff mount Ludo, are visible further to the right back of the island. The party had successfully rid the area of the other two elementals by polymorphing them into clams and having Paklehm and Asteh’s bird familiars fly them far away to be dropped from a great height into the sea.
In the foreground you can see three electric candles, used to remind spellcasters and me as GM that there are concentration spells going on: the two Polymorph spells and Shashi’s illusion of the fire, keeping the water elementals away from the tree shrine in the center. (Those candles were a great idea I got from Lance, one of the players in my former Monday night campaign, in which we tested the Kabalor world with rapid leveling up. His super-chilled-out Duan monk, Shay, reached 20th level and became an emissary of the eminence The Dreamlands.)
So, how did I create this build? And what’s involved here?
In the previous session, a tsunami had struck the coast and the party rescued people in a village at the point where a good size river comes to the inland sea. That great wave pushed up the river and then up the stream leading to a very small community of the diminutive Lissami folk in a swampy area. This is a sacred place, home to a shrine to the eminence The River, and—as with many areas where the veil between this world and the planes of the eminences is thinner—prone to outbreaks of wild magic. The wave (itself having arisen from great magic) disrupted one of those strong spots of wild magic and combined it with nascent water elementals to create much larger water elementals that are a threat to people and structures. The couple dozen Lissami of this secluded spot fled in every boat they have, leaving behind their possessions in order to carry with them their beloved capybara mounts, and arrived at the damaged village at the river mouth seeking help. Everyone looked immediately at our heroes and, well, ya gotta answer the call, right?
For this build, therefore, I needed: the stream the party comes up, the boat loaned by the Lissami, the shrine to protect, some village structures, a base swampy region, and the suggestion of more flooding than normal, with difficult terrain pretty clearly identifiable onscreen by my players.
The Ikea Linnmon table where I create my builds is narrow—23.75″ wide—but about 4′ long. In general, I work with low terrain in the foreground and higher in the background and that fits well with this scenario of the players coming upstream. It also works well for broadcast to my players over Zoom. A screenshot from the end of our game gave me this picture which I only cropped and blacked out the corners of for this post. I use my iPhone as camera, this Haitent stand to hold it, and this older Jackery Bolt battery pack to keep it going through the game. (Those Amazon links help support this site through the commission I earn. For everything else I link to, I try to support the maker or my friendly local game store. ❤️)
I searched through my Paizo maps to find something suitable as the foundation layer for this scene and came up with the out-of-print version of the Village Square, the flipside of which had a mix of green and a gravelly gray suitable to represent water. (Paizo has since switched to roofed and unroofed views of the village on that map, for which I can’t fault them.) The 3D printed model I wanted to use for the shrine, SunForgeGaming’s Place of Power: Sundered Heartwood Tree Shrine, fit nicely in the middle.
With the core plan confirmed as viable, I pulled out my Paizo Marsh Trails Map Pack and filled in the foreground, borrowing a little bit of water from under a bridge from another of their map pack card sets to indicate the stream itself at its transition into the wave-damaged swamp.
As in any terrain setup I’ll be sharing in a long-shot like this, the next step was to establish the horizon. Fortunately, I was able to grow my collection of Dwarven Forge escarpment pieces with a big investment in last December’s restock. The Escarpment Pack, Escarpment Corners Builder, and the Cave Mouth Pack all got involved in building a nice rocky hillside in the back.
To bring the terrain down to the map surface, I used the Dwarven Forge Forest Transition Banks Builder set (also bought in that excellent restock). These represent fairly undamaged land, while my stone banks in cavern paint pieces (1, 2, look like closest listing in the store now) came into use as water-washed or elemental ravaged areas. You can see a triangular piece sitting between Shashi and the pond and at the corner by the larger (for Lissami) building with the brown roof where a water elemental had threatened it before being turned into a clam.
Other Dwarven Forge pieces in play here are a couple large forest floors (Heavy Forest Pack), some forest scatter terrain, my long-sought and much beloved trees (finally back in stock in a shining moment last December after a long wait), and the rowboat. With a waterfall added (from the old Wicked Cavern Pack) in the distance, the visual line of the normal stream is established along the left side of the scene.
Non-Dwarven Forge items filling out the scene include a few styrofoam wargamer hills (mostly for vague horizon greenery plus definition of the creek edge in the foreground) and a resin pond I bought at a gamestore’s flea market day, haystacks from the WizKids Medieval Farm to represent the domes of Lissami reed houses, the roof from the WizKids Jungle Shrine resting on tree stumps from a forest floor section to be their community hall, and some actual dry branch pieces from the yard for flood flotsam. The mushroom ring from the Jungle Shrine set was also in use on the island for marshy ambiance until a water elemental moved through it and destroyed that spot.
On the near center corner of the island is an almost unnoticeable bush which is there to cover up one of the trails in that terrain piece. That Pathfinder Kingmaker Bush, if I recall correctly, I got out of the bits & bobs minis box at Gamescape (my FLGS). Holy cow do I use that thing constantly. All that ranting about “bring me a shrubbery!” makes so much more sense now. Looking forward to additional hedge action coming in Wildlands this year.
During the session the only new thing that came onto the table besides the character, familiar, and elemental minis was fire. First a Major Illusion filling the whole shrine, making it look extremely unappealing to water elementals, played by the Dwarven Forge Wall of Fire Pack. Then a smaller illusion represented by a piece from the WizKids Wall of Fire and Ice set. My completed Monday night campaign featured a Shafor wizard, Nyba of Pvaku, who was a serious fire hazard and my spell effects collection still bears the burn marks.
I hope this visit to a scene in play has been fun for you too!
Our Magic 