Building the build: Waterborn

First off a huge thank you to my Patreon supporters, players, and community friends who encourage me to tell stories, create worlds, and make games! 💖

It was such a delight to get to take over my big table for two weeks to make, document, and enjoy the Waterborn build. If you can add a cafe table into your home, I strongly encourage it. Sometimes it’s the little game table that doesn’t interfere with dining, but sometimes it takes all table duties for a while as something big and wonderful happens.

My June 2022 build served many purposes:

• the setting for June playtests of Our Magic
• first big test of my new terrain organizational system (spoiler: great success!)
• first build since my Dwarven Forge Wildlands pledge arrived
• illustration for world-building blog post
• relief from ongoing situation of not getting to actually travel much because of the pandemic
• giving me a chance to document my build process in detail
• just dang fun

For the playtest I wanted to feature the Nymion and Davur cultures. I knew I had the pieces I would need to build multiple buildings of their cultural style. The most logical place that draws on both is the point where the Mirror Nymioni and First Nymioni regions adjoin, which is at the base of major mountains where they transition down to fertile plains. So, I needed stone elevation, a variety of trees reinforcing the idea of elevation changes and an expanse of green suggestive of a transition toward farmland. But, because I don’t have any actual farmed field pieces, not the farms themselves.

To emphasize the elevation and play with big new pieces, I decided to feature a waterfall from the mountain and to make it the start of a river.

I placed some of my sturdy steel DIY terrain trays along the side edge to help avoid any shifting or slumping in the slight gap there (caused by the trim board at the base of the wall). The waterfall base and river are a tour of the eras of Dwarven Forge water surfaces. I love the new Wildlands one so much, though, that I’ll get at least one more of those when and if the chance comes.

At the top right I placed those dirt textures with the intention of showing a typical Kabalor road, with two lanes separated by useful trees from which travelers can gather fruit, nuts, or sticks. The outer edges tend to be field boundaries, which sometimes have trade points where items can be left when picking up produce or stones cleared from the field. But it wasn’t much farther along at all that I remembered I don’t have fruit trees as such and that indicating the cart lanes would take so many of my bank pieces that I might not be able to suggest the river edge and the transition to the settlement in the way I was hoping. The road wouldn’t be in this build.

In the corner is the classic Dwarven Forge big riser / box piece, atop and around which I fiddled around with risers, embankments, and (because I didn’t intend to use them later) Con-Cave Escarpments to create the appropriate height to support the layers of the waterfall. The waterfall pieces are translucent, so I used a water terrain tray under them.

You can see on the right side side of the table the old cave water outflows which I brought out just in case they might be useful, but which didn’t fit in and so weren’t used on this build.

Note here how completely perfect the Tiered Straight Cliff (piece ER-701) is as a base for the old style waterfall pieces from the Wicked Cavern Pack:

In my builds I find there’s one feature that takes some puzzling to get properly placed, and once it’s in, then the rest flows from there, either through what it inspires, or the issues it creates which need to be covered up. For this build it was the waterfall.

It’s at this stage a problem that plagued me for the rest of the build is easy to see. I thought if I gave my base layer a little forward extension off the front of the table, it would be helpful for photography. But I didn’t realize, even as I was having to contort myself not to bend that paper Paizo map corner, that I couldn’t comfortably reach the back of the table. This turned out not to be a short-term waterfall building issue, but a hassle for the entire build. Test your reach at the very start.

I also noticed on that paper Paizo mat’s illustration a great place where there could be a worn down area by the end of the bridge, and that is why the bridge was initially positioned there. A little muddy spot where animals balk before being led over the bridge. 😃 Little moments like this are such a pleasure in doing a build, even if the story changes later.

One thing I did do right at this stage was bring out the little cup of greenery inserts for the small square cutouts in the Escarpment pieces. Popping these in before placing the pieces definitely was the easiest way to do it and helped the look of the build more than you’d expect for their size. (I actually left these in for storage since I rarely if ever expect to use those square cutout holes.)

Four minutes after the shot of the table above, the whole waterfall structure is in place.

By now I am working from specific terrain trays, with one with lots of Embankment pieces seen on the chair beside the table.

A key part of the mountain area is that it is the connection to the rest of the Mirror Nymion region, so there needs to be a trail. The new Wildlands Winding Stair Escarpments Left and Right are perfect with the Mountain Jumpy Stone as a bridging piece and various other small bits filling in the top left of the lower stairs piece.

Over the course of that evening I made little bits of further progress in between other activities. Extending the uplands was fairly obvious at the start—get the most wooded area of tree stumps in there—but then I found myself with some puzzling to do about how to bring the leading edge down to the riverbank while leaving myself enough big Escarpment pieces to cover some of the back (north) of the build.

Cleaning up the edges and committing to that raised section of forest clearing at the front left helped, so that 15 minutes later I could see that I would be able to make this work, but not quite how yet.

So many problems still to solve.

Knowing I had a limited number of Embankment pieces I began a series of experiments, feeling my way along the northern border—all stretched on my tiptoes to place the pieces and having to make sure I didn’t lift the terrain tray with those big magnets if I moved something. Awkward. My regret for the extended front edge was firmly in place, but I was so pleased with the waterfall I didn’t want to take it apart and start over to fix the problem. So another hour and a half later—probably with a break in there to rest my feet but also with a lot of back and forth—I had something that was finally starting to look decent.

I was ill for a few days then and so it was four days later before I felt well enough to return to the build. I worked on the north half of the cascade from forest to riverbank and lots of clean-up along the upland edge in the foreground. Plus I fit in a few conifer trees to see which problem areas on the mountain I could cover that way. And I puzzled back and forth until I got a good workable base for something beside the waterfall. Definitely took some reworking to make the best use of my remaining Escarpment pieces.

It felt so nice to get into a delightful flow state, laying the river edges. I LOVE negative space builds! Get yourself some banks and you’ll be a happier builder.

Working with banks also helps to sort out ideas from earlier in the build. Now that the logical trail through the forest to the mountain trail was obvious, I could see that the bridge needed to move upstream. That encouraged me to shift the land on the other side of the river to the east, making the river widen as it left the mountain and creating a sense of it slowing into a calmer form (outside of its flood season).

I also figured out that the Nymion building on the stony part of the build would be a Magic School. So I finished the rocky plateau at the waterfall base and built that.

It was 12:30am, but a great place to end the night.

The next morning, the day before the playtest where I planned to use an image of the build to set the scene, I kept my priorities in order in the morning and finished up the rest of the essential playtest prep. After lunch I fit in a little area definition work on the build and the land began to look more realistic.

Worth remembering that Titanstooth Base has protruding pieces that can be used in combination with pieces on the level below to soften a straight edge, as I’m doing in the left foreground here.

Without the trees in place you can clearly see the forest trail that goes through the Cave Mouth piece (here used just as an arch) and onward to the base of the winding stairs up the mountain.

Many seams coming together creates some challenges in how to minimize the unreality. Here’s an example of mixing Edge, Bank, and Scatter pieces to help the eye focus on details of landscape rather than construction:

My one disappointment with Wildlands is with the teardrop inserts (and I have little doubt Dwarven Forge feels the same). Their plan for these to fit in place was good and the prototypes they showed looked great, but the problems of production during a pandemic and global shipping crisis just kept this quality control issue from being solvable. I won’t buy more of the pieces with these cutouts and will remember I need to use the ones I have only in good spots for dropping a hedge, big boulder, tree base, or similar disguising piece. On the bright side, the inserts themselves are handy as larger flat boulders or soggy swamp hummocks (depending on their style).

As I hoped, though, the Wildlands pieces blend extremely well with my existing collection. And support my general style of making it look more natural by mixing things together.

I got pretty sneaky with my little cliff ledges over by the waterfall too, hiding a hole and breaking up an edge by tilting one on its side so the points stick up next to the cavern bank I’m using there.

By 6pm the day before my playtest, the left side of my build was pretty well blocked out and the right, where I intended to locate buildings in a field was looking quite manageable.

By 11:17pm, having done other things in much of the evening, I’d positioned the buildings:

Mix of buildings here. The two round, rural buildings on the raised ground at front left are some “primal hut” I got off eBay and a smaller one which was part of the WizKids ‘Jungle Shrine’ set. The one on the low ground is a truly gorgeous resin Iron Age roundhouse from the now gone Steepled Hat Studios. Wish I’d found their beautiful stuff before their final sales. 🥲

In the back is a Dwarven Forge stone City Builder house (using the special double posts to make it wide). The round stone Davur houses on the other side of the river are small and large DF towers, mostly, though one of them has a ground floor made out of four curved resin dungeon walls pushed together.

Knowing it’d be easier to see and work with minor structural details before the trees were in, when I got up in the morning I jumped into figuring out the main pieces around the buildings and along the perimeter by the (real) wall behind them. I’m working from the principle that the wind comes off the mountain when its coldest, so many buildings have a partial wall behind which animals can shelter—a great use for ruined wall segments.

I’m very pleased about how the bramble hedge helps with the back line of the build. Liked that enough to order another set of them.

Even with just a few trees and some edges the rising ground is looking much more acceptable, and most all of the scatter hasn’t even come out yet.

I took a close shot of how I made those cool stairs to the second floor of the public house partly for you, dear reader, but also so I would be able to build them again if I’m back in a Davur area that has flooding.

Having created a local architectural style, I created a similar but less grand version for the house just to the west.

There’s a shrine here too, but I forgot to mention it in my writeup. It’s to The Stronghold, a patron particularly of Nymioni, but of interest to anyone hoping to hold up against bad weather.

I don’t actually own enough ‘small curved wall with a door in it’ pieces, so I did a sly little thing using a Dungeon Vaulted Door Corner Wall. Didn’t worry about how to do the porch yet since I wasn’t sure what would be in front of the building if anything.

12 more minutes was enough time to swap the tray I was working from, bring out the trees, put root extensions into the water, and start roughing out which trees go where. Always better to do this by setting them down rather than fitting them on the bases since something always changes by the end.

Through the middle of the day I kept swinging back to do a bit more tree assembly between finishing up any non-build-related playtest prep.

The build is getting closer to usable after I found the roof tops for the light colored buildings and added edges to soften the back right corner of the build.

That yellow roof, though, is just unacceptable. It’s not haying season and even then it shouldn’t be that yellow.

70 minutes before time to open Zoom for my playtest and I solved that problem.

One hour of frenetic activity and I was able to finish the build in time to take the photos five minutes before game. My new storage system made this work beautifully. With the trees on the table, only a few other trays needed to come out to be drawn from. It was super easy to have the tray beside the table, pick and place, then swap that tray back onto its shelf for the next one.

New rule: no placing trees without looking at them edge on to make sure the trunks don’t have gaps. Of course it would be the conifer delicately balanced in the hardest to reach spot on the build! The fix for that at this point is to take photos from a slightly different angle.

Lesson from that last picture is to always do something to cover up the ends of elevation if I can, otherwise I’ll need to cover them with a label on the photo in the world building blog post. Photos aren’t going to have gap-hiding curved edges unless I make them in photo-editing software.

Even with a rush at the end I did not find I needed to go back to do any other additions after the playtest. The storage system did a great job letting me work fast when I needed to and still achieve a great build.

In those couple minutes before the players joined I duplicated a couple shots, cropped them down, and was able to use them as my Zoom background and to show players where the story was taking place. The visual helped them lean into character creation in a new game and a new world with a lot more confidence.

When it came time to clean up the build a week and a half later, my storage system again showed its value. Working from the last to the first this time, I would bring out a tray, put into it what belonged there, and put it away on its shelf.

One big improvement that came up during this build cycle was realizing it was hard to remember which trays fit on which shelf when I had multiple trays pulled at once, so I added numbers to the trays and the shelves. Much simpler now!

I’m very pleased with my Wildlands investment. The variety of trees, ground, water, and rock, plus the many ways to work from negative builds over flat terrain or atop other terrain are going to let me illustrate lots of places I hope to show.

Along with deciding to get more of the bramble hedge (unpainted) for its fabulous back-edge-of-build properties, I decided one more Large Tree Pack (painted, for consistency) would give me the lushness of forest I’ll need for some other builds I have in mind. Having seen how well the small round buildings work, I also am getting one more Small Tower Roofs Pack (unpainted, to make it light stone color). And this build demonstrated to me once again that you can never have enough lumpy little boulders, so I’m getting the Mountain Rock Scatter Pack (unpainted).

I didn’t track exactly how much time the rest of the putting away took, but it was entirely reasonable compared to the old nightmare of putting stuff away then realizing something else that should go with it, but doesn’t quite fit and rearranging, ad infinitum.

Is the system perfect? No. But look at how little stuff got missed from being packed into its proper tray:

In future I won’t do a full build breakdown like this, instead just featuring tricky problems and how I solved them, interesting piece combinations, or other things that are distinctive about the build. (Though next time I will do a little extra documentation of the post-trees part of the building since I was rushed this time.)

The build has been extremely well received and I’m very grateful to everyone who has shared their thoughts and questions! It’s really encouraging me to start planning another, maybe for the end of July or mid-August.

As someone who does not draw well, it’s great to have this way to illustrate my worldbuilding and share it with the world.

And, yes, I had a fabulous time doing this build! It was a joy to make and to live with for its time in my place. Every time I passed through the main room of my apartment I took a little trip to Waterborn with its lovely waterfall.