This video is brought to you by The Deck of Many
and their Heckna 5e campaign setting book.
Hello and welcome back to the Gallant Goblin.
This week I received the terrain I picked up
during Dwarven Forge’s last Kickstarter
and I thought I would share it with you, as most of
these pieces will be coming to their web store soon.
This set is called Hellscape.
It’s basically a spinoff of their Caverns Deep set
that introduces several new ideas
that I’ll let you know all about.
Now, there’s so much here that I’m going
to split it into a few different videos.
In this video, we’ll just give a brief overview of the
whole set because I want to get this video to you
before their current Kickstarter campaign
comes to an end… um… later today.
Then we’ll do a deeper dive into the various
innovations and standout pieces in this set.
We’ll show you comparisons and
compatibility with other terrain sets,
and we’ll be sure to answer all your questions.
We cover a lot of terrain here at the Gallant Goblin,
and we’ll be covering a lot more going forward.
There’s an option for people at all price points,
but be aware that Dwarven Forge is
one of the highest quality options
but also one of the most expensive sets out there,
but I’ll give you some tips on getting the best bang
for your buck toward the end of this video.
We’ll also take a closer look at Dwarven
Forge’s most recent Kickstarter
and try to draw your attention to
some of the standout pieces,
and I’ll give you my purchasing suggestions.
If it’s already ended by the time you’re seeing this, you
should still be able to get in for the pledge manager
which won’t hit for another month or two.
For now, put on your lava retardant boots
and let’s explore the Hellscape.
Let’s start with a close look at a
few of the basic Hellscape pieces
so you can see the general quality and
level of detail that goes into these.
Dwarven Forge terrain is designed to be modular so you
can mix and match from a small collection of pieces
to make a wide variety of playable spaces.
All the pieces have a subtle one-
inch grid to facilitate game play.
It’s made of a special plastic material
Dwarven Forge calls Dwarvenite
which is quite heavy and feels
a bit like a dense rubber to me.
It’s extremely durable and should last you a lifetime
unless you store it in an actual volcano.
Most of the pieces in this set take existing sculpts from
Caverns Deep and apply a new paint job to them.
The modern Dwarven Forge pieces
also come with embedded magnets
so you can attach them to these
terrain trays, sold separately,
which allow you to make builds ahead of time
and bring the encounter rooms to
your table quickly during the game.
This terrain tray features a magma river, but there are
trays with grass, stone, still water, running water, ice,
the endless void of a bottomless pit, even
a heaping pile of gibbering mouthers.
They have trays with a variety of shapes and designs,
and many of the Dwarven Forge pieces
are designed to show off the tray with what
are called “negative space builds” like this.
One thing to look for if you’re wanting to make negative
space builds are banks or ledge pieces like these,
which subtly shift the floor onto the map itself.
Dwarven Forge usually sells sets of banks or ledge
pieces in various configurations and designs.
The main innovation in this set
is the Dwarven Forge light panel,
which will illuminate a large area of your terrain.
We’re going to go deeper on the
light panels in a future video.
For now, I’ll just tell you that you can daisy chain
them together into various configurations,
with each panel measuring 8 inches by 8 inches.
They plug into the wall and have a
dimmer so you can set the intensity.
Unlike all previous Dwarven Forge terrain,
most pieces in the Hellscape set are made
of this translucent yellow dwarvenite,
which maintains the durability you’re used to with
Dwarven Forge, but which will allow the light through.
The paint on the rocky pieces of the
terrain is opaque, blocking the light,
but the lava is painted with a translucent paint,
so it glows while the light panel is on.
Now, you don’t have to use these pieces on a light panel,
but it does really make them shine, so to speak.
You can also use the panels for negative space
builds by using their "phantasmal filters,"
which we'll talk about in our light panels video, but
these function rather like glowing terrain trays.
The light panels don’t attach to the
magnets in the terrain pieces,
so you’ll want to build these on
your table ahead of the game.
Now, even if you don’t want to
go all in for the light panels,
many of the show pieces in this set come with
built-in LEDs with replaceable batteries.
Here we have the volcano, and then the
trispire and the Cerberus warhound.
These pieces are controlled with little switches on
the side of the piece, or on the bottom sometimes.
There’s only one setting—off and on—so unlike some
of the other systems we’ve looked at recently,
you can’t set these pieces to
flicker with different patterns.
Here you can see a big setup taking
up most of my gaming table.
Again, we’ll be making dedicated videos for
each of these big pieces on the table soon.
Now I’ve mentioned that Hellscape terrain
is expensive… and I wasn’t joking.
I didn’t use every single piece I had for
this build, so it’s hard to know for sure,
but what you’re looking at here, including all the
light panels, probably cost about $1,500 [USD].
I’m hoping to be able to use this set professionally
and recreationally for basically the rest of my life.
Now, you can either purchase new Dwarven Forge
from their annual, or lately semi-annual,
Kickstarter campaigns, or you can
order them from their web store.
Prices do go up once they hit the web store, so
Kickstarter is usually the way to go if you’re able to.
One thing to keep in mind is that Dwarven Forge
does tend to keep its value pretty well over time,
so if you decide to sell it later on, you should
be able to recoup a lot of your money.
I won’t promise that you’ll turn a profit, of
course, but for certain sets, you might…
Now, Dwarven Forge sells their terrain in various sets.
Sometimes it’s by function, like “Hellscape
bank pieces” or “floor packs,”
but they also sell whole encounter rooms.
Let’s take a look at one of those now, as I suspect
you’ll be able to pick up this set of figures,
give or take a couple of pieces, when Hellscape
hits their web store hopefully later this year.
And this is a more affordable way to
start your Dwarven Forge collection.
This set is called the Crucible Chamber
and it contains enough pieces to design a simple room
of various shapes to have a good combat encounter in.
The Crucible Chamber itself was $139 [USD] for the
painted set during the Kickstarter, and $79 unpainted.
Let’s talk briefly about painted
versus unpainted Dwarven Forge.
You can get a lot more bang for your buck
if you purchase your terrain unpainted.
The trick is knowing which pieces
are easily paintable at home.
As I've said many times, I’m as
amateur a painter as they come,
but there are certain sets of Dwarven Forge
that are ridiculously easy and quick to paint,
but there are a lot of others that are definitely not.
Luckily, it’s the main bread and butter pieces that
you’ll probably want a lot of that are easy.
Here’s what unpainted Dwarven Forge looks like.
Anything that’s just using the standard cavern
paint scheme you can easily do yourself.
This entire cavern set here, I painted
all by myself—easy peasy.
Dwarven Forge has a painting tutorial series on
YouTube that will walk you through the process
and they sell their own paint, which is
affordable and extremely easy to use.
If you use their paints and their recent guide videos,
your pieces will match the factory painted
ones, so you can mix and match.
Oh, and, by the way, they do
have transition painted pieces
if you want to move from a standard
cavern to a Hellscape cavern,
or perhaps the resident red dragon has scorched
up the ground with its fiery breath.
The town builder set that you’ve seen a hundred times
here at the Gallant Goblin—I painted that all by myself.
It has a few extra steps but was completely doable.
I painted this whole town set in about a day.
Finally, the standard dungeon paint scheme here is also
very easy to do at home with the official tutorial videos.
If you’re wanting standard caverns, dungeons, or town
pieces, I highly recommend getting them unpainted
unless you have a lot of disposable income.
You’ll be able to get them around 30-40% cheaper.
Now there are some sets that I would not be able
to paint myself, at least not well and easily.
Unfortunately, Hellscape is one of them.
They have tutorial videos for Hellscape paint
schemes, and, well, you can tell by watching it
that a lot of effort does go into painting these
translucent pieces, as you might imagine.
The other set I wouldn’t try to paint myself is the
forest set, which has a ton of tiny details in it.
They do have a tutorial video
for the Dreadhollow Forest set,
and if you’re more ambitious than
I am, you can certainly go for it,
but I don’t think I could match the factory paint
job by myself with the time I have available.
Each Dwarven Forge set comes with a lot of little
scatter terrain and subtly painted pieces as well,
things like daises, altars, and
like the doors you see here.
When I’m deciding what to buy, unpainted versus
painted, I try to look very carefully at each
to see how intricate the paint job is, and
if at all possible, I get them unpainted,
but sometimes it’s worth the extra money just
to get a nice paint job on these small pieces.
Now, it’s often worth just seeing what the difference
in price is between painted and unpainted pieces,
as it’s not a flat percent increase to
get each set or each piece painted.
Sometimes the price increase is almost negligible,
so you might as well get the painted set.
Basically the less complex the paint job is, the smaller
the premium you pay to get them painted for you.
Today, September 2nd, is the last day for the current
Dwarven Forge Kickstarter called Wildlands.
It features three different environments:
the forest, swamp, and mountains.
The forest really expands upon the Dreadhollow
Forest set from last year with more open ground
and opportunities for negative space builds.
The swamp is all about those negative space
builds as well, with a new type of terrain tray
that has a reflective sheen on
top to more resemble water,
plus many dead trees and fantastical swamp plants.
The mountain set lets you really
focus on those vertical builds,
making multi-tiered mountains and valleys,
often utilizing their new battle boards,
which are more substantial and will fit right up
against your existing Dwarven Forge floors.
I’m still here deciding which sets to
pick up myself from the Kickstarter.
One thing I’ve decided though, those
mountain pieces are definitely paintable.
The swamp and forest, again, probably not so much.
They also have some awesome special pieces like
an app-powered light puck with a lot of LEDs inside
that ypi can make some crazy
customizable patterns with.
And then they have several cool toppers for it
to turn it into an oracle pool, a natural
spring, or a magical arcane portal.
They have a small, inexpensive fog machine that you can
put inside a lot of the hollow Dwarven Forge pieces
to give your forest a nice atmospheric misting, which
is a must for your Curse of Strahd campaigns.
They have an awesome modular waterfall
that I’m definitely not getting unpainted,
and there’s a cool little modular bayou
barge with its own LED lantern.
Just an amazing array of fun stuffs, and
that’s not even scratching the surface.
And if you’re watching this video after
the Kickstarter ends, again don’t worry
because they always have that Pledge Manager
stage of the event where you can usually still get in
and make purchases at the Kickstarter prices,
and if you want Dwarven Forge terrain, again, the
Kickstarter and Pledge Manager are the ways to go
because it’s the only way you can be assured
to get exactly the pieces you want.
Not everything gets restocked down
the line in their story, and it’s cheaper.
So man, I want a lot of feedback from you for this video.
What are you planning to get in the
current Wildlands Kickstarter?
What would you like to see from
our Dwarven Forge videos?
We’ll be showing a lot of comparisons to other terrain
sets and how you can use the pieces together,
and we’ll take a critical look at how things
like the light panels work in practice,
because I do have a few mixed feelings about them so
far, but I do need to spend some more time with them.
And what do you think of the Hellscape terrain so far?
You can find the link to the current Dwarven Forge
Kickstarter in the video description down below.
We’ll also put a link to the Dwarven Forge web
store where you can shop around for older sets.
Speaking of Kickstarters, we want to thank our
sponsor for this video, The Deck of Many!
They have a new campaign setting book hitting
Kickstarter next week called Heckna.
Heckna introduces a new carnival
setting called the Revelia,
which has a creepy, mysterious vibe
to it, just like a real life carnival.
The Revelia is overseen by the titular Heckna,
who likes to fright and delight his audience.
With a name like Heckna, I’m assuming he’s
a completely sane and stable ringleader.
The Heckna setting book will include everything
you need to run a campaign in the Revelia
including background lore, location information,
new monsters, new magical items, and more.
To learn more and to sign up to be notified when
the Kickstarter goes live, visit heckna.com.
Look for the Kickstarter launch on September 8th!
Many thanks to you as well for tuning in today.
If you enjoyed the video, kindly leave us
a little thumbs up button down below.
Again, I’m really wanting to hear from you on this video,
so please leave me a comment down there too.
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Otherwise, as always, stay safe, have fun, and
I’ll see you next time at the Gallant Goblin!
