How can you get them to stay down on the table is my problem! All card tiles have the problem that they move around too much.
An alternative for sticking things down: Post-It Glue sticks. I do a lot of stuff with cardstock terrain (think really heavy paper folded to make 3D buildings, etc.). They've got little props, things like chairs, tables, bookshelves, etc. that are easily knocked aside when people are moving their figs. I rub this stuff on the bottom, however, and they hold up to any casual bumping. I can still pick them up easily, no muss, no fuss.
I have some tiles, but I must confess I dont really use them- when building my own maps it feels.. wrong, kinda, to have to build based on what tiles I have. It seems limiting. How do people get around that? Are they primarily good for pre-made adventures, or is there a trick to making adventures using tiles instead of on a battlemat/1inch graph paper?
I've posted about this company elsewhere, but I'll repeat the gist for those who are interested. The cardstock terrain I use comes from a company called
WorldWork Games that sells folders of .pdf files so you can print out as little or as much of the terrain you want, and it's modular so you can build your encounter as you like. Most of their stuff is designed for doing 3D buildings, etc, but they've got one set called
DungeonLinx 2.5D that's for doing up dungeons with tiles (and the occasional simple 3D prop like doors and a dragon). If you want an 800' corridor, go ahead, print out that much, once you've spent the $17 for the files, the only real cost is ink from your printer (or your work printer
), paper, and if you want to, glue to stick it to some hard backing like foamcore/matboard/cereal box cardboard.
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Most of their sets, however, have ground tiles, and for those of you looking for good outdoor stuff, they've a set called
ExteriorWorks: Hinterland that has a bunch of grass, road, and river "tiles" Even if you don't do any of the 3D stuff (hills, cliffs, bushes, and trees you can put figs in!), you could easily cover a 30x40 outdoor scene with high resolution (300 dpi) good looking terrain. The time investment is only cutting off the margin from the paper and the drying time for whatever you use to glue the stuff down to any backing.
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They've a ton of stuff suiting all sorts of genres (if you go to their site, make sure you check out their horror stuff, most of it is readily useable for fantasy games). If you choose to do the 3D stuff, it can take some time investment to build up your "stock" of pieces (luckily for me, not a lot of talent if you can cut a straight line with a ruler and x-acto knife), but they can be reused for all sorts of encounters. I've been re-using a bunch of the same buildings for my RHoD game, just rearranging them, sometimes making them 1 story small buidings, other times making them into multi-story, multi-room mansions or town halls.
