Miniatures:
It al started out when I got a box of that Master Maze stuff on a whim. After a while it sort of became a routine thing to set up a few obstacles, things to hide behind and take cover and such.. Just to make battles more tactically interesting.
Eventually Joel joined the group and he doubled our miniatures resources (most of his stuff is actually plastic monsters and party favors, but they look great when you use scenery).. Joel came up with the walls of fire and the use of synthetic furniture stuffing for clouds and steam.
And it sort of grew from there. Now I have another player building stuff- the wooden watchtower and palisade in the 5th gallery came from another player. The "ice" we used in the battle with the white dragon is just some crupled wax paper we laid down smooth over the playing surface.
Before we started taking pictures we also did an entire waterfall, a battle in a table-top sized graveyard, a ship-to-ship aerial battle that actually took up an entire basement floor (tha twas fun) and several dungeons with master-maze. The dungeon pieces pictured are actually Hirst-Arts molds from Joel.