NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="thedungeondelver" data-source="post: 5265302" data-attributes="member: 34865">Hirst Arts is nice; I have a tower someone gave me once upon a time, and someone else was kind enough to build and paint for me (thanks Gregg and Scott, in that order).Before I decided what gaming terrain to buy, I looked at a lot of things, and tried some.Flat "battlemaps" are...meh, okay, but at that point I might as well be drawing it by hand on a piece of paper*.Punch out/cut out dungeon stuff looked great...!  But...how many gallons of toner are you going to burn through to get a decent collection?  TSR did a pre-made set that was a bitch to get together...bought two for $2 each at Circus World toys when they were having a clearance sale, and I think I  only ever used them once.Then I looked at Hirst Arts.  That looked like a good choice.  Buy the molds, knock out as many or as much stuff as you want!  All you have to do is pour, and paint.I had some hard thinking to do before I made that leap, though.  How much pouring and painting would I actually do?  Or would I do any?  Would I wind up with a bunch of unused molds and slowly curing dental plaster sitting out here, like so many of my unpainted reaper minis? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" />Ultimately, for me, Dwarven Forge was the way to go.  Yes their stuff is expensive.  Yes, getting even a marginally decent 'crawl going is a serious $ investment...but at the end of the day, I thought, well, this is my hobby.  I don't have a half-built antique car in the garage I tinker with, I don't have a collection of cameras and lenses - my hobby is D&D.Thus I have slowly but surely built up a nice collection of two (well, technically three with the Den of Evil set), the cavernous passages set, both trap sets, underwater stream set, cavern set, lots of furniture, two Floor Sets, two Fantasy Starter sets, and tons of individual pieces.Expensive?  Yes.  Hell yes.  But, would I even have a quarter of this if I'd bought Hirst Arts molds and started rolling my own, like I did back in 2000 when I made that jump?  Hell no.So that's what you have to ask yourself: how much is your time worth?*=I once blew up the map to B2 (in MSPaint!) so that each square was 2"x2", as well as edited out traps, etc. and used that for the gaming surface - in pieces as we went, because the entire thing would have filled the whole game room floor at that scale...)</blockquote>

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