Note: This article is an update from the original published in June 2010 and offers recommendations for the ongoing Dwarven Forge Dungeon of Doom Kickstarter.
One of the interesting things about the hobby of Dungeons & Dragons is the extreme range of the cost to play. Essentially, this range goes from zero to almost infinity. I'd estimate that the average is about $100 for players and $200 for DMs, though.
We'll be talking more about how to play D&D for nothing (or very cheap) in the future. This article, however, goes the other direction; into one of the higher potential costs in our hobby: 3D terrain. In particular, we'll be looking at the best 3D terrain available for tabletop fantasy gaming: Dwarven Forge.
The Dungeon of Doom Kickstarter
At the time of this writing, Dwarven Forge has launched their fifth Kickstarter for the Dungeon of Doom and it includes many of the core pieces I recommend in this article. Getting these pieces through Kickstarter is the most cost effective way to pick these pieces up. Later in this article we have a recommendation list of items from this Kickstarter for those who don't yet have any Dwarven Forge pieces.
Other Wallet-Friendly Options
A solid set of Dwarven Forge dungeon pieces runs about $300 to $500 on the low end. If this cost is too high, there are many more affordable options for D&D battle maps. Take a look at our Battle Map Comparisons guide or, if you want to go really cheap, consider running combat in the theater of the mind. In my opinion, Theater of the Mind is the most cost effective and flexible way to play D&D and doesn't cost a penny.
A Single viewpoint from Nine Years of Experience
This review comes from about nine years of experience with Dwarven Forge products, including products from all four of their previous Kickstarters and a bunch of their resin-based products before they came up with Dwarvenite. Its based on its use at hundreds of games, most at home but some at local game shops as well.
However, these experiences are really just a single view. Our recommendations here fit a particular philosophy and that philosophy may be very different for other collectors. Our goal for this guide is to focus on the most useful, versatile, cost-effective, and easy to set up pieces. We can break this down into two other ideas:
Get big pieces that matter.
Focus on a few versatile pieces and get a lot of them.
Many other collectors enjoy building out very large arrangements with lots of amazing details. Roads, sewers, houses, and hamlets; Dwarven Forge sells products for all of these areas and they look amazing. This variety comes with a cost beyond money though. It also comes at the cost of space (this stuff takes up a lot of room) and versatility ("nah, the sewers sound nasty. Maybe we'll go somewhere else."). Good solid dungeon pieces, however? We can use these things just about anywhere.
A Focus on the Dungeon
For this article we're primarily going to focus on the core dungeon sets. Dwarven Forge also makes excellent cavern and city sets along with a castle set that will soon be available on their website and was the focus of their 2015 Kickstarter. These sets are wonderful but not as versatile as the core dungeon sets. Dungeon walls fit just about anywhere but castle walls really only work with castles, towns, and the like.
Core Pieces
The original Dwarven Forge Kickstarter focused on three primary components: the wall, the floor, and the corner. With enough of these three pieces we can make a nearly infinite variety of rooms, passages, and corridors. We can build small rooms inside of bigger rooms or rooms with walls that act as cover. Though it seems like these three pieces alone wouldn't be enough, we can do a lot with them. How many is enough? Probably two to three sets with a minimum of 12 corners, 28 walls, and 24 floors. That's enough to build out two or three big rooms or three to five smaller rooms with halls and passages and the like.
I'm going to add two more core components to this list of primary pieces: cubes and large floors.
One major advantage of Dwarven Forge is the added dimension of height. We can make this even better by using things like 2" cubes to elevate parts of our dungeons including platforms, altars, sniper positions, and other interesting parts that stick up from the flat floor. The two-inch Dwarven Forge cubes are perfect for this. The Dungeon of Doom Kickstarter includes a 15 cube add-on pack. Otherwise, the only way to get these cubes is as part of the Dwarven Forge Caverns set which look more naturally formed than what we might want in a dungeon.
Bigger floors are also a wonderful and useful piece for building rooms quickly. The 4x6 floors work very well to fill out a room or build a platform.
With walls, corners, 2x2 floors, large floors, and 2 inch cubes; we can built all sorts of amazing halls, rooms, and chambers with elevated platforms, altars, and interesting places for our characters to explore.
A Kickstarter 5 Dungeon of Doom Shopping List
If one is just getting into Dwarven Forge, the Dungeon of Doom Kickstarter is a great way to get into it. The fine folks at Dwarven Forge have this guide for new customers that gives an excellent overview of the Kickstarter and the Dwarven Forge pieces themselves including solid recommendations for new backers.
Here are my own personal recommendations:
Zaltar's Gameroom: Lots of neat pieces including big 2x4 doors and archways and a 4x4 floor. Neat light-up wall pieces with both torches and green glowing snake things, a very cool throne, and lots of other small accessories. This counts as the "level 1" dungeon so it gets you some stretch goals and avoids the $10 fee for going add-on only.
2x Classic Dungeon Remastered Set: A good price for the classic pieces. 30 walls, 16 corners, and 30 floors is enough to build out a lot of great rooms and hallways. You won't fill out an entire table but you can build two or three great chambers or a bunch of smaller ones.
Large Floors: A big 8x8 floor and four 4x4 floors. Hard to say whether its better to get the marble ones or the red ones. If you can afford both, you'll have a LOT of great floors.
Epic Stairs: Nice big stairs that let characters clearly move from one level to another. These will see a lot of use.
Large Curved Walls: Big walls to drop down and build a big room really quickly. This isn't a must-have either but they'll probably see a lot of use if we get them.
Spacer Cubes: An elevation add-on pack includes 15 cubes designed with dungeon bricks and red pillars. These are perfect for standing up platforms, altars, or other multi-level dungeons.
Elevation Platform: A cool way to elevate a huge part of the dungeon to build a two-level huge chamber. Also looks like a great way to transport your stuff around in between games. A bit on the pricey side so more of a nice-to-have. This is somewhat of an unknown.
There are lots of other great options in this Kickstarter as well, including the incredible Forsaken Temple pieces, but above we focused on the main pieces to build the widest range of dungeon chambers. They're intended to be versatile and easy and quick to set up. Keep in mind that new add-ons are released every day so its worth checking the Kickstarter to the last minute to see what looks good.
Filling Out the Dungeon With Flair
Filling out our dungeon rooms with cool accessories will really make them unique and fantastic. Dwarven Forge themselves have wonderful light-up accessories to fill out a room but we can also pick these up as Reaper Bones or even model train or aquarium accessories. Recently Wizkids Pathfinder and Dungeons & Dragons miniatures have started including dungeon accessories and decorations as well which can sometimes be picked up on the secondary market.
Like our philosophy of focusing on important versatile pieces, we can choose the accessories we're likely to use a lot. Here's a short example list:
- Braziers (light-up ones are great).
- Sarcophagi
- Altars
- Statues (unpainted miniatures work great)
- Decorated Pillars
- Floor Runes and Glyphs (cardboard or plastic dungeon tiles work well)
One good rule of thumb for picking up accessories is to ask "can the characters actually do something with this?" If its merely decoration, we can probably skip buying it, but if its something that characters can actually interact with, or something that will interact with the characters, that can be a nice aid to pick up.
Unpainted miniatures can make for great statues to fill out a dungeon as well.
Mixing Our Media
One great way to make the most use out of Dwarven Forge is to mix it with our 2D battle maps as well, such as Paizo's Pathfinder Flip Mats. We can use four corner pieces to make a small 3D building on a town map, for example, or use the elevation blocks to build a small ziggurat in the center of a forest. With a four-inch piece of card board we can build square towers out of corner and wall pieces. We can use some 2" blocks and floors to build an elevated platform on one part of the map. Even just throwing out some wall pieces onto a battlefield can add some interesting cover for characters to hide behind.
Not a Necessity but a Wonderful Aid
Our Kickstarter recommendation above runs about $500. That's not cheap. If this is outside of your price range, fear not. When we think about the joy we get playing D&D, accessories like Dwarven Forge can definitely add to the experience but they aren't required. We can have a whole lot of fun playing D&D with hand-drawn maps on a flip mat or even completely in the Theater of the Mind. We're also not including the high cost of miniatures in any of this discussion; thats a whole other topic.
That said, for people who are really into this hobby of ours and have the income to spend on things like this, there is no better tabletop dungeon accessory than Dwarven Forge.