The following picture drew a flurry of “how’d you do it?” questions on Twitter this morning:

In case you don’t recognize the tiles themselves, they come from the old Dire Tombs set of Dungeon Tiles by Wizards of the Coast. The higher platform is an 8×8 tile from that set; the lower platform—slightly hard to see in this particular photo—is a 2×8 tile depicting stairs with the braziers at either end.

To form the columns, I bought a bag of 1″ wooden cubes and 2″ wooden dowels at the Michael’s craft store in my neighborhood. I drilled holes the diameter of the dowels through some of the blocks. Then I inserted dowels into the holes:

I then threaded another wooden block onto the exposed part of the dowel to form a pillar 1″ square by 2″ tall. I used a dowel instead of glue so that I could pull off the base to form a column 1″ tall as needed.

The little white clips are cord organizer clips manufactured by 3M. I found mine on the hardware aisle at Target. The gap in these clips is just right for lightly securing tiles the thickness of WotC’s Dungeon Tiles. They come with double-sided self-adhesive strips. I used these strips to attach the clips to the wooden blocks that would form the tops of the columns.

And that’s pretty much it! I just slid the cips onto the appropriate tiles and arranged the whole scene on the table. Simple, cheap, effective.

During week of July 11–17, 2010, I reviewed the following products for DriveThruRPG:

• D100 Discoveries Series: Temple, Castle, and Wilderlands Vol. 1 by Jarrod Camiré for Zodiac Gods. If you take this product’s name as an indication that you’ll get a list of 100 possible discoveries for your fantasy RPG, think again; you’ll actually get 600 possible discoveries, since the product presents six different tables of 100 discoveries each. (Read more at DriveThruRPG.) ★★★
• d66 Objects Orbiting a Planet by Dale C. McCoy, Jr. for Jon Brazer Enterprises. Of necessity, perhaps, this particular table offers a bit less variety than you might at first expect from a list of 36 options. Over 1/3 of the entries are ships of one kind or another, and a similar number are artificial satellites. (Read more at DriveThruRPG.) ★★★
• Gamescapes Story Maps: The Crypt of Darkness by Jason Engle and Aaron Acevedo for Savage Mojo. This entry in the Gamescapes Story Maps line strikes me as a bit less creative than some of the others, although it is highly detailed and beautifully drawn. (Read more at DriveThruRPG.) ★★★
• Leather Ancient Army Tents by Billy Bones Workshop. This collection of print-and-build tents gives you three sizes in each of two scales (28mm and 15mm). (Read more at DriveThruRPG.) ★★★★
• Poisoncraft for D&D 4E: The Codex Venenorum by Justin Jacobson for One Bad Egg, now distributed by Highmoon Media. If you want to add a comprehensive and robust yet elegant rules subsystem to deal with poisons in your D&D 4e campaign, you can’t do better (as far as I know at the time of writing this review), than the 4e version of One Bad Egg’s “Poisoncraft.” (Read more at DriveThruRPG.) ★★★★★