The Ruined City: New Highrise

Digging through some unfinished terrain projects I stumbled upon a shrink-wrapped TTCombat building I picked up a while back: the Dicington Tower.

This is a pretty cool piece of terrain as it is both another building for the cityscape scenery for Dropzone Commander and a functional dice tower. Being on a heavy Dropzone Commander city building kick, I decided to bust the kit open as a change of pace.

The MDF plates had some issues where the brick-etched pieces and “stairwell” components tended to break or rip detail off during removal process. Lucky for me, I had other plans for the outside of the building.

The actual build was quite easy but two annoying flaws. One was the second level of the inner tower part that helps tumble the dice didn’t actually extend all the way to the wall so in my first few test runs, inevitably a die would get stuck. I used a torn up brick-etched piece to block the gap and fix that.

The second issue was the outer dice exit extended into the way of the chute and more dice would get stuck there two. I use 12mm dice so maybe that is smaller than they anticipated but in a game that can throw 60 dice in a close-quarters attack, using bigger dice would take a lot of separate drops down the tower.

Using the rest of the broken brick piece, I created two angled pieces to help funnel the dice to the exit. Kind of sad that the tower has these two functional flaws (three if you count the fact that TTCombat didn’t make the tower big enough to handle the high volume of dice one can use in the game) but they aren’t insurmountable and you can use the mdf plate scraps to correct it like I did if you want to use all the pieces as intended.

With my fixes in place, I completed the building as far as I was going to go and then primed it black.

I didn’t want to paint the building up or use the 3D extras the kit came with as the building won’t match the paper terrain I’ve been using and prefer. Instead I cannabalized an existing Ruinscape kit building to finish the piece off.

With the exception of the little courtyard wall, all the art is from one short square building from the Ruinscape set. The walls were from the remains of one of the Ruinscape tiles I had messed with for my board.

To really have the paper terrain come out well, I recommend using a black sharpie to black out the exposed white paper you’ll inevitably see after you start cutting the building up. Combining that with the black priming and you have a lot of flexibility in where you want to cut the paper building and the project is more forgiving of mistakes.

With everything complete it was time to roll some dice. The tower works well and looks great on the table now. The whole build (not including primer drying time) was about 4 hours. Most of that time was cutting up the building art and gluing it on (using superglue to speed up that process).