Strahd’s Castle: It's all about the base (coat)

The Strahd’s Castle series

The party are heading through Barovia to tackle Strahd in his domain.  I had an idea that I would try to enhance this process by crafting out Strahd’s castle, layer by layer, in map form….I didn’t really think this through before I started.  I thought it might be nice to have the floorplan premade for when they arrive and believed I had the time to do it whilst they explored Barovia.  

The party I DM are slow progressors, I know that with several main floors and even more smaller ones, they will take a few weeks, possibly months to make their way through the castle to achieve their objective or die.  Little did I know that the same sentiment might apply to me creating it.

I am now quite a way through but it has been a hard slog, I have only crafted the floor layout of the individual rooms, base coated with mod podge and for some i have also added the base layer.  This evening I finished a coat of stone grey on the floor of the dungeon and started questioning my life choices.  This was after crafting the three half height walls of each of the 32 crypts.  Each set of three walls is held together by two nails, glued down to the base board and held there by a third nail.  The baseboard has been drawn out and grey mod-podged. Each set of three walls has been carved out with a pencil and grey mod-podged.  This evening I joined them all together and painted a grey layer over all.  It was tedious, very tedious.  I have to keep reminding myself that tedium comes before interesting.  

I have been  interspersing the tedium with creating items of scatter terrain, none of which are finished yet.  Over the last two evenings I started a pipe organ in between grey base coating of the floors.

I am at that stage in the creating process where everything looks bad, the badness before the good….hopefully, we will see what fire rises out of the woodpile.