Monday, December 22, 2014

Where should all the Dwarven Forge go?

Between using Virtual Tabletop for gaming on Monday Night, conventions, the game store campaign, and friends now scattered across the United States, I haven't done much gaming at my house for a long time.

For games outside of Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds, this meant I had to find a way of transporting my game room with me. Or more specifically all my miniatures, props, and dwarven forge.

In the past two years I acquired a collection of Dwarven Forge Dungeon , Medieval building set, and most recently Dwarven Forge Cavern. It used to be all I needed was my two milk crates of miniatures and my rolling laptop bag. But now I need to transport my Dwarven Forge as well.

Yeah I know I could run a game without all that claptrap. But this is for when you DO want to run with all that claptrap. Like when you put on a spectacle of a City State erupting in flames.

The calm before the storm

The riot in full swing

The dead


For a while I been relying on a hodgepodge of storage. A combination of a really nice wooden box that my friend +Dwayne Gillingham let me use for a set of dwarven forge style dungeon pieces he made. Along with some of the original DF boxes reinforced with duct table placed in a rolling toolbox I bought. And some other toolboxes I picked up as well.



The Dwarven Forge Cavern pieces were the final straw. I asked Kelly Anne, my wife, to get something the next time she was in Erie. She does hairsticks and other handmade jewelry so she is always in stores that have storage stuff. And she found me these. She got me two sets for four total.


And they are great, ultimately with six of them I was able to store all Three sets of Cavern pieces and addons I bought. Now I wanted more for my existing Dungeon Pieces.

I took advantage this weekend to stop at Target and see what they had.

I found this


And after looking around I found this as well.

After fiddling around I found that the Storage will fit eight of the big Stack and Carry bins in two stacks of four each. I also Found that two of the small Stack and Carry turn sideways is roughly equal in area to a stack of two of the large Stack and Carry. I opted to buy the tote, six large stack and carry, and two small sets of Stack and Carry (three each).

When nested properly it looks like this.


When I got home I found I was able to get all my Dwarven Forge Dungeon pieces in there. In addition I have plastic baggies of what I call my horde miniatures. I lucked out one time when my friend +Daniel McEntee got somebody's collection of plastic DnD miniature in a trade for MtG cards.

In exchange for helping him sort it out, he let me have some of the miniatures he didn't want. This included two dozen twisted demon looking things, two dozen hobgoblin zombies, and two dozen thin undead things. I designated these as my hordes miniature to use when I need to put out a lot of something. They were in a small cardbox box from a Power supply I bought but now they went into one of the small Stack and Carries.

I may buy another set like above and some foam trays  and try to get everything into two storage totes.

The pricing on this from Target was

$10 for the Storage Tote
$20 for the two Small Stack and Carry with three each
$30 for the three Large Stack and Carry with two each.

$60 + tax for all them.

5 comments:

Raging Owlbear said...

Awesome! I've been looking for something that could compartmentalize minis and Dwarvern Forge in one solution.

I found the Plano tackle boxes great for minis, but they don't work for DF.

Thanks for posting this.

Anthony N. Emmel said...

My wife will love you for this!

Chris C. said...

Nice storage set-up Rob!

Cory said...

This is awesome! With the recent arrival of the DF Caverns I'm looking for a storage/travel solution as well. Looks like a trip to Target is in my future. Thanks for the tip!

Unknown said...

I had a very Similar set up for my Warhammer addiction. I've been clean for five years now.

But, I used egg crate foam and put the minis in the valleys between the "fingers" of the foam. Sandwich another layer on top and cut them to fill the big tub. The DF stuff would probably work similarly.