DM Riches discusses products, tools, resources, references, and other items of use to the Dungeon Master.

While I love the Dungeon Tiles produced by Wizards of the Coast, for their looks, and for their game board stock, there are also a lot of downloadable tiles available on the Internet. I’m particular fond of a free set of tiles by Crooked Staff Productions.

While Crooked Staff Productions offers many tiles to represent rooms and corridors, I prefer their Dungeon Tile-set which consists of individual graphics files of about 30 different tiles that you can put together to form your own rooms and corridors. Currently I insert the images into a Microsoft Word document and resize each on appropriately. Most tiles are 1″ x 1″, though there are a few dungeon dressing pieces meant to be different sizes.

Recently I’ve been experimenting with Gimp, a free photo-editing software program. I’m thinking about using that software to create my tiles in the future. It would allow me to rotate the different tiles for additional variety. For example, in the image above the large room is made from the “Light room tiles”. The set only has 5 different tiles, and while I try not to put the same tiles next to each other, there is a pattern in the tiles. I might do better with some sort of random choice of tiles, but by simply rotating each tile I could create a total of 20 different tiles to choose from.

I could also provide myself a bit more variety by adding in a few of the half-tiles and triangle tiles included in the zip file, though I don’t think I’d want more than one or two of each sprinkled in each room.

In the image above, the large room is my own creation while the other rooms and the corridors come premade from the Crooked Staff Productions site on their Dungeon Tiles page.

One of the benefits of this sytem is that you can print what you need on either paper, or card stock depending on how long you’d like the sheets to last. You can also laminate the sheets for additional durability. While perhaps not as durable as the Wizards of the Coast tiles, they’re a lot more portable. You could easily transport tiles for an entire adventure’s in a single manilla envelope for a convention.

Crooked Staff Productions also has some cavern tiles, furniture, building interiors, and minidungeons, so take a look around their site, and find something you can use in your game.

Additional photos: Printable Dungeon Tile Set