To bring wilderness encounters to life, I like to use miniature trees and plants. Here I show you how to make trees out of pine cones.
This is the first of a five part series on Crafting Trees and Plants for RPGs.
To bring wilderness encounters to life, I like to use miniature trees and plants. Players need a good idea of where trees, shrubs, and other features are during combat. Your rangers and rogues have many skills that take advantage of cover and hiding.
Because there are many options for making trees, I am presenting this story in multiple parts. Let me first focus on conifers like pine trees.
You have some quick and easy options for conifers. First, you can steal trees from Heroscape or another game if they are a good scale. In my initial games as a DM, I used this approach. As you can see, they provide a nice view of the terrain, even when used with a standard tan grid mat.
A second quick and easy approach is to use trees designed for model train terrain or for holiday snow scenes. Again, this is quick and relatively inexpensive. Here I used snow-tipped pine trees as part of a frozen forest setting.
If you want a large number of pine trees and you are cheap like Bitzy, you can craft them out of pine cones.
Pine Cone Trees
Materials
- pine cones
- poker chips or other bases
- Hot glue
- paint
Directions
1. Enjoy a leisurely stroll outside and gather a big bag of pine cones.
2. Put them on a baking sheet so you can dry them in the oven. This will kill off any bugs living in the cones and dry them out so they open up. Bake them at 250 degrees, checking them every 10 minutes or so until they pop open.
3. After they cool off, shake out any remaining debris like pine needles and gross stuff.
4. Spray paint the pine cones dark green. After they dry, add lighter green accents using acrylic paint.
5. Hot glue each pine cone to a flat base for stability. I like to use plastic poker chips from a thrift shop, but you could also use metal washers or jar lids.
These trees are great when you need a lot of pine trees and want to make them quickly. However, there are times when you need a larger scale pine tree. Our next story discusses how I made pine trees using a thrift store Christmas garland.
If you have any questions, ask them in the comment field below.
