Descent into the Depths of the Earth

April 21, 2020 10:08 PM

Heeringa and Wilhelmson built an entire dungeon-level into each drawer, painstakingly painted, staged and decorated. It’s intricate: the “tavern” includes a teeny tiny noticeboard where adventurers can leave notes for one other.
posted by Chrysostom (16 comments total)

“See, I told you we shoulda grabbed that curbed dresser we drove by today.” the boyfriend says.
posted by Grandysaur at 10:34 PM on April 21, 2020 [8 favorites]

Wow, that is a true piece of art. Quite the reminder of what you miss when stuck to just D&D over zoom sessions now...
posted by Metro Gnome at 10:59 PM on April 21, 2020

+10,000 bonus experience points for the homage to the cover of the 1981 Basic D&D box set.

That piece of cover art by Erol Otus is, for me, still THE definitive, iconic image for D&D. I’d been playing for a few years when that came out and it was. Just. Perfect. The image became cemented in my brain as the perfect depiction of everything I loved about the game.

From the purple-hued stones in the archway and sinuous columns, leading eerily down the steps into the lost cavern, to the sodden floor where fat gemstones tumble out of the treasure chest, from the glowing green orb of a spell forming to the glint off of the tip of the spear. From the face of the menacing dragon to the curious, dim recesses of the cave. The wooden shield, the breastplate, the helmet, the dagger, the robe, the claws, the boots, the fangs, the water. The tense expectation of the first blows in a battle that could go either way. I’ve written and DMed adventures incorporating that scene, and mentally inhabited it a hundred, a thousand, times.

I’ve been in love with Otus’ work ever since. (As well as that of the famous Drow artist Ool Eurts.) I gave a little squee of delight to see his depiction of the mouth portal from Tomb of Horrors show up on the back of the van in the film Ready Player One.

This art project using the dresser is mindblowingly awesome — thank you.
posted by darkstar at 11:38 PM on April 21, 2020 [15 favorites]

I got eaten by a grue.

I got eaten by a shoe.

Twitter thread showing the interior of each level.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 2:47 AM on April 22, 2020 [6 favorites]

This is really fantastic. I used to play with college friends, and while we used miniatures, we usually used a dry erase grid mat for the dungeon levels.

A few of the same friends just started up a long distance campaign to be played with a small group. We are using roll20.net to facilitate things, which seems to work ok. Their video chat is pretty flaky, though, so we are considering using just their map and die rollers and having Hangouts going on the side.
posted by Fleebnork at 4:39 AM on April 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

We are using roll20.net to facilitate things, which seems to work ok. Their video chat is pretty flaky, though, so we are considering using just their map and die rollers and having Hangouts going on the side.

I used to play Star Wars and other games in a Twitch stream that used Discord as the audio/video platform and Roll20 as the virtual tabletop (if used). When my Friendly Local Game Store closed down for the quarantine, we moved our organized D&D play to a similar setup, and it seems to work, even with 20-some players on the server at a time.
posted by Gelatin at 6:14 AM on April 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

I spent a lot of my preteen years filling sheets of graph paper with endless catacombs. If you had shown the twelve-year-old me this... well, let’s just say I would have become a man sooner.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:14 AM on April 22, 2020 [4 favorites]

There's also a video of the dungeon, via the Pluralistic blog yesterday.
posted by exogenous at 6:18 AM on April 22, 2020 [4 favorites]

The video has music from the first Conan movie-- some of my favorite movie music.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 7:35 AM on April 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

There are a lot of classic nods in this design. The creators really know their history. I especially like the design on the outside, which replicates a classic cross-section map of a multi-level dungeon. If that's an accurate map of the descent down the drawers, I'm even more impressed.

That piece of cover art by Erol Otus is, for me, still THE definitive, iconic image for D&D.

I'm a Trampier man myself (examples here, here and here), but Otus' works are justifiably classic, and he's still very active today!
posted by Edgewise at 7:56 AM on April 22, 2020 [3 favorites]

We’re doing hangout/Rolld20 and the combo seems to work pretty well.
posted by triage_lazarus at 9:20 AM on April 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

We had issues getting one person's video to work in Roll20 so also used the Roll20/Hangouts combo when our in-person game transitioned to online. I also found the video windows in Roll20 got in the way of the map anyway so it was easier having them in a different window.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 9:27 AM on April 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

Erol Otus was my favorite D&D artist when I was a kid... and still is.

The new, 5e art is... fine. It's consistent. Well crafted. But boring. I appreciate that the new art direction includes more women and PoC, but other than that? The new art is soulless and dull. None of the new art will ever be remembered. It's just... fine.

I played AD&D in the early '80s and after a 35 year hiatus, I've been playing for the last 2.5 years with 5e. I miss the sense of variety n the old artwork. The difference in skill among the artists. D&D art today is so uniform and consistent... One thing I've always loved about D&D is that you make it YOUR OWN. There's no single correct way to envision things, and no two worlds are the same. I miss the sense of that in the newer, slicker artwork.
posted by SoberHighland at 11:01 AM on April 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

SoberHighland, that's how I felt when reading Art & Arcana, the D&D art history book. The newer stuff - especially 3E - is technically great, but mostly soulless. Lots of the 1E and earlier art is flat out bad, but the good pieces have a vibrancy to them.
posted by Chrysostom at 3:44 PM on April 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

That Basic cover! We were too broke to afford the Advanced set, so we had to play Basic. Etched in the brain.
posted by praemunire at 4:06 PM on April 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

Also, this reminds me a bit of the amazing Japanese bookshelf dioramas.
posted by praemunire at 4:07 PM on April 22, 2020 [1 favorite]