Last time on Mapping Keep of the Shadowfell, I took you through the creation of the riverbed. This time, let’s work on the cliff face and the trees. The shrubbery will be created just like I did in Part Two, and I’ll be reusing some of the shrubs from that map to round things out.

Warning: This post contains some spoilers from the module. They are not major, but if you want total surprise when you play through it, I guess you’ll have to skip this one.

Let’s start with the cliff face, for which I have both the map and a picture in the adventure booklet to work off of. The picture in the booklet shows a Niagara-style falls, which I thought was way too large for the river as shown on the map, but I did keep its basic shape and decided to make the foliage stick out along the walls. First up, I carved out a piece of 2-inch foam to the same width as the river’s edge of my other piece. Then, using the picture as a guide, I carved out the shape of the falls. You can see some score marks I made to mark the outcroppings that defined the falls. I left the three rock outcroppings behind the falls just in case I can actually get water to look good over them…otherwise they’ll just be texture. I did all the carving on this piece with the sculpting tool.

Next I cut the other parts of the cliff, as well as the outcroppings. You can see I cut too deep on the left side, so I had to replace part of it with a separate rock piece that I carved out of the remains. It looks pretty good, and is modular to boot!

Next I painted the entire thing gray, and put the cave in black.

Once that dried, I dry-brushed on a mixture of brown and yellow to provide some definition. I’m proud of how this one turned out!

Now, I began to realize that the maps weren’t just showing shrubs, but trees as well! I don’t mind that all the King’s Road foliage is shrubbery, I think it looks fine, but having a “forest” cliff lair without any trees seemed weird to me. It was then that I found out the tree armatures we had bought were only 1-2″ tall, meaning small trees indeed! Then I ran across some great advice, either at Terrain Thralls, TerraGenesis, or in one of the books I”ve been reading, about using common weeds as tree armatures. I looked around my driveway, and sure enough I found some amazing weeds!

But would it work? I hung several of these weeds upside down so they wouldn’t dry flat, and let them dry for a few days. Then I used the same technique as on the shrubs…I sprayed glue all over the weed, and started applying clump foliage. Unfortunately, the clump wasn’t sticking to the weed, and was falling off (I also found out the hard way that there was a plug in my glue spray bottle, I swear that’s why my jeans were sticky). So, I improvised with some of the lichen I had purchased for the cliff walls, and I think the result turned out great!

Finally, I used some lichen, some clump foliage, and a couple of cleverly placed armatures to create the foliage for the cliff face.

Well, that’s all for this time. In Part Five I’ll show you what it all looks like put together, the creation of the summoning circle, the tree gunk, and (gah!) the waterfall.