D&D/TTRPG Dice Tower (Customizable)

Welcome to my Dice Tower tutorial! I am mostly going to cover the basics here for how to create the structure and details of the functional dice tower. It is part of the fun to design your own color palette and design concepts! The example pictures I've added were made uniquely for other people's D&D characters, so I'm not going to give too many instructions about the finishing details, it is largely just combinations of simple paint and texture techniques. These are fairly simple as is, but adding more diorama elements, miniatures items, greenery, etc, can be a great way to pay homage to you and your friend's own characters.

Materials:

Required or Very Useful:

• 1L Sparkling Water Bottle (I use Walmart brand)
• Solid XPS Foam/"Foamular" (typically pink, green, or blue, found at home repair stores)
• Disposable Styrofoam Plates
• Extendable Craft Knives + Xacto Knives
• Hot Glue + Gun
• Mod Podge Glue
• Coffee Stirrer Sticks, wooden
• Aluminum foil for texture
• A thin metal tool, such as dissection pins, extra long large needles, etc. (opt, but helpful)
• Heat source, to use with the above tool (opt)

• a Vinyl Floor Tile (opt, very cheap at home repair stores)

Misc:

• Various acrylic paints + basic brushes
• Floor cleaner, clear
• Resin, fake moss, etc. Anything for finishing pizazz.

Remove the label and wash the bottle inside and out, being sure to remove glue residue as well.

Use a pair of sharp scissors to cut the top and bottom off of the bottle, creating a cylinder. Do your best to trim the cuts the be smooth and relatively the same height the whole way around.

If one side is better cut than the other, make note of that for a few steps later.

Use the extendable knife to cut three pieces of XPS Foam/Foamular:

• A randomly shaped piece, around 1/2"-1" or 1.5cm-2.5cm larger than the plastic cylinder's base
• A square-ish pillar the height of the cylinder
• Similar to the previous piece, but more of a rectangular cross section than a square

Glue two styrofoam plates together with mod podge or similar white glue. After it dries, cut a circle out of both plates that is just a bit larger than the cylinder's top circle.

Lightly press the plastic cylinder on the large piece of foam you cut earlier. It should leave a light imprint to use as a guide. Make a groove wide enough to fit the plastic walls of the bottle. If you have a metal tool similar to the one I'm using in the picture (it's some sort of dissection prod/pin), you can use the better instructions below. If not, use a sharp implement.

• Use an open flame or hot implement (use caution with fire) to heat the metal of the tool
• Insert the tool 1/3" ~ 1cm into the foam and start to follow the path of the circle
• Repeat the first two bullet points until the full circle is complete

Foam melts smoothly with heat, so it will create a clean thin groove. I recommend using face covering or good ventilation, avoid inhaling melted foam.

Check the fit by inserting the plastic cylinder as shown above. Make adjustments if needed. (If only one side of the bottle was cut smoothly, insert the WORSE side here). Don't glue this in place yet.

We'll use the rectangular pillar for cutting a handful of steps, 10-12 steps should be good to work with.

Lay the pillar down with the wider side of the pillar facing up. Use the extendable craft knife to cut small slabs out of it. Make the top cut angled upwards, and the bottom cut flat. You want to make steps that look roughly like the ones shown in the image. The steps are angled on the top to keep the dice from stopping on the stairs.

During this step, also go ahead and cut a small wedge out of the styrofoam plate circle, like the one shown in the picture for this step. This will eventually be the hole the dice are dropped into.

(The picture for this was taken after I placed the stairs on, that will be covered next)

Grab the square pillar and use a craft knife to carve it into a rough cylinder.

Use any blunt tool (stylus, pencil, some pens, butter knife, etc) to carve texture into the central pillar. Bricks are simple and nice-looking choice. Varied stripes to create a wood grain is also a good option, depending on the look you want (Wood grain texture can be seen in the 1st intro example picture!)

If using any type of rock or brick texture, use a tight ball of aluminum foil to lightly press texture into the foam. Save this ball for the stairs later.

I've tried a few methods for attaching the stairs, but I'll give the best one I've found so far.

Whether you make clockwise or counterclockwise stairs, make sure you place the steps so that the angled top slopes DOWNward. Starting at the top is best.

• Cut a piece of coffee stirrer (1"/2.5cm or so) at 45 degrees on each side (seen at the top of the photo)
• Put hot glue on one side and shove about half of the stick into the pillar
• Line up the step and pierce it temporarily onto the coffee stirrer. Check to make sure it seems right
• Remove the step, put hot glue on the wooden stirrer, and put it back. This step is done.

• Repeat these steps for each descending step
• Leave around 1-2 step's worth of empty space below the lowest step

This is a bit of a difficult step to describe.

Use a craft knife to carve and round the outer side of each step until the stairs fit neatly into the plastic cylinder, as shown. Depending on how big they were, this might take off a lot of foam.

It should be a close fit, don't make the steps too small.

Don't glue anything in place yet during this step.

This would also be a good time to add texture to the stairs and floor inside the circle, using the same methods as the pillar.

Remove the plastic cylinder and cut a small door out of the bottom.

Cut a few small pieces of foam out and create three objects. We are recreating the sketch shown above. (Also shown in a completely finished form in the second picture)

• A small ramp
• A "wall" of some type to stop the die, I usually make them look like rocks
• A smaller wall to go under the last step

When we line up those three pieces as shown, it will allow the die to bounce smoothly out of the opening. It is a good idea to hold a few pieces in place and test it, but it's still easy to modify these pieces until the plastic is glued in place.

This is a good time to add some detail to the base of the dice tower. The simplest way is to carve straight grooves and flat edges along the side to create a rock face effect. There is no right or wrong way to decorate this, so this is largely up to you.

For each color used (often I just use one, as seen in the intro examples, but this picture has two) pick a light, medium, and dark version of the color. Add a solid layer of acrylic paint to all of the current surfaces you have in the "dark" color. One it's dry, put less paint on the brush in the "medium" color, trying to NOT get it into the deepest grooves. Finally, use the "light" color, wipe nearly all of the paint off the brush on a paper towel, and highlight the sharpest edges.

This is a basic "dry-brushing" technique, but it will give depth to the texture added earlier.

If you want to mute bright colors or add grime, mix a 10:1 ratio of floor cleaner to black paint and spritz it lightly on, let dry. This is called a black "wash", and you can look up other recipes for it too.

(You can compare the 1st picture, the first coat only, to the 2nd picture, finished. I intentionally used a darker wash to make this very grimy).

It's time to glue everything together. Hot glue is by far the best for this. Make sure to attach:

• The bottom of the pillar to the floor
• The ramp and wall pieces to the floor, in the correct positions
• The plastic cylinder into the groove
• The styrofoam top piece to the top of the pillar and top of the plastic cylinder (line up the hole with the top of the stairs)

Hold everything neatly in place until the glue cools before doing the next piece.

If we want, we can create a small tray to catch the die when it comes out of the tower.

The best material for this, since it's heavy but easy to cut, is plastic/vinyl fake floor tiling. Look for something like what's shown in the picture.

• Cut a shape of your choosing out of the tile with strong scissors.
• Cut pieces of foam to make a wall around most but not all of the shape (leave an opening). Hot glue in place
• Use similar techniques as earlier to texture and paint the wall, and add any decorative bits as desired.

Line up the opening with the dice tower opening and it's ready to go! I don't attach them to each other because it's much simpler to transport and less fragile!

At this point, add whatever your heart desires to the tower. Leave it plain and simple, put a plastic dragon on top of it, cover the whole thing in glitter, whatever you want.

Thank you for following my tutorial, feel free to ask questions, post pictures, or send any questions to my mostly inactive twitter @feralpianorat.