Well, I'm not going to go overboard on the elevation. Unlike a diorama, I have to keep things fairly flat and low so the players can see everything. They're seated, after all, and players in RPGs generally don't STAND UP to look over intervening walls and other obstacles to see minis and tokens on the other side, alas -- unlike miniatures wargames, where two or more players are standing up and moving around the table with measuring tapes and/or laser pointers to determine LOS and movement and all that.
Therefore, I usually represent the interior of a "dungeon" with abstractions such as individual floor tiles that represent the floors of the rooms and hallways, and wherever there is no floor, that's assumed to be the solid stone wall separating those rooms (unless or until someone turns a corner and discovers another room he didn't see before, or someone opens a secret passage). More 3D details are restricted to the minis themselves and a few select details such as doorways and furniture items.
So realistically I can probably just use a few foam "hill" pieces I already have on hand, and put a few spacers underneath them -- either *smaller* tiles or hill segments with some thickness to them, but fairly flat and sturdy -- or else things like rolls of masking tape or packing tape at different support points. We don't really need to have the hills spaced several stories above and below each other -- each "step" of difference might represent a far more extreme vertical distance. (I just need to spell that out up front.)
I had to do something similar with a "multi-tier system" layout I did where the differences between floors were supposed to be so great that the steampunk robots with the PCs couldn't simply peek up onto the next level (that and they could walk through the obviously too-short archways), but the visual difference in height was still illustrative. (For maximum visibility, it *just so happened* that the higher-elevation areas were all further back toward the GM's side of the table. I'm standing, after all, so I don't mind looking over obstacles.)
Technically, I could do the same thing with just a wipe-off mat and magic markers, but I like to put a BIT of flash and color into things.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2018-01-17 10:59 pm (UTC)Therefore, I usually represent the interior of a "dungeon" with abstractions such as individual floor tiles that represent the floors of the rooms and hallways, and wherever there is no floor, that's assumed to be the solid stone wall separating those rooms (unless or until someone turns a corner and discovers another room he didn't see before, or someone opens a secret passage). More 3D details are restricted to the minis themselves and a few select details such as doorways and furniture items.
So realistically I can probably just use a few foam "hill" pieces I already have on hand, and put a few spacers underneath them -- either *smaller* tiles or hill segments with some thickness to them, but fairly flat and sturdy -- or else things like rolls of masking tape or packing tape at different support points. We don't really need to have the hills spaced several stories above and below each other -- each "step" of difference might represent a far more extreme vertical distance. (I just need to spell that out up front.)
I had to do something similar with a "multi-tier system" layout I did where the differences between floors were supposed to be so great that the steampunk robots with the PCs couldn't simply peek up onto the next level (that and they could walk through the obviously too-short archways), but the visual difference in height was still illustrative. (For maximum visibility, it *just so happened* that the higher-elevation areas were all further back toward the GM's side of the table. I'm standing, after all, so I don't mind looking over obstacles.)
Technically, I could do the same thing with just a wipe-off mat and magic markers, but I like to put a BIT of flash and color into things.