Product Review: Dungeons and Lasers PrismaCast Pre-Painted Dwarven Mine

 

While I was clipping the pre-painted Dungeons & Lasers scenery out from the sprue, I thought I'd write a short review. There wasn't quite enough space to lay everything out, but hopefully this will get you enough of an idea of what you get.

The painting quality is really good - someone's hand painted everything, which has then been scanned and painted on the sprue. This is a better quality paint than you could get for the money if you bought it unpainted.

You get six sprues like this - four painted with the centre of the floor panels brown, with another two with the centre of the floor painted blue. This gives you some variation - you could have it not matter, or have the water be deeper and inhibit movement.

This means you've got 72 squares of floor tiles that can be used as corridors or rooms, and each of the six sprues has a door, two torches, a free standing lamp on a stand, four short walls and one long wall. That gives you a bunch of flexibility and plenty to make a small encounter room. For a larger encounter or quest I'd be tempted to get somewhere between two and four sets if funds allowed.

The Dwarven Mine set wasn't designed for Prismacast, so there are spots where it falls down a little. Obviously, they can't paint anywhere that the sprue connects to the miniature. There's also a few spots of mould lines that are unpainted. They've put the base material as a dark brown plastic so it mostly gets away with it, but there's a few places where it's a little more obvious when you look closely.

The free standing lantern poles are the most obvious. There should really be, you know, light there! But the quality line is far, far higher than the Wizkids pre-painted models, so if that's your line, you'd definitely be fine.

So the technology is clever, but at least for this set that wasn't designed for it, there's limitations that a hand painted set would surpass. It's good for the money but not perfect, so if you want it perfectly, you'd need to get the unpainted and get it done the old fashioned way. But for the money, the pre-painted option is very very good and will get painted scenery on your RPG tables very quickly.