r/rootgame • u/Luca572 • 19h ago
Print & Play DIY Lizard Cult and Twilight Council expansions
I created these two factions through a long, error-prone process, but I’ve finally finished th
- As a first step, I imported character images into vector graphics software to isolate their outlines; in some cases, I had to do this manually.
- After determining the correct size (though I think the lizards ended up being a few millimeters too big), I laser-cut them using a friend's machine. For each character, I cut two full pieces plus one with shallow cuts marking areas to be colored black, such as the eyes. I used 4mm plywood because I had it on hand, but using 5mm wood would have saved me a lot of work.
- For the Lizard Cult alone, I had to cut 75 shapes and glue them together in stacks of three. Since the final pieces needed to be 1cm thick, I had to sand them down; using 5mm wood would have saved a lot of time and avoided the need to redo pieces that hadn't come out straight.
- Once they were all sanded to the right thickness, I painted them with acrylics. I was happy with the result for the bats, but not for the lizards. Wanting a look closer to the original, I hand-sanded all the Lizard Cult pieces to remove the paint and switched to spray paint. For the parts that needed to be black, after many failed attempts, I decided to use a fine-tip permanent marker.
- For the cardboard pieces, I used matte photo paper, which I cut out and glued onto cardboard shapes that had been laser-cut for precision. I had the faction boards printed at a stationery shop and then glued them onto stiff cardboard that I had cut to size with a utility knife.
It was a very long and inefficient process, but I’m happy with the final result. I had no prior experience and made plenty of mistakes, forcing me to redo many pieces multiple times but actually pulling it off feels really rewarding. I’m a stickler for detail and wanted the result to look as close to the original as possible; I think I pretty much succeeded. Now I can play with two new factions, one of which has become my favorite (the Lizard Cult, naturally). As for the Twilight Council, I think I might be one of the first people to have it in my language, given that there’s still no word on when the Homeland expansion will be released here. For these two expansions, I used a lot of materials I already had on hand, such as paints and wood, so they ended up costing me only about 5 euros each.
I think I’ll only be able to make one more at most, because the others require additional components like cards and, above all, I would run out of materials such as wood, paint, and photo paper, which would make them too expensive to produce (around 15 euros).
I hope you like it!
(English isn't my native language, so I apologize for any errors and for the photo quality, but it's the best my phone can do.). :)
