I use and review a lot of terrain products, both printable and pre-printed. Good terrain and map products give me attractive and interesting stages for the miniatures to play out combat scenes; the best ones also plant story ideas in my head. By those criteria, the Crystal Cave is one of the best 2D printable terrain products I’ve encountered recently—maybe even the very best one that I added to my collection in 2012. The map is beautifully illustrated and evocative. The gridded map is positively huge, measuring 37" x 31" when fully assembled (and requiring twenty sheets of paper)! The package also includes isometric views of the whole complex and individual “rooms,” plus full-sized files for poster printing and very large (3,700 x 3,700 pixels) JPEG files for use in online tabletop software. LZW has really given DMs the whole package here! I gave this product four stars instead of five for two reasons. First, the maps, especially the ones you’d print at home, contain altogether too much black around the edges of the caverns for my taste. I’d like to see a tighter trim there. Second, although the product is marketed in English to an Anglophone audience, the English grammar is terrible. “These stone pillars are dangerous. If you want go to the other side you need go away them.” “The aim of the game may be the defeat of the monster what live in the cave, or the crossing on the cave.” I care too much about words to give such a product all five stars. LZW needs a collaborator who speaks English (or American) well to really make their prose shine like their pictures.

Like most of the other ground sets from Lord Zsezse Works, the desert set features good-looking artwork in a set of extremely predictable (if you’ve seen other LZW ground sets) patterns. Quite frankly, the notion of a brick road through a desert (which constitutes about half of this set) is rather odd, especially when the bricks seem to have been made from a non-local rock or clay. The other half of the set focuses on ruins, and the results here are more consistent with the desert feel. Clearly, most of the ruins must be the mere tops of walls that run deep below the sand, since no foundations are in evidence. Nice touches include a mound of sand perhaps created by some burrowing creature, a very small oasis, some altars and pillars, and the skeleton of some enormous horned beast, perhaps a desert-dwelling dragon (though it has no wing bones, so I don’t know about that). This set is probably best used to stage scenes in an area that was not always a desert, but has been overtaken by the sands after centuries of neglect. If the set were limited to the roads, I’d probably give it only three stars, but the ruins half of the product and the excellent artwork lift it up to four. (This review pertains to updated version, February 2011.)

I have to agree with the other reviewer. The tiles themselves are great, amazing detail and good assortment, however, the inability to remove the grid lines are what brought down my rating of the product.

If this is going to be the norm from now on this will be the last purchase I make for this type of ground tile.

This is a fantastic looking model. The artwork is vibrant, the instructions clear. This was my first Lord Zsezse Works purchase, and I'm not disappointed. The fireplace prop is really a stove. There's a small square where the resident could cook up a pot of soup (or something). That's a great little detail. Plus, the well prop can be used as a separate piece. I plan on using it as an objective for a wargame scenario.

This kit is sharp. Although it is a little more expensive than others, the detail included makes it well worth the price.

It’s nice to have these models bundled together with a bit of a price break. I haven’t had a chance yet to build the column circle or megalith circle, but I’ll be using the temple model in game just a few days from the time I write this. The models are complex, and not very forgiving of imprecise cuts or scores; putting the models together is quite time-consuming. However, they look great when assembled carefully.

The four printable chambers in this product are, like all similar LZW products, richly illustrated and evocative. The “cover” image might be taken to imply that you can use the chambers inside to build a complete small dungeon, but you’d need to connect them with corridors (not included) or set the crypts in a graveyard or supply a central chamber of some sort. Chamber 4 features some minor customizability using PDF layers (you can turn a pentagram and fog layer on and off). The tiles are not modular; you can’t really mix and match. These maps would be great on your table once—and then you probably don’t want to revisit them anytime soon, as they are very distinctive and would get trite if overused (hence four instead of five stars), but the price is reasonable even for one-off use.

I'm planning to run a modernized version of Beyond the Mountains of Madness as the conclusion to my Delta Green game and I just know there's going to be some fighting in freaky Elder Thing architecture. The Crystal Cave Battlemap seems like a perfect fit.

It's obvious Lord Zsezse Works thought through this supplement. The Battlemap is not merely a single map for printing, but a variety of views, including an isometric and overhead view. The overhead view has a layer to turn grids on and off. This isometric view is annotated to give some context to the weird things that are in this cave. There's poster-sized maps of the isometric and overhead views, a welcome addition for those with access to larger printers. There are also versions of the map for online play.

For general strangeness, these maps don't disappoint. Alien plants, glowing crystals, a deep hole, a stone dragon head, and a fountain are all detailed here. I'm not thrilled with the dragon head – it commits the map to a fantasy scenario – but the vaguely pebble-hide sculptures do lend an alien ambiance to the design that still make it generically useful.

Overall this is an excellent map of the weird and will do nicely for my Elder Things' Construct.

The T-Builder is quite easy to use, it's just a matter of clicking on the options in the layered pdf menu. The graphics are pretty good, though somewhat in favour of a Diablo-style fantasy game (not too much scifi specific content). This doesn't matter much, as the vast majority of the graphics is universally useful and useable. All in all, the product is well worth the price, and I have no serious criticisms.

I like this set, it's quite evocative and quite beautiful. My biggest gripe with it though is the orthographic top view print outs. They're good and all, but since these are the ones that can be used with figures for gaming, it should be broken up in ways that make sense for encounters. The breaks in the pieces don't really make sense. There are parts of walls on one piece and sections that really go with other rooms. I guess it's just the way it broke out, but I've managed to reassemble it by cutting apart some pieces and it seems to still break into manageable sections. My main concern with this is that if you don't want to lay it all out immediately, but rather introduce rooms as the characters investigate, these breaks reveal too much. Otherwise though, I really like it and will be using it for my games.

I'm always looking for a way to make my wargames look better. That's why I'm in miniatures. These tiles are great because they are so changable. You can use cardstock buildings and set them right down on the tiles. That way whatever surface you're using doesn't show thorough

A phenominal piece of work.

HIGHLY recommend ANY of Lord ZseZse's stuff.

Now all we need is a Dwarven Keep map and I think I could die and go battlemap heaven. :)

The layers make the appearance versatile so that it can change with the story line. The instructions for assembly are clear and simple. It can also be used in any campaign which might have this type of location. I think this is a wonderful item that will turn up time and again in my adventures(but not so often as to be expected when it does. Where would be the fun of that?)

It was a free model, how could you go wrong? The construction method was simple, and the art more than satisfactory.

It looked cool. It just wouldn't provide a download link for me.

The Megalith Circle looks simple enough for the more clumsy paper modellers, like myself (thumbs the size of footballs). This would make ideal set piece for fantasy or horror campaigns in RPGs and would probably not go amiss on a sci-fi battlefield, like WH40K.

Really nice work, Lord Zsezse!

Billiam B. http://bit.ly/pr9z9l