This is my fourth Hirst Arts project, a platform of chipped stone bricks I could use to display and transport miniatures. It's a simple setup, just a rectangle of matte board with two levels of bricks. The tricky part is that I left nine square gaps in the brick pattern as I glued the other bricks down. Once the glue dried, I glued small rare earth magnets from Lee Valley Tools into those gaps and filled around them with fresh plaster. When the plaster dried, I painted two thick coats of clear sealant over the tops of the magnets to prevent them from rusting (I don't know if they would rust, but I thought I'd seal them just to be sure). I then painted the whole thing with a light tan color, drybrushed it with white, and spray-sealed it. Then I put glue into some of the cracks between the bricks and flocked it with green flocking to look like moss and vines, and then flocked the "ground" of the matte board with a grasslike herb I got from the soapmaking section of my local Michael's craft store. The net result is a mostly-natural looking section of floor in a grassy area, like an old ruin that's become completely overgrown. The magnets barely show up as circular marks that don't match the chipped-stone texture (you can see one protruting from under the spear-carrying guy in the left foreground).

The trick with the magnets lets me use this to carry minis as well as to display them. Those rare earth magnets are really strong. Each of the 1/4" magnets can hold 2.5 lbs ... more than enough to keep a mini in place (because I base my minis on metal washers, so they stick to magnets). I've put minis on all nine magnets on this piece, turned it upside-down, and shaken it with a reasonable amount of force, and none of them moved, let alone fell off. This lets me display the minis of the player characters in the game I play at my office, and when it's time to game I hand off the entire unit to one of the players to take to the meeting room where we play. This has two advantages: (1) it's one less thing for me to carry to the game room, and (2) I can separate the PC minis from the NPC/monster minis, keeping them out of sight of the players' eyes until I'm ready to reveal them. Anyway, the magnets are awesome, I recommend checking them out (and you can get ten of them for less than $3 ... and as far as I can tell the metal caps Lee Valley Tools sell to strengthen the magnetic power have a negligible effect for this purpose, so you can skip them).