
My best friend is moving away in a few months, and since he's spent the majority of his weekends over the past few years playing Dungeons and Dragons with me and my kids, I want to give him one last dungeon-delving experience before he leaves. It'll be the finale for the campaign we've been playing all year, and will involve adventuring through a giant subterranean cavern system that spans my entire 6' x 2' table.The game board will be made from cavern pieces made from dental stone (cast from silicon molds), so that they're stronger than plaster, while still allowing me to drill through them to mount lights. To get an idea of what it will look like (without the lights, at least), check out this photo, then imagine it scaled out to 6 feet long.I want to insert a series of red, green, blue, and purple holiday lights up through the bottom of various pieces to represent glowing stalagmites, crystals, torches, etc. I'll then set up a series of 1" PVC piping to get some dry ice fog to flow through. I figure, with the lights off in the house, the fog and "ambient" light from the game area would look pretty damned cool and show him how much we appreciated hanging out with him over the years.What I need help with is trying to find a way to make it so that whenever a miniature is placed inside a "cavern" on the map, the lights in that cavern turn on (and turn off when the miniature gets removed). I could easily do this with an on/off switch, but since I've got months to build and plan it, I figured why not go all-in (and possibly replicate it on other projects in the future).I have no experience with electronics, but I think it involves a reed switch, yet I'm not quite sure how to set it up if that's what I have to use. For example, if it does involve this kind of switch, I don't know if I should be running copper wire to each floor piece the miniatures can touch so that the magnet would close the circuit on the switch to turn on the lights, or what.Does anyone have any experience with something like this, who's willing to point me in the right direction? via /r/DIY https://ift.tt/2Fr6Ooq