Marble plinth

 Our long suffering duo has been once again sent on a fools' errand by their mad patron.  But as experienced warriors, they know that empty purses kill as surely if not as quickly as a blade.  There has apparently been some inconvenient chronomancy, and the sedentary one has sent them in search of his lost marbles.

Frostbite Falls - This copy of the pillar has had a bronze moose placed on top as a commemoration of the founding of Moosylvania and an offering of gratitude to the God of Soggy Ungulates for founding it somewhere else.

 Catlinburg - This iteration apocryphally had a large urn on top before the cat took up residence.

Southern Jungles - The pillar has been here since at least three hundred years before it was made.  The jungle would have claimed it if the buggalo didn't regularly nibble the vines off.  No information is available about the warrior in unfamiilar armor, or what deeds lead to a commemorative bronze.  The locals don't even cast bronze.

I acquired a guillotine cutter and some paper punches, so I thought I'd see what I could get away with.  The plinth is corrugated card, covered in paper and enough glue to make it sandable. It and the bronzes had their intermediate layers done with a makeup sponge.  The sponge provides a pretty fast drybrush, but works best on a flat surface with deep cuts.
 

Merchant house

 

 

 

I built this house out of food packaging and an old sock to see if I could. It's not exactly up to code, but looks a bit better on the table than the dollar store Jenga blocks to which it is functionally identical.  The upper story is a 12 oz/340 g raisin box end capped with corrugated card for the gables.  The lower story is a box for a dozen packs of chewing gum (we all have our vices). Both were wrapped in packing paper before adding the timbers.  It's just a more paintable surface than the plastic impregnated trade dress.

 

 

 

The timbers are cereal card, cut in 6 mm strips on a paper cutter.  The corners are 12mm strips wrapped around to hide the ends. The stucco texture between them is gesso.  I decided to assemble and paint each story separately before gluing them together and adding the roof.  This made things considerably easier than trying to shove a paintbrush under the eaves.  There's no chimney because between the local clowder and a gaming group that can't seem to go five gorram minutes without knocking a drink over, I just don't need the aggravation of an easily snagged protrusion.

 

 

 

The shutters are 20mm by 30 mm slabs with the slats cut into them and hardware cut separately and glued on. Similar technique for the door. The thatch is the inside of a retired white cotton sock, dyed with tea.  My Black Assam habit left permanent enough stains on my teeth and the occasional shirt, I figured I might as well exploit that.

 

 

Goldar the Barbarian and his long suffering associate Sergeant Cerulean serving the whims of their mad patron once again.  At least he let them stop somewhere civilized (or at least indoors) this time.  The cat's name is Prue.  She's here becaouse not every establishment can wait for low level adventurers to show up every time there's giant rats in the basement.

Gronk

"Look, if you put your teddy bear at the bottom of the bag you're just going to have to wait until we stop to get it out."

Number Appearing:  1 to lots

Size: Giraffe

Armor: Pack saddle

Resilience: As large herd beast

Intelligence: Questionable

Communication: "Gronk!"

Disposition: Domesticated

Violence: Variations of "trample"

Enemies:  Large predators, bandits, gopher holes

Aims:  Keep moving forward

Peculiarities: Dwarf sauropods are peculiar in the same way as jumbo shrimp

Treasure: As caravan

"Picked 'em up in Damascene.  Salt was cheap and almonds were dear and we needed extra beasts to haul it all home.  The man that sold them to us said that the merchant he acquired them from claimed they were from somewhere around Akka Arrh, but that doesn't make any sense.  That place has been lost for centuries, if it ever existed."

Gronks are "dwarf" sauropods used as beasts of burden.  They're fairly unusual outside their home range of "not here".

Format cheerfully swiped from They Stalk the Underworld

Mreen

Original recipe next to very mild conversion.

"We're not sure about the new guy."
25mm Ouvre-boîte (MegaMiniatures OOP), Cheap Chinese knock-off of Bandai "Gouf" (Rhode Island Novelty Company "Battle Space Robot"), Reaper Bones 77047 Goldar the Barbarian

Number Appearing: Never more than 4, usually just one, probably no more than a dozen exist at all

Size:  Ten feet tall and bullet-proof

Armor:  Nth generation self-repairing variable-albedo laminate

Resilience: That which does not kill them makes them stronger.

Intelligence:  Artificial

Communication:  Abrupt and lacking in tact.

Disposition:  Militant

Violence:  In spades.  Also *with* spades.

Enemies:  All who hinder the completion of their mission.

Aims:  Return the Crown Princess to the Capitol for Coronation.  There are unforeseen transportation issues.

Peculiarities:  Might be sort of dead.  Doesn't slow them down much.

Treasure:  Owed a budget-annihilating level of back pay.

Format cheerfully swiped from They Stalk the Underworld

Children are told ridiculous tales for their amusement about silly creatures known as the Mreen (one of the quirkier aspects is that the word "Mreen" is always capitalized).  Absurd constructs with necks of leather and jars for heads, a bizarre code of honor (including an annual requirement for cake), and what seems, at first glance, to be a decided lack of critical thinking skills.  Many of the tales are about a Mreen named Privet Shmucktelly and his hilarious misunderstandings and mishaps with assorted magical tools ("Privet Shmucktelly and the box of Grid Squares" is a perennial favorite).  These aren't like those creatures of legend.  They are the self-same creatures - older, possibly wiser, and definitely free of tale-tellers' distortions.  They are the surviving(?) Marine Contingent of the Imperial Cruiser Pandora, and they have been on duty for a very long time.

On the Island of Knossos, there is only one suitable place for boats to make landfall, inside a natural harbor on the southern side.  On the wall of the harbor is a message, carved in the stone of the cliff in characters a yard high and a hand deep, and rendered with precision that would not be credible if it were not also demonstrable.  The characters are readable to any scholar, over four hundred years old, and don't make much sense.  They are a distance, a direction, a date in the near future, and twelve words that most scholars assume to be names.  They are directions to find where the escape pod containing the Crown Princess will make landfall due to orbital decay.  That's when the trouble starts.  As Presumptive Empress, the Crown Princess can override any and all military orders and directives.

The Marines are trapped in their suits due to a Coronation Directive.  The suit AI is to keep them on duty until they can deliver their charge to the place of coronation or are relieved by an appropriately sized force of body guards.  The previous record for being under Coronation Directive is 273 hours.  Pandora's Leathernecks have been on duty for over 423 years.  Between their advanced age, suit AI, nanotech repairs to their failing bodies, and the fact that nobody has opened a suit in centuries, even the Marines aren't entirely certain if they're still alive in a strictly biological sense.  It doesn't matter.  What does matter are the factors that hamstring their mission: namely the need to barracks lawyer the suit AI to get anything done, and reliance on field expedient power supplies.  The first is what's kept them from building an empire and starting a space program (Coronation Directive is intended to be a short term emergency protocol).  The second is why they ride in wagons or on boats and whack hostiles with shovels instead of accelerated particles.  It's also why they sometimes take up causes with locals that can get them necessary supplies.

The outlaw Sergei d'Gisbourne was judged to be dangerous enough to require several Mreen for his extraction from Quaker Tower.  He ended up leaving through an arrow slit - involuntarily. 

A Bit of Culture (it grows on you)

"William", courtesy of The Met

This is a 3,800-year-old knick-knack from an Egyptian tomb. Over the last hundred years, it's become a mascot of sorts for The Met.  If you take a close look at the lotus markings, they're really just made out of triangles and dots.

Painting by Charles R. Knight

These things said "Hong Kong" when I was a kid.

Uintatheriums are a somewhat odd extinct mammal.  The tusks give them a certain resemblance to hippos (they're not meaningfully related to any modern mammal).  Uintatheriums started popping up in bags of chinasaurs around the time that Gary Gygax was playing with other cheap plastic critters in his basement, but never got turned into anything iconic, D&D-wise.

Reaper 77144: Mummy for scale.

This sort of thing is what happens when I play with cheap plastic critters in my man-cave.  Acrylic paint, an alcohol pen, and a paperclip used to wire him to the Magic-Sculpt base.  The biggest time consumption came from the cleanup stage - the molds have not aged well.  One big advantage over doing this in the '70s is that I can pull up a 3-d view of the original hippo's markings while I've got the pen in hand.  He's deliberately glossy because "William" was originally glazed with blue glass.  He seems to be perfectly serviceable as a statue, living construct, or magical critter.  I kind of picture him as an immobile oracle that speaks with a lisp due to the tusks.

Sky Whales

The real ones like belly rubs.

Number Appearing:  Seasonally dependent

Size: USS Macon

Armor:  Not really.

Resilience:  Not much for the size, but still take a lot of killing.

Intelligence:  Fairly high.

Communication:  Flatulent trumpeting.

Disposition: Bubbly.

Violence:  Would prefer not to.  Equivalent to being kicked by a freighter if convinced otherwise.

Enemies:  Cloud Kraken, whalers, The Knights of Thunder

Aims:  Muck about in the troposphere having a good time.

Peculiarities:  Flying cetacean isn't weird enough?

Treasure:   Flubber

The deadliest creature on the Sea of Grass isn't the hungry Steppe Tiger, or the stampeding Purple Buffalo, or even your cuddly friend the Death Worm.  It is the Mountain Locust.  Which is more or less exactly like a grasshopper, except that it has both the capability and preference for inviting several billion relatives over at dinner time.  This can effectively reduce the contents of the The High King's granaries to dust and echoes.  This makes The High King very interested in protecting creatures that can devour several tons of locusts at a sitting.  And his subjects in the area very interested in heavily reinforced roofs, because they are very literally lower than whale dung.

Like normal whales, Sky Whales represent a very large concentration of (often illegal) resources to those able and willing to take them, and a serious mess when they beach themselves.  Their feeding grounds are
above the Sea of Grass during summer, and they winter in their breeding grounds higher up and further towards the equator.

Format cheerfully swiped from They Stalk the Underworld

Celestial Exiles

Whenever a large group of people interact, those with power will inevitably decide that certain individuals are inconvenient.  A time honored solution to this problem is exile to the provinces.  This solution is particularly attractive when it is nigh impossible to return without intervention from the exiling authority (sometimes you want them back).

The Celestial Empire is no different.  Where the Celestial Empire *is* different is that, being at the top of the g-well, they can drop their troubles off literally anywhere on the globe.  Or the moon, for that matter, but that's a whole separate set of anomalies.  You can do the orbital mechanics and such for how long it takes to lob an object upward from somewhere outward/down from the Celestial Palace (roughly 15,000 miles up, give or take a bit) and drop it onto terra firma in the equivalent of Saskatchewan if you like, but let's just assume that they can and that the transit time for a one-way trip is unimportant.  They can then decide if they feel like dropping supplies, reinforcements, etc.  - or not.  The thing about exiling nobles is that they don't go alone.  They have staff and bodyguards and obnoxious political supporters to accomplish whatever nominal task you sent them out for besides "not being here".  So the drop zone can get pretty big depending on the rank of the exile, or be fairly small for someone genuinely unpopular.

What all of this means for folks with a gravity habit is that the Celestial Empire is in the habit of dropping large groups of well-trained, well-armed, absurdly ignorant and incredibly desperate people literally out of the blue.  Have fun with that.

Drop Pods of the Celestial Empire

The bulk of the Celestial Empire is centered on the midpoint of the Beanstalk, at an altitude of roughly 15,000 miles.  Climbing down is analogous to circumnavigating the world on a stairmaster.  Even if you've got the thighs for it, it's really time consuming.  Falling, on the other hand, is relatively low impact (initially, anyway) and a whole lot faster.  In a nutshell, the drop pod is exactly that - a modified hollow seed pod for dropping people and cargo to places farther down the g-well.  Don't ask me how they aim what amounts to a giant dandelion seed, but they seem to be accurate to within a couple hundred yards or so.

Game stuff:

• While they can vary in size, these are roughly equivalent to ship's boats.  Cargo/Personnel capacity equivalent to anything from a dinghy through a small pinnace.
• Due to assorted peculiarities in the laws of physics around anything as decidedly impossible as a live space elevator, pods fall at a more or less constant terminal velocity of 300 mph.  This means that they may end up falling for a little over two days if they go all the way to the surface, followed by some pretty rough (but non-lethal) bouncing.  Cavalry (and other mounted troops) may not take this very well.
• The counterweight is actually "down" from the midpoint, so they can drop in that direction as well.
• You're more or less on your own to climb back up, but supply pods can be dropped along your route.

The Beanstalk

From my Weird Stuff That Won't Get Played file:

Beanstalk - The climbing vine of any of a large variety of legumes.

Beanstalk - SF geek slang for a space elevator.

This one's both.  It's not exactly natural, but it is alive.  It isn't exactly an elevator as such - more of a bridge.  If you've got the time and inclination, you can walk all the way up the stalk to the counterweight.  This would generally take about three years to get to the main station at the halfway point (14,625 miles or so).  The thing about large foot bridges is that they are seldom unoccupied.  No, not trolls (mostly).  Medieval bridges were lined with shops and houses like any other street, just moderately cleaner (just as easy to chuck the refuse in the river as in the gutter) and often with mills in the stream.  The main stalk is hollow and has a horizontal cross section about 250' across, or about the same area as one of the original World Trade Center towers.  The assorted "floors" vary in height, but are usually less than 30 feet.  There are various types of passageway that allow access between levels - it's a living plant, but was designed by wizards (or someone sentient and a bit off, anyway).  There are also access points to the outside, where leaves the size of small baronies become archipelagos in the sky linked to the main stalk by their tendril.

The takeaways:

• Live, plant-based wizard's tower.  Height not measurable by conventional means.  A little under 30,000 miles if you must count.
• Surface area roughly that of Australia.
• There's stuff living there.  Some of it's a little strange.

The Immortal Heroes of Summat

There's a Frostgrave scenario with statues that these might be handy for.

I bought a bag of 2" "Army Man" knights.  Painting one of each pose as statues leaves me with 30 more for whatever nefarious purpose strikes my fancy.  Mostly attempting to rehabilitate my fine motor skills, truth be told.  I'm not really up to painting 25mm figures again just yet.  Raw Umber damp brushed with Robin's Egg Blue drybrushed with Seafoam Green yields a reasonable facsimile of a patina on bronze.

 Normally I don't like cast on shield heraldry, but the drybrushing works pretty well with these to bring out the designs.

Larger than life, but not into colossus territory.

Herd Snail

Number Appearing: Herd

Size: Watermelon to cargo van

Armor:  Thick stony shell

Resilience:  Surprisingly difficult to kill

Intelligence:  Not that you'd notice.

Communication:  Not much.

Disposition:  Sluggish.

Violence:  May stab other snails as foreplay.  Otherwise no.

Enemies:  Rustlers, assorted carnivores, Gourmands

Aims:  Not as such.

Peculiarities:

• Vulnerable to salt.  Snailherds use goads tipped with rock salt.
• There are legends of very patient knights training the beasts as Destriers for no readily apparent reason.  Snail jousting may be popular in faraway lands that haven't heard of cricket, competitive walking, and other forms of spectator tedium.
• Those raised as livestock usually don't get much bigger than a small cottage, but keepers of snail lore maintain that they never stop growing and do not die of old age.
• Rustling them via herding isn't really practical.  Rustlers on the Beanstalk tend to roll them to a waiting flying boat at the nearest leaf edge.  Turns out that the hulls of flying boats are inexplicably delicious to herd snails, so one way or another they don't go very far.

Treasure:  Love darts (piercing blades of a size relative to the snail, very effective vice boneless creatures), vaqueta steaks, Copious quantities of disgusting acid-proof slime

Format cheerfully swiped from They Stalk the Underworld

Cloud Kraken

We're gonna need a bigger boat.

Number Appearing:  No survivors have reported seeing more than one

Size:  No survivors have ever seen the whole thing - but big enough to take an air ship

Armor: Not really

Resilience:  Tentacles are rubbery, hard to cut, and long enough to keep opponents away from the vital bits

Intelligence: Cephalopod

Communication: Skin pattern changes, to include bright flashes that mimic lightning.

Disposition: Hungry

Violence:  Great big tentacles leading to enormous beak

Enemies: Sky Whales

Aims:  Live fast.  Die young.  Leave an enormous floppy corpse.

Peculiarities:

• Some survivors report a strange "Ulla Ulla" sound in the vicinity of the encounter.
• Hunt throughout the Troposphere, but won't come below the cloud deck.  Won't come within a few hundred feet of the ground in most places due to trees, hills, etc.  Unexplained disappearances on the Sea of Grass may be linked to foggy weather.
• Can create a noxious opaque cloud the size of an air ship when they feel the need to cover their escape.
• Flying Squid are a real thing, which is pretty darned peculiar.

Treasure:  How do you feel about calamari rings?



Format cheerfully swiped from They Stalk the Underworld

Obligatory PSA

I don't really post about my personal life.  I don't generally feel that it's of interest to the three of you or the hundreds of adoring spambots that congregate here.  But I've been out of action with a brain injury for the past six months because someone decided that the screen of his phone was more important than looking through his windshield and ended up parking in my trunk at about 40 mph.  So if y'all could refrain from playing Angry Birds whilst driving or operating heavy machinery that'd be fabulous.

Sandstone Outcropping

 So I've been mucking about with the Crayola Air-Dry Clay again.  Coated with Elmer's glue and painted, the final product is similar to resin.  And it smells a whole lot better while you're working with it.  I used a small rock to created the stony texture.  Fractals are nifty.  This particular bit of terrain is probably reaching the limits of my current armature technique, if you can count a pile of wet paper towels as an armature.  Wrapping the paper around something rigid might still keep the clay from cracking.

The beetles are from the first Reaper Bones kickstarter.  The spiders from the same set are a lot better.  I tried  to base the paint scheme on this little cutie:

Festive Tiger Beetle
Cicindela scutellaris

Bait Ball

"In the mouth of a 20' wide alcove south of the altar basin stands an idol or statue of serpentine stone, expertly sculpted to depict a writhing, amorphous agglomeration of fish, eels, octopi, and other marine monsters. This horrid thing is about eight feet high and nearly as broad, the whole forming a globular mass standing about four feet from the altar basin." - Temple of Elemental Evil

Translating from the original High Gygaxian, serpentine is a semi-translucent green stone.  It sort of looks like jade, but is available in much larger quantities.  Gygax being Gygax, the inanimate object is going to try to eat you.

Theodore, Bugbear with Big Stick, posing for scale.

I snuck in a nightcrawler just because.

This one's FIMO soft, a polymer clay made by Staedtler.  The base is Magic Sculpt so that I had somewhere to grip it before baking.  Magic Sculpt has no objection to the temperatures needed to harden polymer clay.

Kitten Sphinx

The Lady in Red is confronted by a dessicated guardian by moonlight.  "Come back when we're open..."

So I picked this up from Goodwill for a couple of bucks while She Who Must Be Obeyed was foraging for handbag parts.  It was covered in white texture paint, the occasional brush bristle, and appropriately enough, cat hair.  I gave it a sandstone paintjob in homage to the ruins of the Kitten Kingdom from Epic Battle Fantasy 3, starting with a medium brown and drybrushing 3 subsequently more beige shades with a larger-than-usual brush.  Sealed with Ceramcoat Matte Interior Varnish.

Owlbear

No, that's a bare owl.

The first one was more disturbing.

Number Appearing:  One's enough

Size:  Too big

Armor: Fat, feathers, intense burning rage

Resilience:  Very.  Too angry to recognize lethal injuries.

Intelligence:  Not so much.

Communication:  Violence, mostly.

Disposition: Hangry.

Violence:  Very much so.  All the appendages end in sharp.

Enemies:  More or less everything, but especially wizards.

Aims:  Kill.  Eat.  Hopefully in that order.

Peculiarities:  Interact strangely with wizardry.

Treasure:  Not really.  Maybe a tacky rug if you're careful.

Wizards bend Reality in uncomfortable ways.  Owlbears are Reality telling them to stop.  The enormous eyes can see magic, even in complete darkness.  Especially in sorcerous darkness.  Magic is tasty.  Owlbears devour spells as they devour wizards.  If the wizard is particularly alert and starts casting before the chomping starts, they devour spells before they devour wizards.  The magic makes them stronger, angrier, and harder to kill.  Oddly, they'll get the same rush from devouring scrolls, wands, spellbooks, and potions (oftentimes plus the potion effect).  In the absence of sorcery, they are merely nearly silent nocturnal ambush predators that can out-sprint a horse.

Stone Lions

 So I went to the dollar store to buy toys again.  The thing about dollar store toys is that they often weren't schlock before the production team's bean counters got a crack at them.  This tigger appears to be a direct casting of a 3-up wax sculpture intended for a pantograph.  At a guess.  Added a beard and tail tuft before I remembered the camera.

 Covering up that nasty join line at the neck.  Using a foil filler because Magic Sculpt ain't cheap.

 Magic Sculpt mane.  Basically do a pattern of flowing locks, then add the grain.

 Looks a lot more like a lion with the stripes covered.  Folk Art "Wrought Iron" for the base coat.

 Finished painting using the same technique as the stone columns.

"Grr.  Aargh."

Fang and Claw, guardians of the Gate of Sorrows

Wasp Women

Thank you, Roger Corman.

Number Appearing: Too many

Size: More or less human

Armor: Rigid chitin and blurring speed

Resilience: Not so much

Intelligence: Sapient

Communication: Pheromones, mostly.

Disposition: Waspish

Violence: Nets, Man-catchers, paralyzing stinger if they're desperate enough to grapple

Enemies: Mice, of all things

Aims: Feed your still-living brain to their young.

Peculiarities:

• Only become sapient if fed a live intelligent humanoid as larvae. Use unintelligent drones as cannon fodder. 
• Hunt giant spiders because they can. 
• Strictly diurnal - cold and dark impair them greatly 
• Not-so-strictly diurnal if someone's got artificial lights they can home in on 

Treasure: Hornet Juice (if you know how to harvest it, acts as potion of speed), Reams of high quality paper, a large pile of inorganic personal effects. Several live victims that may or may not have an angry wasp creature pull a chest-burster maneuver later on.


Monster format cheerfully swiped from "They Stalk the Underworld".

Animate Structure

Some magic is about sacrifice.  A castle can have a garrison and sit in the middle of a friendly (or at least ethnically loyal) population and change hands regularly.  A wizard's tower can stand alone for centuries.  Because every now and again, some idiot gets an army together and tries to take one.  Their legends discourage future attempts.

This is more of an item ability than a spell.  A wizard with the correct property rights may once (not once a day, once a month or once a millenium, but exactly *once*) activate a magical structure to defend hearth and home.  This takes a bit of time (one full turn, ritual casting, or however your game covers "about as long as it takes to brew a cuppa without a fire going").  The wizard must have legal title to the place, either inherited, elected, or constructed.  The structure fights as an enormous golem, running along on its pillars, columns, or flying buttresses and steamrollering anyone that doesn't get out of the way.  It moves either the length of its footprint or its height, whichever is greater, in a straight line every round.  Everything that doesn't get out of the way is essentially getting hit by a rockslide.  The building is still a building - its ability to take damage is neither lessened or increased.  The structure will fight for one round for every year that the wizard has lived in it, plus a round for every five years that previous owners in the line of succession have not used the ability.  At the end of this time the structure must make a Saving Throw - success means it still stands, if it is able to on the location it ends the duration in.  Failure means it collapses in a pile of masonry, its wizard pilot usually escaping the collapse by one sorcerous stratagem or another.  The duration on this ability means that it is normally only used in defensive circumstances.   But there was this one resurrected Pharaoh...