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

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.

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.

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...

Lighting Fires

 So this is Reaper's large fire elemental that I got in the first Bones Kickstarter.

Turns out the bottom part is hollow.  Hollow enough for the LED from a tea light, anyway.

 This is a D&D Miniatures fire elemental, probably listed as some synonym for "really big fire elemental".  Unbasing this guy was a pain - there are several pegs involved.  Easiest way is to drill several holes in the bottom and break the base in half.  He isn't as nice a technical sculpt as the Reaper model. but the light can go a lot further up and the orange is more convincing than the Reaper red.

With The Lady in Red for scale.  They're not little in comparison, but the table footprint is the same as it would be without me hiding lighting infrastructure in a juice lid.  These are from the Simply brand.  Their Apple juice is really tasty if you like that sort of thing.

Beaky Beast

So Chinasaurs have a certain charm, mostly based on childhood nostalgia.  The printing said "Hong Kong" back when there were two Germanies.  Turns out that Magic Sculpt will stick to this plastic quite readily, making them excellent armatures/conversion fodder.  He looks big enough to be threatening without getting into kaiju territory next to this 25mm Grenadier figure.  Bigger than a Destrier, smaller than an elephant.

 I was kind of at a loss as to how to paint him - ended up with a scheme inspired by an online picture of a box turtle assaulting a strawberry.

I really need to add a Godzilla roar when this one gets clicked on.

Gamewise, he usually just gets the same stats as a Stegosaurus or a giant lizard, although Dragon Turtle wouldn't be so very far off if we needed a breath weapon critter.

Man's Best Friend

Julie Guthrie is a better sculptor than me.

Meh.  I've drunk out of worse.

So I went to the trouble of making this dog out of Fimo.  And I figured that maybe an adventurer's best friend deserves better than to be a 25 gp bit of disposable equipment.  Plus this. So here's an NPC class, ala Swords & Wizardry:
Faithful Hound: NPC only, XP and Saves as Fighter, HP and Tracking as Ranger, only surprised on a 1, doubled movement rate, all armor (natural AC 7/13), no shield, no weapons, cannot use magic items.  +1 to hit, damage, and AC per level (the last one only when fighting in a fur coat, i.e. sans armor).  Always does full damage to skeletons, bone devils, etc. because it's funny.  This is a Lassie/Rin Tin Tin type henchdog, so he can pull levers, open unlocked doors, laboriously climb ladders, etc.

It seems a little overpowered, but henchmen are running on half XP.  He can't activate magic items, although if he came across a passive item like a collar of fire resistance, or if someone let him lap a potion out of their helmet, I'd allow it.  There could also be a Paladin's Hound, as an alternative to the Paladin's Mount.

Buggalo

So these are the livestock for the Mouslings  of SWMBO.  Buggalo milk naturally occurs as a wobbly sphere about the size of a cabbage that can sustain one person for one day.  Buggalo yogurt and cheese (especially cheese) often have magical properties similar to potions.

The miniatures are made out of Durham's water putty, poured into a press mold made out of uncooked Sculpey from a Magic Sculpt original.  So I could theoretically start up production again if I decide that I need an enormous stampede.

Dracolich on a budget

So I picked up a 3-pack of dinosaur skeletons at some dollar store or other.  Turns out that they're made of the same type of PVC plastic as the Reaper Bones miniatures.  Thought I'd do some pinning just to test out the material.  Those are the pterosaur wings on the dimetrodon  body (yeah, I know, the upright knees aren't right for dimetrodon).  The neat thing about this stuff is that works sort of like the rubber in self-sealing tanks.  So when you pin it it tries to clamp back down around the hole  Which is a whole lot of words to say that you just need to sharpen the ends of a bit of florist wire and shove the whole thing together and you're done.

Saddle Cat

So, it's clearly a part of the zeitgeist.  Or at least was.  It probably still should be, what with YouTube being one giant shrine to Bastet.  So yes, it should be okay to have your character to tie a feathered mousy to the end of his lance and ride into battle upon a couch leaping, yarn chasing, cheezburger hazzin' giant kitty.

The Good:

•  Talk about riding a jumper.  Saddle cats are capable of leaping twice as high and twice as far as a light warhorse and can charge their regular move distance straight up a masonry wall or wooden palisade.
• Causes abject terror in ratmen
• No need to dismount to be sneaky

The Bad:

• They can only be ridden 2 hours a day - they choose which 2
• The fish bill.  Oh dear merciful Bastet, the fish bill.  Seems they'll go through a barrel of salted fish every couple of days, plus hard tack, jerky, and whatever the local farmers would prefer they not catch.
• Prone to dragging grooms around in their mouth without provocation.

The Ugly:

• Lock up the Familiars
• Occasionally fall through ceilings
• Dragging the groom around means it's *your* turn to clean the enormous litter box

In game terms, I'd just give them the same stats as a cavalry horse, but with twice the movement capability (jump or charge), twice the damage, no endurance, and enormous upkeep costs.  They should also be capable of stealth and very hard to surprise.

Column Tutorial

This is the lid from a bottle of Dole juice.  SWMBO is fond of the orange-peach-mango variety.

This is a 2-1/4" disk (I've got a circle stencil) of paper grocery bag.  Attach it using the old 19th century poster technique of saturating both sides in Elmer's glue.

Pretty self explanatory.  Gesso makes paint stick to plastic.

Gesso goes on pretty thick.  Don't dilute it.

It shrinks a lot as it dries.  This takes at least 24 hours.  They mean it - it'll peel if you try to paint before a 24-hour cure.

FolkArt Artist's Acrylics "wrought iron".  I like it better than black because it's plenty dark without being artificially sharp.  Real shadows are never black.

No need for a palette.  This thing's about the size of one anyway.

The FolkArt regular acrylic is slightly translucent.  This works in your favor.  Use a palette this time.  A medium gray would work just as well, I just like the slate blue effect.

The Dove Gray goes on as a drybrush coat.

Since you're going to game with them, sealing is recommended.  I like brush on sealers because they're thick, non-toxic, and can be used at my desk.

With The Lady in Red for scale.

What it looks like on the table.  For 2.5-d we usually let anything climbing the column like a squirrel on a tree just set on top and have cover.  It also obviously makes a good plinth for big statues.

Piercer

Stalagmites

This is Crayola Air-dry clay.  It is intended to be a material to keep children busy attempting to make ham fisted art.  It is cheap and non-toxic.  It cleans up easily with water.  The tub is really good at keeping it from drying out.  The internet arts and crafts folks hate it.  They hate it because it frustrates anyone attempting to use it as one would polymer clay.  Because it's real clay, and the rules are different.

This is ham fisted scenery made from Crayola Air-dry clay.

This is roughly half a tub worth of terrain.  Or about $3 US worth.  Turns out that damp paper towels make a great armature for simple cones.  Wrap a sheet of clay around them, thwack it in layers with the side of a broccoli base, and wait about three days for it to dry.

You can see my thumbprint above the zombie's head.

It's fairly dense when it dries.  Not as heavy as a real ceramic, but it doesn't wander on the table.  I also coat it with Elmer's glue (PVA) after it dries as a moisture barrier.  This would actually be a hell of a lot easier with a polymer clay like FIMO or Sculpey and a foil armature.