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

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.

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

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

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...

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.

Piercer