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

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.

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

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.

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.