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.