I was short of prep time for a couple of games of Grimdark Future over the weekend, so I commissioned my son to build me a "great walker". This is the result.
It worked pretty well in the first game, though less so in the second, where I had to bend the points allowance to fit it in and ended up with too many eggs in its well-protected basket. I'll probably add some tattered banners and graffiti to it before its next appearance.
This is my son's take on the Alzabo, a monster from Gene Wolfe's tremendous The Book of the New Sun.
Here's the latest beastie from my son - a reimagining of the D&D bulette or landshark. And here's how he did it:
These are some quick Mordheim ruins built from cardboard (ordinary box cardboard glued together for double thickness) with coffee stirrer planking. I covered the corrugations using wood filler. I took the templates from the marvellous Devs & Dice YouTube channel.
If you don't know the Bill Making Stuff channel, you're missing out - it's a terrific mix of whimsy and creativity. And it's brimming with great ideas for gaming projects: imagine Rick Priestley's deodorant hover tank as Studio Ghibli would have done it.
It's also by far my son's favourite YouTube channel. He recently made this short and cheeky tribute:
My son has made some of the things from The Thing. They'll be handy in sci-fi skirmish games, and the big one will also work as a chaos god in Hordes of the Things (appropriately enough ...).
He's put up a video about it here:
I'm increasingly fond of scratch-building big monsters for RPG encounters. This fellow - Gurakeel, Lord of Manticores and deposed king of the Seventh Hell (since you ask) - took a couple of hours to build from tinfoil, Fimo and greenstuff and maybe another couple of hours to paint.
He was the result of a Friday-night decision after that evening's online session ended with an unknown monster crawling up the side of the ruin in which the party were sheltering. Some post-dinner fiddling with tin foil and Fimo produced the base. After baking him, I added some green stuff to the face and then finished off the feet and fur in the morning. Once he was dry, a suitably swift paintjob finished him off.
My son obliged by constructing the ruins in the morning, so we had a suitable stage for an epic slice of action.
The great thing about scratch-built and - frankly - rushed monsters like this is that there's no need to take much time with the painting. Base colours, a wash, some impressionistic highlights, stripes with a Posca pen and then a tiny bit of care with the eyes, and he was done. And he produced the requisite gasps on his debut - more than I'd have got by taking hours and hours over an expensive miniature.
The party stumbled across a brain collector in the depths of Castle Amber as our last session of 2020 came to a close. For the first session of 2021, I knocked this fellow up out of Fimo, tin foil and mince-pie trays.
