I, Monster Maker!

As mentioned earlier, I've been listening to and enjoying James Hollway's podcast Monster Man, a simple idea of one roleplaying fan's reading of the 1977 Monster Manual beastie by beastie. Recetly James set his listeners a challenge I simply couldn't overlook: create an old school D&D monster.

Specifically, create a monster based on a bargain-shop miniature or knick-knack; the way the very first proprietary creatures were made by the likes of Gary Gygax and Tim Kaske from the dime store bags of 'dinosaurs' (loosely referred to as Chinasaurs, although they really originated in Hong Kong), repurposed to become the Carrion Crawler, Rust Monster, Owl Bear and Bullette. James' challenge was as much to do this as make the monster, then to draw up the relevant entry for the Manual.

So I took up the challenge - initially looking around the local Two Dollar shops for inspiration, but I found little outside of some insects and marine animals, made from pretty cheap and nasty-smelling rubbery plastic. Out of desperation I went underground - specifically, under the house to my Bitz Box, and found some loose plastic toys collected from recent school fairs. From that I found this guy:

I've no idea who or what he is. Looks modern, lacked a tail, so I carved up an old Allosaurus and courtesy of the donor dino, the result was near indistinguishable:

 The question then became what to convert my new beastie into? The current paintjob is okay - certainly fine for tabletop play, if a little airbrushed and quite 90s in colour scheme. Was it from a video game or something? Anyway, when I got it I thought it could be an evil tree spirit or something. Cut to the Monster Man contest and I wasn't as drawn to that interpretation. Still stumped, I undercoated it old school style with white acrylic...

...and inspiration struck! One turquoise wash later, with some blenched bone highlights and he's a mountain menace, a white wailer, an Eisengeist... ehh, I'll come up with something.

The next candidate was even simpler and more organic in his creation. take a grasshopper head and a triceratops body (it helps if they're not to scale, obviously) and you get this guy:

Sorta resembles a Rust Monster! But my version, the Flambeau or spit lizard, is a more natural creature in intent. The Flambeau lives deep in damp places where it eats subterranean fungi and rotten or petrified vegetation. Due to intestinal fermentation it has a unique defensive manoeuvre: it spits a noxious substance to deter its attackers. Now, in the natural world this means a tarry, foul-smelling substance to gum up would-be aggressors and maybe provide some random protein for our chimaeric critter here. However, as a trap for the unfortunately adventuring party, the Flambeau's spit also turns out to be highly flammable.

Yeah, he's a natural, walking napalm cannon to anyone sporting a flaming torch, opened lantern, or foolish enough to go in fists blazing with a fireball. Heh heh heh.

Stats to come, though  I missed the Monster Man deadline due to other engagements :/ Oh well.

This Is The Day The World Ends

In the summer of 1982 the Stockholm Scientific Institute prepared an analysis of the aftermath of a theoretical nuclear holocaust set a few years into the new decade. The work caught the attention of Vatican Radio, who made much mileage over its doom-laden forecast of human annihilation and a planet reduced to desert and scavenging rodent survivors. As mention of the study was also made in this book, it also caught the attention of me and my friends mid-1984. After all, the fateful date in question for the study was the slightly more imminent June 15, 1985.

Today marks the 800th anniversary of a much happier milestone event, King John's signing of the Magna Carta, but the aforementioned date held our juvenile attentions much more, I should think. For a while, at least. A year after reading this tid-bit the thought really only occurred to me at a local youth group social, when I realised on the dance floor, awkwardly twitching to something ephemeral and of the moment, that that date had actually arrived - as in, right now. With somewhat nervous laughter I informed one of my friends, and, well, we danced on, a little more reassured - or not.

Thirty years on and the world has not collapsed into a radiated wilderness - yet. I don't recall why this anniversary popped into my head over the past weekend, but here we are, upright (or vaguely so) and here I am grown up, schooled up, mortgaged up and looking for work in all the wrong places. My adolescent anxiety/enthusiasm over nuclear Armageddon seems hopelessly quaint now, almost enviable. The stuff of nostalgia - and long may it remain so.

So in the spirit of thermonuclear nostalgia and misplaced plans, here's my get-through list for Post-Apocalyptic modelling, post-Mirky Dozen, of course. I've stuck to a short, easily-manageable list this time, even though with a new Mad Max movie out and Fallout 4 having just been released, PostApoc gaming and modelling has never been busier! 

My dreams of conquest (ruined):

1 irradiated roadside diner

1 battlecar-ready 1:75 modded 'Doc'

1 battlejeep

1 scavenger dune buggy

and maybe,

1 Battletruck(tm) should I ever want to drop down a scale and join the kids kit-bashing Matchbox toys. Looks like fun!

Should that all fall into place then maybe I'll branch out into a Cursed Earth model and go full-Helltrekker. But that might have to wait for a few Dredd models first.

Stuff I Have Dug Out of My Garden the Sequel (Yes, I Know!)

Yep... The trouble with committing to a close-off point on anything - such as, say, blogging all of the domestic jetsam that becomes flotsam in your garden, is that of course there's never an end to it. I thought there would be - I was pretty much convinced I'd got there. Even when I found stuff later, I slipped some in between postings, pretending that a follow-up was neither necessary nor interesting. Anyway, months on, another garden revamp and tidy plus a holiday and look what turns up: My first ever button discovery! Not a fake find! TWO plastic animals, both of whom were overlooked during excavation but were discovered by accident on separate occasions when the bucket of topsoil had dried and resolved itself - I kid you not. More dead clothes pegs. Oh well.

There's also a strange yellow daisy wheel thing in the top left hand corner, which surely must be related to the one found on a previous dig. God knows what they are, but now I've got two of the things.

Oh, also that white-ish pebble in the bottom left corner?

Turns out it glows in the dark.

Oaken's Twelve: Moria Cutaway

Perhaps it’s because of the stuttered way I first read The Lord of the Rings, or maybe it’s the Ralph Bakshi movie which left its retelling of the book unfinished, but for childhood and adolescent me the two big and most evocative episodes of the entire story take place within a pretty small geographic area: they are the battle of Helm’s Deep and the Fellowship’s travel through the Dwarven stronghold of Khazad-Dum, the Mines of Moria. Moria especially lingers long in my subconscious because for me, as much for many RPG players of my generation I’d say, it is the quintessential D&D set-up, a party of mixed races and classes groping their way through dark and long-abandoned tunnels rich in history, rumouring untold treasures and teeming with goblins, orcs and worse besides. Within and at the heart of the mines is the chamber of Mazarbul, the records of the various Dwarves who dwelled there, from the great Durin to – most excitingly – the ill-fated expedition of Balin son of Fundin. Its entries describing the gradual but certain annihilation of its last Dwarven residents is riveting stuff, especially in book form, and to lesser degrees with each movie version. What the movies do have that the book doesn’t of course is the visual element, and that’s where my interest was engaged once more, in seeing Moria recreated in Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring.
So here’s a model I made perhaps six or seven years ago while I was still painting GW miniatures and waiting for a decent release of dwarves to tackle. The tableau’s straight from the movie rather than the book, with Balin’s crypt surrounded by the detritus of battle, and the Book of Mazarbul stuck within the dead grip of, it’s assumed, its last chronicler Ori. Games Workshop did eventually provide their own version of this scene, though simplified and a little less cluttered, for their first plastic-only table-top scenario The Mines of Moria, In mine the scale is out a little – the tomb’s a bit too large, but that’s a movie concern rather than a book one anyway (there is no elevated sarcophagus in the book, just a space on the floor where the crypt lies, nor is Ori to be found.) If memory serves then Ori here is made from plastic scrap and green stuff, the model has a card base with model bits to decorate, and if the first appearance of some actually utilised Suburban Archaeology – the sarcophagus being a plastic box I’d found under our house in Dunedin, and a small sliver of rounded shield likely kept inside by whoever the ex-resident RPG player was at the time. The other item contained in the box is still in my Bitz Box and can be see here.

I think I might revisit this model in time, updating the colour of the cover stone (it should be whiter), re-doing the Book and furnishing the inside of the sarcophagus itself, maybe even attempting Balin lying in state. Games Workshop did actually tackle Balin in figure form for their LotR line – a trifle cheeky, perhaps, but theirs is the empowered King of Moria version rather than Ken Stott’s stooping genial version in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (great casting too, I think.) As indicated earlier, I rather think Adam Brown’s version of Ori in the same movie has been retrospectively modeled on the elements of this image, and fair enough. My version is, too, in a way, although quite a different thing from the cinematic Ori. Ah, poor Ori…

The Last of the Stuff I Have Dug Out of My Garden

As far as my Urban Archaeology series goes, this is the unexpected third installment, and will without doubt be the last. Folks, I think my sweep of the section is now done!

Below are the spoils of a last dredge below layers of greywacke and our back deck (recently re-stained). I've officially gone beyond casual finds! But there are some intriguingdiscoveries to be had yet: a plastic cow, an LED, something like a toy car graveyard, and it appears that somebody not only had a plastic flower fetish, but they also had a kitty cat...













Believe it or not, I think there's possibly some useful stuff in here for the Bitz Box. Not the clothes peg bits, obviously, but maybe something... vehicular...

More Stuff Keeps Coming Out of My Garden

I swear that for as long as blood runs in my veins, I will garden. And for as long as I garden, it seems our topsoil will throw up ever more curious objects for my bemusement. Suburban archaeology – it’s the unravelling of a cardigan of past owners and residents, perchance to find the occasional button. No buttons this time, or yet indeed, but quite a bit of plumbing stuff from around the kickboards of the house, some terracotta and more ceramic discards (probably an old pipe or flower pot), a vintage Pepsi bottle cap circa late-1980s (when did Pespi arrive in NZ I wonder? 1987 or thereabouts?), a heart-shaped eraser long since perished to uselessness, and clothes pegs, lots of clothes pegs. I am rather taken by the Deco-like plastic thingy which incorporates some screws and brass strip on the reverse (a light housing, perhaps for a fluoro tube?) though, but in conclusion, not much here for the Bitz Box - but a bit more root space for our transforming garden.

More Stuff I Have Dug From Out of My Garden.

It's been some time since I last posted an updated inventory of the Monkeyhouse's backyard treasure trove, and here it is:













The reason for this is that it's simply harder to find the stuff by accident. So what's here is a canny compilation of foreign objects from our current house and back yard, plus what we found in the garage on moving in, and some more stuff from under the back deck. Oh, and at least one bit there - the lower half of a lead miniature (probably a horsie-riding kerniggit) from our last ever Dunedin flat. Yeah, I indulged in suburban archaeology there too and discovered lots of cool stuff - old bottles, a tin bath that ended up as a planter in my mum's garden (naturally), and some RPG discards that, by pure Otago coincidence, may have belong to a gaming acquaintance of my brother's well before we lived there.

Other items of interest: the aforementioned train/wagon wheel, plastic flowers (we got a lot of those in various states in the soil), two Super 15 hacky-sack things (one of which had an operating voicebox at time of discovery, the other had been disembowell'd) and the round yellow thingy top centre-ish. I think it's supposed to be a haystack as there have been a few agriculturally-themed toys discovered so far (well either that or we had Lilliputian farmers occupying the land before settlement). In my opinion it's headed straight for the bitz box as a future native hut or even maybe a Baba Yaga conveyance.

Stuff I've Dug Out of my Garden

In the course of general gardening, weeding, clearing away vegetation from an imperiled deck, digging new plots, mowing lawn and building a low retaining wall (haarggh!) my backyard activities haven't half revealed some unusual objects unearthed from the loose soil. Our back lawn used to be flowerbeds and all elevated by about a foot of earth and clay, but was excavated by a previous owner to make a play area for her kids - and play they most definitely did. By the time we took possession ofthe property other subsequent owners had a go at reinventing the back section in a rather slip-shod way, really, meaning the detritus of numerous juvenile adventures lay in damp, anaerobic conditions waiting for my trowel, my line trimmer, my reliable pushmower.

Here's some of the crap that's come out of the ground since:
















Quite the varied treasure trove we have here: some Star Wars stuff by way of a Happy Meal (I think), lollipop sticks, an Action Man flipper, Kinder Surprise disjecta membra, something I'm informed is a Yu-Gi-O, or Dragonball Z. And bits of stationery of course. Missing from the photo above is a rather careworn Thomas the Tank Engine helicopter (given to the kid of friends of ours before I could fix him up properly - thanks, dear), and a toy wagon/train wheel which has already made it into my 'bitz box'.

Ah yes, the Bitz Box. The amateur modeller's grab bag of off-cuts and model parts, ever ready to be enlisted for further modelling and kit-bashing. Mine is very modest indeed, but there's stuff shown here I have plans for and intend to use in some regard. Most of the other things will be binned, as any sane gardener would do. But I'm a believer in chance meetings and making lemonade while the sun shines, so again, some projects for later in here, maybe. In the mean-time, I think our back section is a little lighter for these having been removed. Doubtless in time there'll be a new crop of things being planted in there by little hands, and I will follow this by wonderng where my car keys got to, or something similar.