Cthulhuween 2014: Seven Swords Against Cthulhu!

Now that Christmas has come and gone, I can finally discuss this year's Halloween one-shot.  That is because while I was getting ready to run it in October, I heard from a friend who had moved away a while ago and misses the Call of Cthulhu one-shots.  He was going to be in town for Christmas, and wanted me to run one then.

Of course I told him to get bent, since I had put so much work into the one that I was working on, and couldn't possibly put together a new one in the intervening 2 months.  But then it occurred to me that since I was putting so much work into this year's Cthulhuween, why not run it a second time to get more mileage out of it?   In addition, since there were other friends and family who would be in town for the holidays who normally missed Cthulhuween, or fellow locals who missed it, this would be a good thing.

So this is the first one-shot that I ran twice (make up your own clever name.)

But that meant that I could not post about it until both groups had played through it.  So now I am doing so.  Happy Holidays!

The theme was one that I had been wanting to do for many years, feudal Japan.  Over the years, I have acquired a number of samurai miniatures from various sources, and always wanted to use them in an epic story.

As to the story, there was an obvious source for 'inspiration' (or downright theft,) in Akira Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai."  If you are unfamiliar with the plot, some poor villagers are being menaced by bandits who steal their crops, and so the village hires seven down-on-their-luck samurai to fight off these bandits.  It's such a simple setup, I can't imagine why no one else has ever thought to use the plot for some other stories...

Of course, I would have to find a way to add a Cthulhu mythos angle to the story.  Perhaps those bandits are not bandits at all.  And perhaps they are not there to steal crops...hmm.

I decided to use plain ol' 3.5 D&D rules, just for nostalgia, and to make them feel tough.  They each got a premade 8th level badass, usually a fighter, which rightly worried them

As I mentioned, I've gathered a number of samurai and related minis over the years.  To begin, I got out all of the samurai minis and looked at them all together.  I immediately realized that the scale differences made it impossible to use all of them together (it would have been really cool if I had thought to take a picture of them all to illustrate this, but oh well.)  For example, there was "Death Demon" from Indy Heroclix, who I had picked up specifically to use as a samurai years ago.  But he stood almost double the height of the really old metals that I had (and which I would be damned if I was not going to put to use!)

Funny side story about the two metal guys I had:  about 15 years ago I ran a 'mythic Earth' D&D second ed. game with some students at my school.  One kid was a real Japanese history and culture buff (today he is married and lives in Japan teaching English, so there ya go with dreams as such,), and he wanted to play a samurai (natch.)  So I went out an picked up a metal samurai mini from the old Reaper Daimyo line, a regular old samurai with medium armor and a kabuto helm with face mask (mempo.)  When I showed up with it (hadn't gotten around to painting it yet,) he says "thanks, but I was thinking something more lightly armored, like this." and produces a second mini in lighter (do-maru) armor with no helm.   Harumph.  So I painted up the second one (with white hair by request,) and when the campaign ended (and the players all graduated,) I kept the minis.

In all their roughly-painted village people glory (guy on the end got reused, so his base was repainted.)

So the upshot was that I had two metal samurai.  But how to make them fit with the larger guys?  I had already decided that I was going to need to pick up a box of plastic ashigaru from Wargames Factory to use as the 'bandits,' and last year's game with the WW2 Germans taught me that WF's excellent minis look puny next to beefier 28-32mm clix guys.  So what to do?

In the end, I just decided not to use the big guys.  So this entire game would be a strict 25-28mm affair.

But this means that I was gong to be a few samurai short of seven, and I would be unable to convert any.  Luckily, I happen to be brilliant

It occurred to me, that instead of getting a set of ashigaru, I could just pick up a box of samurai, and make some of them into ashigaru (rather than buy two boxes, because I am cheap.)  So I started with the samurai themselves.  Let's take a look at them shall we?

We start with the leader, who was an 8th level Marshal (from the Miniatures Handbook, and which is one of my favorite classes.)

 

 He is from the Wargames Factory box, and has blue armor with white laces and a pair of back banners (sashimono,) with no mon or symbol because he his clan was destroyed in his backstory.  Like the others, he is mounted on a clear acrylic disk, which looks pretty great on a battlemap.

Of course there has to be a character who uses two swords.

 

Another Wargames Factory construction, this one in dark blue armor with light blue laces (and sharkskin handles.)

One of the iconic moves in any samurai flick (or anime, for that matter,) is where a swordsman runs towards his opponent, slashes, and then continues onward, and only after stopping does the other guy fall down.  In D&D this is possible with the use of the Spring Attack feat.  So I needed a skirmisher (8th level scout, who gets extra damage for moving as part of an attack.)

 

This is the mini my former student picked up.  I updated the paint job, but kept the hair as it was out of nostalgia.  I had to cut him free of the base, to mount him on the acrylic one, which ended up meaning sculpting new feet for him.

I wanted one guy with a naginata, but there were none on the WF samurai sprue, so I used a spear, and swapped the spearhead for an old sword blade (from the Mordheim mercenaries sprue.)  He was a fighter with a host of cool reach weapon feats, which let him take all kinds of attacks of opportunity.

 

I really like how the brown armor and red lacing looks, along with the shigami image on the helmet.  Like many of the others, the inspiration came from pictures I found online from museum pieces.

Every group of character has to have the big, boisterous guy.  He usually has the heaviest armor, the biggest weapon, and the loudest laugh.  In the best cases, he is played by Brian Blessed.  In this group, I knew I wanted a guy wearing full O-Yoroi armor and wielding a kanabo-tetsubo.

This mini has an interesting story.  There was this HeroQuest knockoff game called Dark World that was distributed by Mattel here in America.  They made a couple of additional sets that never made it to the States, but I picked one up on ebay (I still want a complete copy of Village of Fear something bad, but what can you do...)  Anyway, the minis were cheap single-pose plastics with empty hands so you could swap out their weapons.  Most sucked, but this prticular guy was surprisingly accurate for o-yoroi armor.  For the tetsubo, I used a carved toothpick from Cracker Barrel for the handle, and the head is from the Beastman Gor sprue.  I copied the design from a particular museum display.  It was bigger than the others, but that fit the description of the character's backstory.

And of course there had to be an archer.  Except the samurai sprue had no bows.  What to do, what to do...

 

What the sprue did have was o-dachi, longer samurai swords, still in their scabbards.  It occurred to me that if I took two swords, cut the hilts in half, and then glued them together, it would make a decent daikyu or great bow.  The hands were perfect, I simply had to make him a southpaw.

And that is six.  For the seventh, I wanted an impetuous youth (always gotta have one of those.)  I had the idea of a barbarian, an Ainu mercenary who had won a suit of armor (he had to have a suit of armor, because that's what the mini looked like.)  He was an 8th level barbarian, with feats that gave him sick damage when charging.

I thought yellow and orange would be striking colors, and I ha the idea of this guy taking the tiger as his totem animal.  I thought his jacket should be painted with the image of a tiger, but had no way of getting a decal that would work.  But what else could I do?  Could I really just paint a convincing tiger freehand?

Apparently yes!  I can't tell you how pleased I am with how this turned out.  I just tried it, and it worked the first time.  Just goes to show you I guess, that you never know until you try.

I had to snip his feet off of the base, so his big bear-skin booties (totally accurate!) were sculpted with putty.

So there were my seven samurai.  Now I needed the mercenary ashigaru.  The samurai box set had plenty of legs, arms, and spears, but I wanted their torso armor to be very plain.  There were five different torsos in the box, with five of each.  One of those was what I wanted: a plain cuirass.  But I needed like fifteen guys, so how would I get ten more cuirasses?


I would mold them!  Using Magic Mold Putty, I made simple one-sided push molds of each side of the torso (which were very conveniently flat on one side.)  Then I used plumber's putty and pressed it into the mold to make copies.  Once painted, they looked great.  I couldn't get the heads right (jingasa are hard to sculpt!) so I went on ebay and ordered just the heads from the ashigaru sprue (thanks, Hoard 'O Bits!)

I decided to give them a nice, plain paint scheme (and I clearly didn't spend too much time on them.)


So now I had the minis (most of them, but more on that later,) and it was time to set the scene.  The story begins in media res, with the party having tea in the house of the village elder.  They are a simple fishing village, living quiet lives of simple work.  But about a month ago, as he tells the party, armed men came to tell them that they must move out of their village.

The soldiers were taking order from strange figures in hooded black robes, clutching mysterious books  The robed figures said that the villagers god was a fairy tale, and that they themselves served an ancient and powerful being from the sea.  They said that this god had died, but would return soon.  They then ordered them to leave the village before the stars were in proper alignment, and that if they did not, they would be wiped out.  They even had the audacity to smash the shrine, leaving nothing but a pile of blackened rubble where normally would be found a statue of Buddha.

Of course, this all sounded plenty familiar to the players, all of whom are well versed in the Cthulhu mythos and stories about it.  While the elder is telling them all this (we call this 'black bars,' in reference to the widescreen effect many video games use to indicate cutscenes where you have no control over your character,) the raiders show up, fifteen of them.  The party appears on the map ready to fight!

The map is actually from the Starship Troopers roleplaying game, and came in a boxed set that I picked up for next to nothing during the Paizo Great Golem Sale (LOVE that sale!)  I have a sheet of acrylic that I put down on top to smooth out the wrinkles.  As for the huts, I wanted an easy way to make them, so I tried something new.

I started with blocks of green floral foam from the craft store.  I cut them into shape with the peaked roofs.  For the wood planks on the sides, I used wood shapes from the craft store, scored to look like individual planks.  I covered the sides with glue and then stuck the wood bits on, so that the glue would seal the foam.

 

For the roofs, I used cheap washcloths, painted with white glue and scraped downwards into a 'thatchy' pattern.

Then I drybrushed the heck out of them, and Bob's yer uncle; huts.  I also sprayed the underside with Plasti-Dip spray so that they would not slide around on the acrylic.

The players utterly crushed the goons, who were led by a cowled figure (a plastic Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars Epic Duels!)  After the fight, they checked out this sinister figure, and the description hit all the right notes for someone who's read any amount of Lovecraft:

"The body is of a man, you’d guess around middle age.  But his facial features are like nothing you’ve ever seen before.  His skin is sallow, pasty and clammy like a fish, and his eyes bulge outward, wide and staring like a frog’s.  His face is hairless, as is the top part of his head, which is a scabrous dome, his remaining hair stringy and matted.  He wears an odd-looking dagger at his belt, and the heavy book he is carrying is filled with undecipherable symbols written on some kind of skin, but finer and thinner than any animal’s skin you’ve ever seen.  Altogether, the man gives off an alien, unhealthy appearance that unsettles you."

The players all grinned and rolled their eyes and gave each other knowing looks.  They figured they had the whole thing figured out by this time.  They got another black bars transition when the village elder told them that their cam was a long-abandoned temple known as "Demon Gate Temple," and asked them to go there and take care of the remaining soldiers.

So they fast-traveled to the next encounter area, Demon Gate Temple.

I made the temple using my lovely, lovely Dwarven Forge Game Tiles from the Kickstarter.  This gave me an excuse to paint them up.  I painted the monster face door to look as much like an oni painting as I could.  I also decided to make little coping tile tops to the outer walls.  I started by getting plastruct sheeting in a Spanish tile pattern (works fine for Chinese/Japanese tile as well,) and
make one exemplar.  Then I made a silicone mold of it and used hot glue or plumbing putty to make copies.  Obviously I ran out of time and did not finish all of them, but it still gets the effect across well enough, I feel (but wait, didn't you have an extra two months?  Why couldn't you get it all done in that time?  Fuck you, that's why.)

The pagoda is an aquarium accessory that hilariously fell down while I was spraying it and shattered.  Lucky this place is supposed to be a ruin.  The roof was made from more of the plastic sheets.

So once again they scythed through the mooks like wheat (or rice, I guess.)  As they were about to kill the last guy, another cowled figure appeared and yelled for them to stop, in the name of the lord Jesus Christ.  With him was an official from the Tokugawa government.  This threw them for a loop, and they stopped to hear this guy's story.

It seems he was a foreigner from the distant West, and was a missionary.  He happened across the village and recognized the hideous octopus-headed statue they had in their shrine.  He realized that this village was made up of foul cultists who were planning to summon one of their demons soon.  He tried to disperse them by sending local soldiers to scare them off, but they would rspond only to violence.

While all this was being explained, the players were all groaning and cursing my name as they realized they'd been fooled.  All of a sudden, the description of the robed figure they had killed sounded less like a deep one hybrid, and instead sounded like a European monk as described by Japanese who had never encountered such an individual before.

There was nothing left for them to do but to head back to the village to try to stop the ritual.  When they arrived, the last of the villgers was walking forward into the sea, drowning themselves in autosacrfce.  As they rushed to try and stop them, hideous deep ones (they thought of them as kappas,) attacked.

I didn't take any pictures of this because they are the same deep ones I used for Cthulhuween 2013.

Finally, they defeated the kappas, and it was time for them to fight the final boss battle.  THIS was what they had been given such bad-ass characters for.  It was a Star Spawn of Cthulhu, and I had been waiting to use it since I got my stuff from the first Bones Kickstarter.

My brother provides his own special comments on the situation.

I don't need to tell you that it was a hard fight.  I made up some suitably fearsome stats, but they defeated the thing at last, with only one party member remaining in the October group, and three survivors in December.

All in all, I'm calling this one a resounding success.  I think I wil start doing the two run-throughs in October and December from now on.  When you do this much work for a game, you should at least run it more than once, ya know?