Miniatures For The Mummy's Mask Adventure Path (Pathfinder)- Part One **SPOILERS** (update 5/15!)

Okay, okay- I know that the title of the blog clearly identifies its focus on modern and post apocalyptic minis and all that, but I'm about to run the Mummy's Mask Adventure Path for Pathfinder, and I've gone just a touch insane over making minis.

Now I need to confess right off the bat that I absolutely do not need to get any new minis to run this game.  I have scads and scads of mins.  I have oodles of minis (each oodle being equal to 2.3 scads.)  I have TONS of minis (almost literally, since plenty are lead.)  When my two Bones Vampire level boxes arrived, they huddled together for comfort, being so outnumbered in this strange new environment (it's cool now, they've mingled and made new friends.)

I may not have every creature in the module, but I have 'close enough' matches to accurately represent the type and size of each encounter and still maintain a semblance of accuracy.  So there really was no need to take any special steps to prepare for this adventure path.

Buuuuuut...

The fever is upon me.  It started simply enough; "I don't own a sandling mini.  I bet I could make one.") And before I knew it, I was making and converting every mini in the first module, even ones that I already had acceptable minis of.

Sigh.  Obsession.

So here I have posted photos of my OCD modeling project.  This first batch are all from the first 'dungeon' of the first book in the adventure path.  That means THAT THERE ARE SPOILERS AHEAD, MATEY! YAARRGGHH!



SERIOUSLY: ACHTUNG!  SPOILERS BELOW!  IF YOU PLAN ON PLAYING THIS MODULE AS A PLAYER, DO NOT LOOK AHEAD.  Go look at cute pictures of cats or something.

You have been warned.

 

The first critter the PC's will face is your basic scorpion.  Many of you may recognize this guy as a 'dust scorpion' from Reaper, which is now part of the Bones line.  This was perhaps the mini I was most excited to see rendered in Bonesium, as I frequently need hordes of size small/medium scorpions in fantasy games (especially when you have a summoner on the team) as well as being useful for other games (they will see extensive use in my Fallout game...)

The next foe the party will encounter is a trio of tiny animated objects, in the form of carved statuettes that are part of a military diorama in the first tomb.  This meant I needed some smaller than life size Egyptian themed figures.  That's where Arcane Legions came in.

Arcane Legion was a sadly doomed attempt to cash in on the tabletop mass fantasy wargame market, by appealing to more casual gamers.  The price point on starters was quite low, and minis were available prepainted or not, and the rules were designed to be easy to learn and play.  But it failed.

This is great news for jackals like me who wait for games to be marked down so that we can swoop in and pick up plastic minis for cheap!  However, I had learned that the game is in a 25mm scale, and it was a hard 25mm (close to a 22mm or so.)  There is simply no way one could use Arcane Legion minis next to regular sized minis (let alone Heroclix mods,) as the Legion minis would be dwarfed by the 28mm ones.

But I had a plan!  Years ago, when game stores started dumping their Arcane Legion sets, I decided to pick up two infantry starter sets, one Egyptian, the other Han Chinese.  The Han Chinese troops looked like the famed terracotta warriors, and I just knew that one day I would have an army of those things in either a D&D  or Cthulhu one shot, and being a little bit shorter would not matter, as the actual terracotta warriors were not that tall (under six feet.)  And the Egyptian troops would be painted to be ushabti (tomb guardian statues,) so being shorter also would not be an issue.

Unfortunately, I did not realize quite what the size difference was, so my terracotta warriors are about half sized, rather than simply the shorter end of life-sized like the real thing.  They will still work, but all the PC's will feel like NBA stars.  Worse though, I did not realize that the Egyptian set was mostly mummies.  There were a few human archers, and some Greek and Roman auxiliaries (dressed in obvious armor,) but all the melee guys were clearly desiccated forms with screamy mouths.  They would never do as ushabti, and unless I had a tomb full of halfling mummies, they were otherwise useless.  So I sat on them for a few years.

When I saw I would need some little armed ushabti for this adventure, I got them out and looked again.  I decided to use two of the archers, and realized I could convert a couple of the Greek auxiliaries by trimming off their crested helms and using putty to create nemes-style head cloths, then swap out the Greek xiphos blade for one of the khopeshes that the mummies carried.  Paint them appropriately and voila!

The paint job is rough, not just because they are really small and I'm lazy and only using them once; I also wanted to represent the models as the looked.  The guy in back with the ridiculous eye is intentional, if one looks at the source material (including the picture in the module,) one will see what I mean.

Here is a shot of them with a Bones mini for scale.  Perhaps more 'small' than 'tiny,' but still a preferable size to work with.  I added a fourth just for fun.



 Back view.  Those shields are actually snipped off the ends of some of those safety covers you stick into power outlets when you have small children.

Moving on through the tomb of Akhentapi, the party will face a sandling, an old school critter from the original Fiend Folio, now found in the Tome of Horrors Complete.  It is a size large critter composed of sand, that strikes forward like a snake:

The one on the right, officer, that's him!

I did not have a mini that specifically fit this description, but it seemed a snap to make.  So I did:

 

I started with a paper clip armature, bent into the general shape.  Then I molded the body around the wire using some really cheap plumber's putty (the kind that is no good for sculpting and smells like cat urine.)  Once that was set and sanded, I painted it with white glue and dipped it in sand.  Then I drybrushed the hell out of it and called it a day.  It did not turn out stellar, but damn if it isn't a sandling.

Giant spiders are a staple of low-level adventures.  But one does not find many actual spiders in the deserts of Egypt (or Osirion, the Pathfinder world equivalent)  Thus the module features solifugids; the so-called sun spiders that do roam the deserts of that region.

One of these guys.  They are actually the basis for the 'Frostbite Spiders' in Skyrim

 Unfortunately, nobody makes a solifugid mini (although one is on the way from the Tome of Horrors Kickstarter in which I did not participate, sadly.)  But that's fine, because you can just use a spider mini and be done with it.

Unless you're obsessive.

Using the Bones giant spiders as a base, I used putty to elongate the abdomen and add overlapping plates.  I then used more putty to sculpt oversize chelicerae in the front.  I'm quite happy with the result, and with being the only person in the world (as far as I know,) who possesses a pair of solifugid miniatures.

The prey for these hunters are mining beetles, which are advanced fire beetles.  This being an Egyptian-themed adventure, of course I had to paint them like scarabs.

The carapaces turned out swell, using metallic blue craft paint and a bit of pearlescent green from Martha Stewart of all places.  I'm not thrilled with the oversized mandibles however.  My wife said they looked like extra legs, so I felt I had to pick them out with another color somehow, so I went with red, like on a stag beetle.  I think it looks a little cheap, so I may trim them off entirely.  The eyes also really need to be on the side, so I may mod this mini further.

One interesting encounter in the first dungeon is an animated sarcophagus that attacks the party.  I happen to own a nice sarcophagus mini in pewter from an old vampire mini.  But it cannot stand on its own, so I decided to make another version.  I've begun experimenting with casting my own minis (a post on that is in the works for someday,) and this seemed like a good candidate.  So I made a simple (one side) RTV mold of the lid and the lower section separately, and then used it as a push mold with more plumbers putty.  The bottom did not turn out well, but I was able to add more putty to the lid part to make a solid version out of the plumber's putty.  I then filed down the 'foot' end of the sarcophagus so it could stand up.  Then I mounted it on one of my new clear bases (I'm excited about using more of these,) and I had an animated object fit for a pharaoh:

 


No self respecting tomb is without traps, and one of the ones in the module summons a swarm of flesh-eating cockroaches.  Cockroaches?  In an Egyptian themed adventure with mummies?  Nah.  Those are scarabs, man.  I will be using the stats for the roaches, but how can I not use the scarab swarms I got from the Bones Kickstarter?

Here again the metallic blue and pearlescent green paints shone through.  I made sure to use a variety of mixed colors to avoid them looking too uniform.

Now, the last critter in the first dungeon is a monster I have no mini for, but have long wanted one; an iron cobra.  Of course, I could just use any old snake mini of the appropriate size (got plenty of those,) or modify one and repaint it (granted I would have one less snake afterward,) or simply go online and purchase one (surrendering my hard earned money needlessly.)  Any of these were viable options.

Buuuuuuttt....

I've been dabbling with sculpting my own minis, starting with making more and more elaborate modifications to existing minis.  This seemed like a good opportunity to sculpt a mini from scratch (like I did with the sandling, but more elaborately detailed.)

To begin, I created a rough armature of the shape I wanted out of a paper clip.  Then I used some plumber's putty to bulk it out into the general form of the snake.  Then I covered that shape with green stuff to give the specific details.  For the armored plates, I added them one or two at a time, in order to create the overlapping effect.

In the end, I was pleased with the result:

There are a few rough spots here and there, but not too shabby if I do say so myself.  Now I simply had to paint the thing:

 

 

So there you have it: all the minis for the first dungeon of the first module of the adventure path The Mummy's Mask.  Still plenty more to make, but I do love a good challenge.

**Update!**

Well we finally ran the first tomb, and here is how it looked using Dungeon Tiles:

I made some alterations to the original layout, but you can still see the outline of the dungeon.  The party barely made it out alive, but they had a good time.

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?