The Day Itself! Playing the Mass in the Cauldron

 

Photos by @michaelcwiatrak_art

Well the day finally came! Yesterday we played The Mass in the Cauldron at Top Deck Games in West Philly. Ten players came with their freshest and stinkiest little greenskins (a flexible term, warbands included bears, cyborg orcs on nightmare beasts, cute hooded frog people, and some spectacular spider-riders) and clashed across four games of Cauldron, mutating, foraging, and finding fantastic relics along the way. I am still somewhat dazed after the event, but absolutely thrilled with how it all went. We had folks make the long journey from all over Philly and Jersey and the suburbs, and everyone stuck through all four games until the big finish! 

The calm before the storm

With ten players, we paired up in two games of two and two of three across the four boards. Thankfully Dellon (@whitetigertablecraft) though to add more treasure tokens for the boards with three players. I can only speak to the games that I played in (though I got tidbits from other players) but it really seemed that people were immersed and engaged in the whole undertaking right off the bat. The first game was designed to start a little more slowly, with rolls for special events only on Rounds 3 and 4, and a more generous selection of treasure tokens. Matt (@ierthling) brought his Frog Spam List (and very generously, frog minis for everyone he managed to turn into a frog) and did manage to turn my hero (Tuggles McSpink) into a frog and then kill him in the first game, though thankfully Tuggles made a Full Recovery after the game. 

Warbands started picking up mutations quickly, but as expected the Mass remained treacherous. I wrote a d12 check every time a model moved on the mass- after an initial move, the rule was just 'don't roll a 1'- but the rule added a lot of drama, as models would get quite high up on the Mass, and consequently face a lot of potential falling damage, if they rolled a 1... and this happened more than one might expect. I had my Beast (Wee Little Snax) and Troll (Dongle the Tongue) both fall off the Mass in Game 3. Snax died and dropped a treasure, which Dongle was happily able to grab in the aftermath. 

In Games 2 and 3, the Events started to really come into effect- sphincter-like holes opened in the Mass, swallowing up models and spitting them out mutated, or the whispering wind causing players to lose control of most of their warband for the rest of the game, or extra Creatures of the Mass emerging to defend it from the greedy invaders clambering all over it. Part of me wondered whether losing control of many characters was Not Fun for the folks who ran into it, but it seems everyone took it in stride. 

I also have to say I'm thrilled with how the custom Mutation, Foraging and Treasure tables played out. Players got very into foraging, finding tidbits like a Notorious Nugget (yum), a Throwable Hole, or a Hot Rock (read- radioactive) and Mass Moss. More of the sci-fi treasures started appearing- the Ray Gun, Jump Boots (which some characters had along with the Telekinesis mutation, making for a potent flying threat), or the Turbo Suction Device. 

Also huge thanks to Matt for being willing to do all the experience math and pair players- my brain was simply not up to the task after a few games of Cauldron! 

For the dramatic denouement, we paired all ten players into teams of two. Each team selected two models for the final game. We gathered around the highest board. From the mists of the Cauldron a strange building emerged- blue, tall, and covered with glowing signs for fast-food establishments. (If you go a little ways back on my IG, you'll recognize this building from my  Wanted! Reward 10,000 CR.  board (which is truly a spectacular game, go play it please)). 

Another day-of bit of brilliance was insisting on team names for the final game- we had Team Jump Boots, and Ray Liotta Fanboyz (both models had a Ray Gun) and a few other really great ones. The final game (Race for the Mushroom) was a struggle to get from ground level to the Interdimensional Mushroom token atop the Bizztro Eleganzza restaurant on the Mass. Since players had this very specific goal in mind, there was some strategic selection of models (biased toward speed, Jump Boots, and telekinesis)

The Mushroom atop the Bizztro

The game ended up delightfully unpredictable, with the Mass shaking off many of the models at one point, and three Autoturrets (one deployed by the bear mini) causing a variety of chaos. 

The bear deploys his Autoturret against a frog person

A spider rider clambers up the Bizztro. 

Eventually the spider rider reached the Mushroom, but failed his Brains check and was overwhelmed by the visions of the Mushroom. The Mass shook and lifted off, bearing the Bizztro into space. We paused to read off the dramatic conclusion: 

As the character’s mind struggles in the grasp of the Mushroom, they see a vision telling the story of the Mass. The Mass was lurking below the Cauldron for millennia, awaiting the moment to awaken and return to its star-brethren in the cosmos. It is one of thousands of vast cosmic beings which exist to ferry galactic fast-food establishments around the universe. Having lost its restaurant long ago in the mists of time, the Mass fell into a deep depression and fell into the Cauldron, while Bizztro Eleganzza blipped through time and space in search of its carrier. Sensing the Bizztro drawing near, the Mass awoke from its slumber. Guided by the Interdimensional Mushroom, the Bizztro returned to its rightful place. Now, it is time for the Mass to leave the Cauldron.

Playing in teams was a great way to wrap up the event (I was a husk of a person after three intense games)- thanks Matt for suggesting it. It was absolutely thrilling to see how engaged everyone was in the final game. 

The whole crew- note Jesse's Green Lung shirt (and James in a Castle Rat one too, hidden in back!)

I'm still processing the whole experience but it sure sounds like everyone had a lot of fun (I certainly did). I'm also thrilled to be part of a community of folks who'll get on board with spending an afternoon listening to my nonsense and engaging with this wild little narrative scenario I've dreamed up. Dellon and I are scheming about potentially publishing some of the scenario in future. The whole thing felt incredibly satisfying to do - having read and listened to a lot of info about narrative minis-based gaming, it was a thrill to just do it and have it succeed so well. Huge thanks to everyone who came out and played, and again to Matt for the brilliant editing and help moving the boards. I need to recover for a while, but I definitely want to do something like this again in future!

And now it's probably time to finish that scratch-built Ork Dreadnought I was working on back in June when I decided to put on this event.. that is, after I unpack and organize all the stuff from yesterday.... 

Thanks for reading and more soon! 

The Mass in the Cauldron pt. 9: Creatures of the Mass!

 As of today I'm exactly one week out from the event! Next Saturday is the big day..... so I think things are in a pretty good place in terms of preparation. The last few things are painting up a few more minis and then printing out all the packets. In the spirit of 'work with what you have,' I decided to use these absolutely brilliant Hieronymus Bosch miniatures by Andrew May. I'd backed them on Kickstarter a long time ago, and they'd been sitting unpainted, but they seem perfect for the weird, otherworldly, mutated beings I imagine inhabiting the Mass. Plus, as an art history dork, how could I possibly resist getting these? They felt too special to use for a long time, but I decided now was the moment. 

I have both sets of them (and it sounds like a 3rd set is in the works) so that's a total of 20 weird little guys. Right now I have twelve done, which is probably enough for the event itself, but I might try to jam out a few more this week while I'm in the mode of doing it. 

I'm really happy with the recipe I landed on for the bases- a strange teal housepaint I have left over, followed by black wash, then lime green, pink, and yellow drybrushing. The figures themselves get painted to a reasonable level of detail then drybrushed with ice yellow, which to my eye at least, hides many little errors and clumsy highlights underneath it. 

Very happy with how these look on the boards- I can't wait to see all of this stuff together and mixed up with a bunch of folks Cauldron warbands! 

The Mass in the Cauldron pt. 8- Layout! Graphic whatnot!

 

Quick little post- I've been traveling for the past week, but while sitting in airports, I've been working on layout for the event packet and flyer. I'm definitely not a graphic designer (I say this because I work with Real Graphic Designers) and most of what I make is 3D, but I enjoy the freedom of bashing together text and images now and again, especially when it's something quick and dirty like layout for a game event packet. I made up the flyer above to promote the event and tell folks what to prepare for the event. This one ended up being a much more all-over design, inspired by the layout of the Cauldron rulebook. 

I was thinking about doing this level of dense layout on all of the pages, but I quickly realized that would be a LOT, and kinda a headache to read on the day of the event. So, I decided to run with making a dedicated header for each of the games, and for each of the tables. I'm about 70% of the way through this- just a few more tables to go- but this was a decent compromise. Fundamentally I'd rather spend my time building terrain and painting minis. I don't spend as much work-time on the computer as a lot of folks have to, but I still don't find myself very enthused about spending extra time unless needed. 

Work gives me access to the Adobe Creative Suite, and I'm used to working with these tools for art purposes. I briefly debated doing all of the layout in InDesign, but honestly that's a program I'll only touch if I have to.. I haven't made my peace with it (ask me about putting together a 900-page tenure dossier in InDesign- actually, please don't). 

So I settled on knocking together headers in Photoshop and Illustrator, then just doing the layout in Google Docs (I know, clunky, but that's where I'm writing). A little finagling with font, margins and indents and these are passable for a one-day event. I wanted to keep the instructions for each game to two pages, and I more or less succeeded there. 

I do try to be good about using stuff that's in the public domain for the images I sample- my default is Wikimedia Commons, though I know there are a lot of other good sources out there. I decided to keep this to black and white for graphic simplicity, and also because getting anything printed in color is expensive and a hassle in my world. I like to search for engravings and drawings because they're already simplified graphically. For these headers I didn't run them through posterizing filters, though I'll do that sometimes to get a little more edge/simplicity. Here just tweaking the brightness/contrast is enough. 

Honestly the amount of great old engravings is such a treasure trove for me, and I end up discovering all kinds of neat stuff as I'm poking around. The other fun thing about graphic design-adjacent work is the ability to just tweak and adjust proportions and relationships so quickly and freely. This kind of intuitive fiddling isn't possible in making sculpture (at least usually for me) so it's fun to just be able to adjust immediately and tweak stuff. 

Got a few more of these to get done, but I'm feeling the pressure to get the next round of NPC minis painted- I have exactly two weeks from today to get all of this done. I'm feeling OK about where I am now but no time to dilly-dally. Next up- the Creatures of the Mass NPCs! 

The Mass in the Cauldron pt. 7- Ogre Treasure Hunters!

 

Ogre Treasure Hunters!

The next thing I've been working on for the Mass in the Cauldron is a set of NPCs for the scenario. Like most anyone in this hobby, I of course have a backlog of miniatures that I haven't gotten to painting, so I ended up writing in two sets of NPCs in the scenario based on a couple sets of minis I'd purchased without really having a project or army in mind. First up- the set of Wargames Atlantic Landsknecht Ogres. I was soo delighted to find these physically in stock at Sanctorium Games in NJ last year and couldn't resist buying them. How can you not love a big stocky ogre in flamboyant slashed landsknecht clothes? I wrote them in as Ogre Treasure Hunters, prowling over the Mass in search of unearthly artifacts and riches. 

The perfectly tempting box of ogres

I have to say that building these guys was a real pain. Part of it is on me, for not using plastic cement (thanks Philly Indie Tabletop for the reminder there) but anything with a two-handed weapon is usually a hassle.

Side note on SAFETY- while adding magnets to the bases, two magnets jumped together while covered in liquid superglue. A tiny drop got in my eye- which meant spending most of the next day at the eye ER! I'm fine, but I'm going to wear safety glasses when gluing down magnets from here on out- so the safety minded shop teacher in me wants to share that recommendation....

Assembled ogres at great cost to my eye and my patience

From there, just painting away. I tend to use gesso on bases and dip the whole model into scale gravel to get texture, and I wanted to use a few more bits to give these guys a feel like they're part of the Mass. Because of my aversion to spray paint, I just brush-prime things with the Vallejo primer, but it works pretty well. I try to be a fussy painter, but my patience has limits and I'm feeling the need to get these guys done. 

     

Quick bit of basecoating

I'm pretty straightforward with painting- basecoat, washes on each color, then mix up highlights and do what I can there. On a real showpiece I'll try to do two rounds of highlights, but I wanted to work fast on these guys. 

Washed and ready for highlights

Then just drybrush the bases with the same mix of colors I've been using on the tokens. I was going back and forth and considering doing the bases in my usual goblin green so they'd work for other later fantasy game scenarios, but I decided in favor of keeping the Mass looking cohesive and I'm pretty happy with it. I always debate whether to do overall drybrushing on the model after doing all those highlights, but more often than not, a quick, light drybrush with Vallejo Ice Yellow makes everything look so much sharper and more unified. 

        

Two finished ogres. 

Then I ran downstairs and immediately set up my toys on my board and took pictures because WHY ELSE ARE WE DOING THIS??? Very excited about these guys. I've got another round of NPCs to get done, but I'll be traveling for the next week so things will be a little sparse on posting. Gonna try to get some layout done for the scenario guidelines while I'm away, though. 

As always, thanks for reading and more coming soon! 

The Mass in the Cauldron pt. 6: Tokens!

 

Finished Coruscating Nodule tokens.

Next up in the process is making tokens. As I've gotten deeper into tabletop/miniatures games, one of the things I've come to appreciate is a completely themed table of miniatures, terrain, and tokens. I think that's the artist brain wanting a visually cohesive experience. I completely understand the reasons to have dice and other things on your board to keep track of damage or other details, but if you want my honest opinion, I don't want to see it. 

I want the board to be visually immersive, and to be as much of a window into the world in which we're playing this game as possible, as opposed to something more like a board game with pieces and cards etc. So, in my rather totalizing vision for a tabletop game, everything on the board is painted, complete, and bespoke, and you can have your pencils, character sheets, dice, cards or whatnot off to the side, thank you very much. 

(My one obvious exemption is for Space Gits, in which stacks of dice are an essential mechanic, also this game can do no wrong and EVERY time I play it, whether with experienced tabletop nerds or with folks who've never touched a miniature, it's an absolute ripping great time.)

                      
Coruscating Nodule tokens

For this scenario, I needed a variety of tokens. In Cauldron your characters are often seeking Treasure tokens, which must be spirited off the board to be claimed. So I needed some of those. I also wrote a couple other types of token into the possible events that might happen in the Mass- something called a Coruscating Nodule, and then a great big mushroom for the final game. 

I find tokens a lot of fun to make and paint, since they're like tiny little sculptures and they can be looser and messier than actual miniatures. Also they can be made from junk and debris, so there's no pressure to do justice to a fancy expensive miniature that I treasure and want to be worthy of showing off. The pearls I mentioned previously became the Coruscating Nodule tokens. That was delightfully easy- just superglue them to a base, douse the connections with baking soda, and repeat until I had something that looked like a semi-biological outcropping. Then add base texture (I use gesso and dip the whole base in a mix of scale gravel/sand, both for miniatures and tokens). I'm painting all the bases for the tokens with the same teal I used on the boards. Follow with a black wash, then drybrushing in the same pink, lime green and yellow I used on the boards. 

Oh horror! Gold spray paint!

For the Treasure tokens, I assembled these by gluing the 'building circles' toys onto bases- happily they fit into the base slots! I cut a few of them up to give some variation and added some small rocks and of course sand texture to the bases. The mushroom token came from some 3D printed mushroom terrain a friend gave me- actually quite nice for 3D prints (I do a LOT with digital fabrication in my teaching and art-making, but I am not usually a huge fan of 3D printed tabletop games whatnot). 

I tried very hard to resist spray painting these things. I did some tests, though, and my usual brush-on Vallejo primer just ran right off the plastic toys. I could have fought it, but honestly that wasn't worth it here, since I had a lot of tokens to complete. So I surrendered and got a can of gold spray paint (going straight for the WORST possible stuff- not only spray paint but METALLIC GOLD!). It worked like a charm though. 

Gold and teal!

With the spraying out of the way, I could move onto my usual detailing. I did the same cycle of teal base and drybrushing on the treasure tokens. The mushroom needed a bit more special attention, though, since it's a showpiece for the end. Last summer I bought these Vallejo Shifters paints for a project I was doing with Max (if you haven't yet, go take a look at Rumpus, which he and Kyle have been madly developing for the last couple years). This was a set of 'Twinkling Tombs' tokens I made- think a game board inspired by Damien Hirst's For the Love of God. 

One fun thing about miniatures work is that I can indulge in a lot of stuff that I think is really silly or tacky or whatever, and just run with it, rather than try to frame it aesthetically or actually make peace with it. I think that's really exciting and freeing, honestly.

Treasure tokens!

These came out fun- maybe thinking of them as big gears or something protruding from the earth. 

The Interdimensional Mushroom!!!

Last up was the mushroom! This needed to look cosmic and weird, hence using the Shifter paints on top of the caps. Pretty happy with how this came out. 

And here we have a tray with all the tokens ready to go. I did decide to use some red crystal tokens I had on hand, as well as one other set of things I'd made for Wanted! Reward 10,000cr which will be revealed in the actual game scenario. 

So I'm moving along through the list of things to make- and moving now onto the NPC miniatures, which I want to slow down and do in a refined way, since they're miniatures I love and and want to do a Nice Job on. And then there's layout for the game scenarios, packets and tables! Gonna be quiet on the blog for a few days since I'm going camping this weekend, but more to come soon. 

The Mass in the Cauldron pt. 5: Writing? Ideas? Etc.

I've been focusing on the process of building the boards so far, but I thought I'd take a minute and talk a bit about the process of writing the scenarios. I've done a bit of game-related writing over the years, but it's not something I've pursued extensively. 

A few years ago I wrote the Wig-Maker's Fingers for Into the Odd, which was an utterly fascinating experience (thanks for the encouragement, Max!) I've always enjoyed writing, but over the years, most of my creative energy has gone into making artwork. So, when I got back into RPGs and then tabletop games, writing felt like accessing an unfamiliar side of my creative practice. At the same time it was a very freeing experience- the speed at which an idea can be captured and to a certain extent realized in writing is so much faster than the process of making an object, at least the way I go about it. 

So, I tend to start with a very messy Google doc. I jot down a bunch of ideas, and often these ideas will suggest other things to look at, and it ends up being a soup of links to Wikipedia articles and maybe some images and then bullet points and half finished sentences that interrupt each other. Sometimes I think it's better to start ideas on paper, but I type and gather info so much faster digitally than I can write by hand, so the messy document is usually where things begin. 

The other point is that game writing is much different than any other mode of writing for me. It requires a whole bunch of potentially disconnected ideas, rather than pursuing a cohesive thread or narrative. The goal is to create a series of ingredients that are flavorful, unpredictable, and compelling, then hand them off to players and dice rolls to see what happens. Give the players a world, a context, throw some surprising, highly specific items and events at them, and that, at least for me, is where a lot of the fun comes in, whether for RPGs or tabletop games. It becomes more of an exercise in imagining a world and all its bits and pieces, as opposed to developing characters or stories- that's for the players. 

For this undertaking I wanted four game scenarios with some specific events for each game (to add flavor and unpredictability). Cauldron has great tables for things like treasure, foraging and mutations, but I wanted to write my own versions of these for the Mass, since it feels like an unfamiliar object would have its own set of possibilities. So I ended up writing new tables for Treasure, Mutations, and Foraging. 

I will admit that I wrote most of the item and event tables with Cauldron open in the background. I love the flavor and slightly jokey, knowing tone of the writing in Cauldron, and it helped to keep the things I was writing in dialogue with the game itself. 

That said, as the writing the four game scenarios proceeded (I wrote scenarios and rules for the four games roughly in order, followed by tables), I did find myself leaning much more in a sci-fi direction than the magical dirty swamp that is Cauldron. Maybe a nudge was the fact that one possible treasure in the game is an actual machine gun. Which really cracks me up, but it also points to older visions of sci-fi/fantasy in which the genres blend more fluidly- think Jack Vance's Dying Earth, or Goodman Games Mutant Crawl Classics, both scenarios in which the game/story is set in a post-technological world, with magic appearing amidst the ruins of a sophisticated technological civilization. Or just the fact that early editions of Warhammer Fantasy and 40k/Rogue Trader were essentially rules compatible, so one could potentially mix and match the games at the table. 

I'm also drawn to more surreal and somewhat silly visions of a technological future - the absurdist humor of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Red Dwarf was formative in my teenage years. Another slightly more esoteric source I recently revisited is Daniel Pinkwater's Borgel. I cannot recommend this very strange book enough. A young man accidentally goes on a surreal journey through Space Time and the Other with his 'uncle', a mysterious man named Borgel from 'the old country' and their talking dog Fafner, in a clunky old car called the Dorbzledge (that might be spelled incorrectly but it doesn't matter). Various campsites, galactic fast food stations, and a trip to Hell later, it comes to a rather uplifting conclusion, involving the discovery that one form of the Supreme Being is the Great Popsicle. (Seriously go read some Daniel Pinkwater if you haven't already, you owe it to yourself)

Theodore Kittelsen Skogtroll, 1906.

(don't worry, it's public domain, I checked!)

And there is of course visual inspiration to draw from as well- I know there are so many tropes of adventurers realizing the thing they're walking on is alive, but the first image that popped into my head is this wonderful illustration of a forest troll by the Norwegian artist Theodore Kittelsen. I grew up reading a lot of Norwegian folktales so many of his images live in my mind, and it really embodies that idea of an ancient lifeform that exists on a nearly geological time-scale, like a living mountain or a nearly immortal sloth. 

In the game world, I don't find myself hugely drawn to writing a bunch of new mechanics or new games- I like to dig around in a game that already exists, but one which is open ended enough for me to envision new things without being trapped in a lot of existing lore. Cauldron fits this bill perfectly- as does Into the Odd. I'm really not interested in playing or imagining in a world with extensive existing stories, like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. I'm much more interested in creating narratives and situations that might be fun to play in, rather than designing all mechanics of a game from scratch. I guess I would say have a story brain, as opposed to a game design brain, and that's just fine by me. 

Anyway, that's a quick outline of the writing process so far. I also want to extend my thanks again to Matt Farmer (@ierthling) for a really keen and thorough and generous review of what I'd written. Matt caught so many things that would have made this unplayable, and offered numerous really excellent suggestions that will make the whole endeavor much more fun and surprising. It's not publication ready by any means, but I think it will do for a one-day event packet. I am delaying doing the final edits and formatting, though. Next on the list- making tokens!