The Mass in the Cauldron pt. 3: Painting the Boards

 

So the next phase in making these boards is building up texture before moving into color. I unfortunately didn't get great pix of that step- but after capping off the open ends of the boards with cardboard, I applied two coats of DIY texture paint (in this case Kilz mixed with a lot of sand), and some drywall joint compound in places to transition areas and fill gaps. I also built up the swamp terrain a little bit by adding sheets of stacked cardboard with joint compound and texture paint.

(forgive me if I go deep on process, this is just the kind of thing I find very fascinating to read from other people and it's what remains clear in my brain after doing the project.)

Next then is color. I wanted a color that hovered between the natural world and something much weirder and more synthetic, and lo and behold I happened to have most of a can of this oddball teal color that I'd used on the exterior trim of the building where I live. Perfect. Very heavy and opaque since it's an exterior paint. Another guiding principle behind this whole project is do not spend money. I haven't been able to perfectly adhere to that rule but I've made a great deal of this from materials I have on hand. 

Then- brown as a base color for the swamp elements. Now this is starting to look like something- something ugly in just the way I want it to be. But still very flat- so time to bring it to life a bit. 

I started with a round of drybrushing- an off white on the brown swamp, followed by a light green and a bright magenta on the Mass itself. Then a heavy layer of black wash over the whole thing. It's starting to build up the color that I'm hoping for- I think I got really lucky with the random selection of sample-sized housepaints I had on hand in the studio. But it still needs a lot more detailing. So, the next phase is, of course, a trip to the dollar store for random junk and oddments to add in for detail! 

The Mass in the Cauldron pt. 2- Boards!

 

As I've mentioned, one of my favorite parts of the whole tabletop games hobby is the outlet to make things fast and messy. I spend a lot of time making very fussy deliberate things (I make sculpture in the rest of my life) but game terrain especially is a chance to just fly by the seat of my pants and glue and slop things together in a way I really don't do otherwise. 

The whole focal point and mystery of The Mass in the Cauldron is a gigantic unknown mass rising slowly out of the swamp that is the Cauldron. Players will have a chance to explore four boards representing the Mass, with the Mass running across all of them, gradually increasing in height across all the boards. 

So, a logical (and very exciting) place to begin was building four boards with the Mass running across them. I had a bunch of leftover tile-backer board, and started off by just randomly gluing down trash and foam to build up the volume of the mass. I tend to hold onto stuff like egg cartons, oatmeal tubes, and other food containers, because they work well in situations like this. Years of making sculpture has given me an aversion to pink foam, so I'm trying to minimize my use of it. All of this is just hot glued down in place. I try not to think or fuss to much at this stage. 

The next step is Glop. Something to cover and cohere all of this into one big volume. In this case, I had a bunch of medical gauze and FGR-95 (extra hard plaster) left over from a sculpture project. So the whole thing turns into a kind of papier-mache process with a ticking clock because the plaster sets fast in hot weather. 

This is an appallingly messy process but also a LOT of fun. A couple layers of gauze and plaster will rapidly turn the mess of containers and junk into something like a landform. I wanted to give players the chance to move through the Mass too, so there are tunnels (made from shipping tubes and oatmeal containers) that run through the Mass. 

I also like that Cauldron kind of invites the mashup of fantasy and sci-fi tropes, and the Mass is meant to be something of ambiguous origin, loosely inspired by Jeff Vandermeer's ideas of the New Weird in sci-fi (is it biological? Geological? Extraterrestrial? We don't know and we don't need to). So glopping some broken drill charger parts into the thing gives it a bit more technological feel. 

So, the forms are established. Let that dry overnight with some fans and we're ready for paint next! 

The Mass in the Cauldron- pt 1.

So the real reason I started this blog was to post about an event I'm putting together next month. If you haven't heard of Cauldron, it's the best. It's totally caught my imagination. And it's a bunch of goblins, orcs and trolls hitting each other over the head in a swamp. 

It's the brainchild of Hill Giant Games and I've played it enough to desperately want to play more of the narrative side of it- where your group of hapless greenskins can advance, gather weird treasures, eat pickled feet, and generally make themselves more substantial nuisances than they are to begin with. 

I'm lucky enough to regularly play games with Philly Indie Tabletop, a group of like-minded nerds who mostly focus on the smaller (as the name implies) independent tabletop games. PIT has put together some events in past for Turnip and Hobgoblin, but I thought I'd like to make something happen for Cauldron. I've never done something like this before, but with the kind help and encouragement of Matt Farmer (@ierthling) I've embarked on it. 

I am unfortunately not good at doing things by halves, so I've decided tackle the following before August 22nd-

1. Write an overall scenario for four games of Cauldron (including outlines for each game)
2. Write a zillion new treasure and foraging tables
3. Build four new 2' x2' boards for the event
4. Make a bunch of dedicated tokens
5. And paint a whole bunch of NPCs 

I honestly think the fast and freeform making that goes into terrain and tokens is a major attraction in the hobby for me- for all the slow fussy work of painting minis is part of it too. Also I really really like when all aspects of a game are considered and aesthetically somewhat united- so tokens should fit with the board, boards should look cohesive together, etc etc. So I am midway through this process right now but it's moving. 

And here's the thumbnail outline of what's happening in these four games of Cauldron: 

Deep in the Cauldron something strange is happening.

Rumors abound of a huge mass emerging from the swamp.

An ancient pressure ridge squeezed upward as the

earth shifts beneath the swamp?

Or is it some long-buried building? Is it even from the Cauldron?

Did some zealous shaman call it forth from the stars?

Dweekin the Goblin hasn’t been the same since he came

running out of the swamp, but he swears he’s seen the thing

with his own eyes, and that it BLINKED at him. 

Whatever it is, the rumors also say a few denizens of the

Cauldron have explored the Mass and come away with riches,

but some have emerged changed, whether visibly or otherwise.

Many more have departed than have returned. 

Should your brave, foolish or stupid band of greenskins venture forth,

they will certainly have to contend with other greedy fools,

as well as whatever perils the thing itself may pose.

Next up- building the boards! This was a blast...

This is BWAMP's fault

 

So this whole undertaking is explicitly the fault of bwamp.org and its mastermind Kyle Reimergartin. I blame him for several things. I was in the perfectly innocuous habit of playing RPGs with him and friends over the internet during the pandemic. this is a normal thing that normal humans do. 

then he started building little guys for a game called Turnip. I was following along with interest. this progressed. he acquired GOBLINS. The sight of little goblins unlocked the Proustian memory of sitting hunched over a drafting table in my basement in my early teens, giving myself visual migraines trying to paint these weird little dudes. This spelled trouble. I had an orcs and goblins army circa 1997, probably for 4th edition. I barely played it because I couldn't convince anyone else in Cedar Falls, Iowa to spend their precious pocket money on this level of nerd stuff. That didn't stop me from creating and painting a whole ping-pong table full of terrain. This is when I learned that spray paint eats foam. 

Cut to 2001 when I was heading to college and gave ALL my nerd things (a copious amount of Magic cards, some varied RPG books, and a ridiculous amount of goblins) to my neighbor so I wouldn't look like a NERD when I arrived at college. Whoops. 

Cut to December 2023. I could no longer vicariously watch Kyle paint goblins. I had to paint them myself. So I ordered a bunch of night goblin spearmen. And then the abyss opened before my feet. It's now 2026 and I have so many goblins. And so many other things. And I have rediscovered a passion for building terrain out of trash. Only now I have a whole woodshop and sculpture studio at my fingertips so this is all much more dangerous. I have been posting whatnot on Instagram but I am also know the world is a vampire and blogs are somewhat (in a tiny incremental way) less vampiric than Instagram. But if you want to find me there I'm at @nervous_goblin_factory. 

Also I am spending too much time this summer putting together a narrative Cauldron event for Philly Indie Tabletop and Kyle is screaming at me to blog about it so here we are. No promises. But I'll probably write and put pictures here somewhat regularly. 

                        The first Night Gobbos from early 2024.