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! 

The Mass in the Cauldron pt. 4: Painting and Detailing the Boards

 

As alluded to in the previous post, the next step was to get my hands on some new things to create detail on the boards. Luckily there's a Dollar Tree next to my regular grocery store, and dollar stores usually have all manner of good stuff on hand. The finds this time were a set of really great iridescent fake pearl things, which came in TWO sizes (excellent for looking natural) and these knockoff kids building toys, aka "building circles".  Not pictured- fake wheat from the fake flowers section, great for swamp plants. I'll come back to the building circles- they're actually fodder for tokens, not the boards themselves. 

I glued down the iridescent pearls in nooks and crannies throughout the boards, thinking of them like a geological deposit or fungal material, perhaps. I'm quite generous with white glue on the boards, as it creates good gloppy texture, and some of the pearls slipped or ran down off the board in other locations- and that's fine. Most of the gluing in general is done with white glue, since it's cheap, non toxic, and I'm not in a rush- letting things dry overnight is generally fine. 

From there, finishing the boards involved many rounds of drybrushing, moving from darker colors (purple, magenta) to very bright ones like a vivid yellow and lime green. I did this with a 2" or so house painting brush, trying to concentrate the lighter colors on the top of the Mass, but also blending over the pearls and other features to integrate them. 

I struggled a bit with material to imply water for the swamp. The boards weren't built with a lip to contain a proper resin pour, and I didn't want to order a bunch of resin for the project. I briefly contemplated getting the bar top epoxy from Home Depot, but it's relatively expensive and takes 72 hours to cure, which was more time than I wanted to give to that phase of the project. So, finally, I just decided to take the poor man's route and pour white glue and hope for the best. I tried to concentrate it in areas that would have maximum effect. It dries sort of clear, sort of cloudy, which is OK for a swamp. The final fix was to wash it with a very bright green acrylic- that gave it a nice contrast against the earth and the Mass, while still letting some of the base texture show through. 

The final swamp details were some lichen and moss material I've had around forever- there was a period in grad school when I was very into scale models as art (I shopped at all the train guy stores) and I'd been schlepping a bunch of Woodland Scenics supplies around since then. I also acquired some Woodlands rubber molds for casting plaster rocks in this phase of my life, and they're just great for game terrain. Awfully handy when one decides to return to tabletop games in midlife. 

The last details for the board were making a kind of plinth for an object that will appear in the final game (no spoilers yet!) and then building a bunch of ladders out of 1/8" square scale lumber. I really like making terrain/buildings for orcs and goblins because everything can be messy and sloppily crafted- so I deliberately broke the lumber as opposed to cutting it, and then cut the short bits in bulk with a not-super- sharp chisel, which kind of crushed the ends instead of making clean cuts. I tried to dip the ladders in thinned black paint as a base (I find ladders annoying to paint) but this dissolved the white glue, so I surrendered and got my fingers all covered in brown paint. That plus a little off-white drybrushing and they're all set. 

(I know, you might ask, why not spray paint? Like pink foam, I've been trying to get spray paint out of my life and my studio for years. I really don't like it, it smells bad, it makes a lot of waste that's hard to dispose of safely, and one is always left with six mostly empty cans of colors one will never use again and that just sit around being a fire hazard. But spoiler- I DID break my rule when it came to making tokens...)

So these are the four boards (though I'm reserving some details for the day of the event). I'm delighted with the level of texture and unearthly color palette that they eventually took on- it feels very much like the unfamiliar/extraterrestrial/ambiguous world that the Mass might come from. 

As is usual in making things, I like to bounce back and forth between parts of the process. So, building the boards informed the writing of the game scenarios, and of course the initial ideas for the scenario inspired the the boards. The key is that I didn't have all four scenarios written before starting the boards- I find it easier to let different parts of the process inspire each other, and I think that's generally much more exciting, productive, and helps keep me from getting stuck. But now I'm committed to the boards, so that's off the list. Next up- a bit of thinking about my writing process, then onto making tokens and NPC models! 

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.