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!