The Figurante: for Harry Clarke Bestiary Project

A humble contribution to the Harry Clarke Bestiary Project:

The Figurante

Armour class: as chainmail. Hit dice: 8. Move: as a racehorse. Attacks: 2x Pirouette (d10) and Mesmerizing Performance*. No. Appearing: one Figurante plus 3 admirers**. Morale: 10 Treasure: twin lockets, each with the heart of the other. Two individuals holding the lockets are irreversibly in love and their hearts may be found in the other's locket. Alignment: chaos.

Elegant gods burned into existence by The Lady Candlemaker as a case study in duality. The opposite halves of the Figurante are Passion and Poise, united in unquenchable love. Art critics muse that with love so apprehensible, so tangible, the Figurante should be considered a trinity.

*Mesmerizing Performance: Passion and Poise entwine in a breathtaking display of skill, love, and dance. All who see must save or be stunned each round. If two saves are failed in a row, then the observer must grab the nearest partner and begin to mimic the dance.

**Admirers

1 - two former enemies locked in mesmerized dance, unable to escape

2 - a corps de ballet (group of dancers) on a field trip

3 - an angry mob of crop farmers with mushed crops

4 - a priest delivering passionate sermon against the sensuality of dance to a large crowd

5 - a heartbroken giant who can't look away
6 - a panel of critics
7 - an achemist who wants to capture the essence of true love

8 - The Lady Candlemaker

Cathedral in Flames, Ode to Our Lady of Paris

Cathedral in flames, Ode to Our Lady of Paris

So the interior of Notre Dame has burned out. It was quite a shocking spectacle. I'd never known much about the building, but everyone's heard of it. As I saw the fire blazing away from the point of view of countless reporters and iphone users, I couldn't help but think the place was utterly magical. The intricate carvings, biblical iconography, centuries of history, and unquenchable fire. It was tragic and beautiful and evocative. In a small way, from someone a million miles removed, an Ode to Our Lady of Paris.

My design goals for this little dungeon were to respect the architecture and history of the building, make it gameable and fantastic, and to cross-link to tons of other pieces of the community project this is a part of.

The dungeon is submitted as part of the Indefinite Train community project. So technically the whole thing is on a train car hurtling through worlds and time, but it works pretty well without any of that, too. Just replace the italicized references with other monsters/NPCs and forget it's moving.

Apart from running the Indefinite Train, you could use it as an interesting site for a relic the PCs area after. Put the item up in the spire or bell towers. Your Moriarty analog could easily have sent a good to burn down the Cathedral. whatever.

Let me know if you use it! I'm extra interested in how using multiple ton magic bells goes. That and what sort of mischief 50+ toddler gargoyles get up to.

EDIT******

The format of the google doc was terrible and I just realized. Here is a link to the original document just uploaded to google drive as a pdf. I created the document as a pdf, so unfortunately I don't have an editable file for you. Here is the pdf.

Cathedral in Flames

Killteam Objective Marker

Killteam Objective Marker

One of my favorite things about conversions is seeing models that tell a story. This is something that always impresses me about other people's works, and something that I am trying to incorporate into my projects. 

The best parts of 40k to me are the weird, strange and mystic aspects of the setting. I've always loved visualizing Astartes as these fanatical, dogmatic zealots, who would sacrifice immense resources to protect/retrieve holy relics and iconography. I wanted to tell a story of a Space Marine's final stand, the last of his squad. I've loved using this objective marker in games of killteam, as it's felt much more immersive and evocative than a simple token on the board.

A lot of the inspiration for this came from the Overwatch map Eichenwalde. In that map, teams fight for the throne room, in which the German Crusader hero Balderich's corpse lies in his power armor. I thought it was really cool to fight battles over holy relics/a hero's armor etc. Go watch the cinematic short "Honor and Glory". 

I will probably do another iteration of this piece in the future, perhaps a primaris sitting on a throne. Also, if I did it again, I would set the cool colored power armor over warm colored stone, and then set that around cool toned rubble. As it sits, the cool power armor is directly on cool stone. 

-Nebulous 

Mordheim 01: The Hangman

Mordheim 01: The Hangman

"He's a grim man, Aldrich. Be sure, he's not following Avahd into Mordheim for riches or redemption. Losing everything to the destructions of chaos, he lives solely to put heretics to the sword, torch and noose. Alas, in a place such as this, hate is as good a thing as any to drive a man!"⁣

Here is the first member of my new Mordheim warband; Aldrich the Hangman. I had a blast creating him and I'm pleased with how this conversion turned out. The head he's holding is from the Empire Flagellants kit and I connected the skull to his hand via a pin, and then wound the pin with a strand of twine I got from hobby lobby. The twine is also wrapped around his wrist to hide the join. The cawdor kit is really great for Mordheim conversions imo, and you'll see a bit more of it to come..

-Nebulous

Ritual Spell Table

First post fam!

I want to talk about my rpg history and influences, but I figure no one cares about that stuff unless they like how I hack up games so I'm cutting to the chase. I'll circle around to that stuff later.

This is a table to determine the components needed for a ritual largely inspired by Chris McDowall's post on ritualizing DnD spells. If you're playing DnD, pick a spell you want to have a ritual for and decide how hard it should be on a scale of 1-4. either roll that number of d4s or more likely pick which group of condition needs to be met (location, item, words, help) and then roll a d6 for each of those.

(should have made a 'light a candle made out of someone's face' item)

I recently joined started running the OSR starter dungeon Tomb of the Serpent Kings using the GLOG. One of the most compelling things about the system is the levelless spells. A magic user can assign any number of magic dice (usually 1-4 representing their power) to a spell to increase its effects. One condition per magic dice then. Maybe it doesn't matter which condition is met either, just one per magic dice you want to power the spell with. This system makes knowing one of these rituals a lot more fun/flexible.

If you like it, steal it.

-Not Dark Lord