Smaug's Horde-FOUND!

So I found the solution to creating the "flowing gold coins" look I was going for with my Smaug's Horde project: 


Plain old gold glitter. 
Yes. 
Gold glitter. 

$2.99 at my local Hobby Lobby and in the perfect small coin size. My project room looks like a 70's euro disco, but nothing a bit of vacuuming can't fix. 

Once applying the glitter over the painted pile, the form really began to take shape. 





I added small jewels, gems, crystals and even random bits of metal to the horde to really give the look of ancient unidentifiable artifacts buried in the horde. These were removed, cut, pulled and pried from old costume jewelry and by pilfering through my 10 year old daughters collection of beads (sorry sweety! RPG emergency!!!) 
A small painted cauldron ( wooden bag of 10 for $1.99 at Hobby Lobby) spilling out gold coins added a touch of realism along with an earring back which served as a perfect sized 28mm round shield, half-buried in gold coins. 
Beads turned to hide center holes make perfect orbs, globes, or even 'Palantir's' along with the presence of diamonds, massive ruby's and various trinkets. 
Lastly, I sealed the entire pile in a gloss varnish spray (spray helped keep the glitter in place for brush on varnish) and spot gloss with fast drying polyurethane. 
Not too shabby for a total cost of probably $8! 

Ideas & Inspiration

It's amazing what you can find that inspires some game ideas and inspiration. Occasionally on this blog I'll throw out some random images I find around this strange campaign-world I am currently in...where I play a level 13 International Creative Director for a major health and nutrition company that maintains a love of fantasy role-playing games and artistic terrain and world building...
Good grief that sounds boring, how did I roll that class?




Found this online the other day. An 80's tutorial on creating your own Hoth base out of foam packing material. Good for my parents that I never saw this back then or I am sure the house would have been a "winter wonderland" of cut foam and random packing peanuts. 
This probably explains the interest in creating my own terrain. The ironic part is having grown up in the 80's playing with just about every pre-fabed Kenner playset the Star Wars brand had to offer, I still ended up creating my own and sticking with the D&D Fantasy genre so many years later...but I can't help but look at this now and think..."That would make a perfect Icewind Dale Icing Death lair!!!"
If your an R.A. Salvatore fan, you'll see it too..... 


A little professional-level inspiration is never bad. This image comes from miniaturewargaming.com and just completely captures what I hope to one day achieve. To be that cooky elderly gentlemen who recreates ridiculously detailed mythical battles of yore at an age where I no longer care what society (or the oppositte sex) think of me as I stride proudly through public in pre-14th century garb, and for some reason speak with an English accent. I'll likely stand atop a crows Nest on my gaming guest house and yell nautical terminology at random intervals as well. And perhaps fire a cannon on the hour. 


This reminds me of the "spinning wheel of death" thing from the film Labyrinth from the 1980's starring David Bowie. It has that same, Fantasy-feel with a bit of mechanical, almost steam-esque feel to it. I have no idea where I found this, nor what I was saving it for other than pure inspiration, so my apologies to the very talented artist and creator of this imagination-capturing model. Household junk can be a tremendous source for creative traps, gadgets, characters, and in-game scenarios. I once ran a campaign lasting several sessions where the objective for the players was to stop a world-eating mechanicus device made from old bike parts, a disected watch and a silver painted q tip. It's possible that it is somewhere still in the deepest bowels of my gaming supply dungeons,  ready to "go off" at any moment.  


I am sure I am not the only geek who thinks about Halloween costumes year round...but I am sure I am not the only one who looks at this and thinks it could make a far better "Cuthulu" costume as well...


These are completely hand made. Well, everything except the sword and dagger. The sword is the Sword of the Witch King from the LOTR, and the Dagger is the Morgul blade which stabbed Frodo atop Weathertop. But the sabotons and gauntlets were assembled, hammered, riveted, and blackened by me in a simple backyard fire-pit and on a bit of old railroad tie used as an anvil. The advantage of creating the perfect NAZGUL costume is that errors can be plenty and be easily hidden under the guise of age and ware. After all, what condition would one expect of armor worn constantly...for ages...by the servants of Sauron?   

Smaug's "melting" Horde? Or...Dragon Vomit?

Ok, so the "Smaug's Horde" project is moving slow, and as of last night, not....quite as well as I had hoped.
The use of hot glue, while so so very good for so many RPG tabletop projects, may not have been the ideal solution. I am finding the paint work quite difficult to capture the "flowing gold" feel while still retaining a sense of "individual shape" to the mass-in other words, it is supposed to look like a pile of coins right, not a massive Ochre Jelly that swallowed a treasure horde.
Now the images here are of course, pre-completion, and this is the first coat of Antique Gold acrylic, so there is no shading, dry brushing, shaping, etc, and quite a ways to go, but its beginning, thanks to adding a bit of metallic gold dry brushing on one end, to at least resemble the possibility of a treasure horde.... Time will tell...
For now though,  it does look like a small pile of dog vomit doesn't it?
Ya.....





Smaug's horde...well...sort of...part I

I read an article once, likely sometime after the release of the second Hobbit film in Peter Jackson's trilogy, that tried to direct the amount of gold actually in Smaug's horde.
It was astronomical. Ludicrous. More gold than had ever been mined in all the earth...or something like that. Far too much to re-create for any creative geek like myself.
So I needed to create a more manageable size horde for modular table top use, and to create a sizable treasure pile that matches the size of the miniatures I currently own. After all, why do I need a "Smaug-size" treasure horde when I have yet to acquire a "Smaug-size" dragon - see Wizards of the Coast Colossal Red Dragon for example ($300...wow...really?).

while I have a fairly good selection of these winged beasts, my largest is the Wizards of the Coast Black Dragon, and while VERY large in comparison to the other standard-size player character miniatures fromWizards and Wizkids, it fails, somewhat ridiculously so, in comparison to the size of the Colossal Red. But it is plenty large for my smaller sized gaming table, area, storage space available, and thus, treasure horde. 
As for other Dragons, Tiamat seems like she would have greater aims then to amass treasure, and this treasure project model will be plenty large for the Wizards of the Coast Dragons Collectors set with large versions of Red, Black, White, Green and blue dragons.

One thing I did NOT want to do from the inception, is have a wide, low pile. I have created treasure piles before from bits of metal, glass, and old costume  jewelry, but I wanted this one to be different. More "epic" to go with some of the new projects I have created of late really focusing on intricate detail and realism. No, this horde needed to ahem height...like when Bolbo slid down the treasure pile like a mountain after the arkenstone...mass. Steepness and a size large enough to attract the attention of even the most fool-hardy of adventurers. 

Early stages:
I started with a cut cardboard base with glued glass round vase beads. these glass rocks come in small bags at just about every dollar store Ive ever seen. I went with clear to ensure that the colors would not necessarily show through the mass of hot glue I would be using atop. For the "base" I wanted to avoid too much color, and save the rainbow flashes of jewels for the top if the horde.
Additionally, I stacked large brooch style costume jewelry pieces on top of those, almost making a "junk pile" of sorts and covering each section with an ever increasing mass of hot glue. I used all temperature hot glue six, allowing some areas to dry harder than others, some to drip and ooze for various effects I will detail later. I have found that high-temperature hot glue six tend to mold into themselves too quickly, and leave you with a large, albeit wide, gooey pile. Wonderful for creating slimes, oozes and jelly's, but not for structures, shapes, or mass.


As the glue hardened and the mass began to take shape, I began to add various beads of color, shape and size. Beads work well because they do not appear as "beads" when the holes are placed at the right angle, they are colorful, cheap, and accessible. Along with this I added more visible pieces of costume jewelry cut with metal pliers into everything from scraps of gold and silver to great spheres of black and even pearls, emeralds, amethysts, ruby's and diamonds. The back of a cheap piece of costume jewelry served well as an upright shield buried in the foreground of the pile too, just about the right size for a 28mm character figure.



Two notes I noticed in the construction here:
1 - Too colorful of beads and it started to look fake. Some of this area here will be painted over with gold metallic and antique gold paint, to reduce the "whimsical" colors here.
2 - The glue needs to be taken right to the edge of the cardboard base so as to avoid a "base" look. I want this to look as if it is sitting on any potential surface. This small exposed lip of cardboard here in the foreground will need to be added to with additional glue and accessories to enhance the look of an overflowing pile, as opposed to a pile on a base. 

Next, gold coloring, wash and dry brushing, and adding final gems, jewels and treasure pile accessories... 



Caverns of the Under-Table

Perhaps it's the winter. The mist. The clouds rolling in over the south-western Ochre mountains here or just that same old "calling" that comes on the wind throught the fall and winter that I have heard my whole life that I have never been able to define, but there has been a tremendous amount of creation going on in the deep dark depths of the (Ursus Templari - yes, still deciding on a proper name....long history surrounding that bit...).

Having purchased the Gale Force 9 Caverns of the Underdark adventure set, I wanted to match the terrain to not just the vinyl Underdark mat produced by GF9, but to the actual terrain models themselves.



http://www.gf9.com/Default.aspx?tabid=348&art_id=3310

So the key was to match hand-crafted terrain pieces with the color, look, feel and outline of the GF9 ones. I'd done this before, and found that Citadel Paints "Fenris Grey" worked well with dabs of purple to capture the sense of dripping cave algae or fungi. I wanted a true seamless piece, complete with crystals, black-purple still water pools, and a real sense of similarity.


There was one other caveat too. I wanted it modular. I already had the GF9 cavern pieces I could use just about anywhere, but I needed mine to be portable, storable in the small gaming tower of the Ursus Templari, and easily accessed for potential gaming (someday). Where could I create a large scale cavern with columns, pools, walls, rolling flowstone and yet still, encompass a complete environment? 
I started looking in places I already had.....midden places, and things maybe I "missed" in the past....like the underside of a table.
Yes, the UNDERside for a perfect UNDERdark....er, uh...the "Under-Table."
The entire table was first sprayed in a "base" coat of generic primer grey. I added dabs with a standard utility brush, allowing the bristles to spread and stretch dry-brush style to create the "blotchy" black and even deeper laid tones of brown to give some depth to the base floor. Stone or natural marble-esque look.
Following the base coat, the walls and "flowstone" was created with grey cement caulk from my local big box store. Cheap caulk, about $3, and a $4 caulk gun. Enough to do far more than what I needed. 
The flowstone caulk was laid on the edges of the table inside, to create a "border" for the natural "walls" of this large cavern complex. By bringing the depth of the walls out it created natural formations allowing the caulk to sort of just ebb and flow and using a small metal pick to manipulate the texture and flow of the caulk. 


I added in small broken fragments of slate tile I had left from a previous bathroom tiling project which when put together with the natural grey cement caulk gave depth, stairs, and accents to the corners to sort of "round out" the harsh edges of the vertical walls of the tables inside bottom. These also made for perfect borders to create the small pools. 




Once this was completed, came the painting of the caulk and flowstone. This was the most time-consuming portion, as the light grey needed to be first painted in several layers of grey and blue to achieve the depth to each section of flowing caulk. Once that was colored to match, the walls were dry-brushed with lighter grey again to bring out highlights, and a black water base was added to finish it off and fill in small holes and shadows.
The final step was to paint in the black "background" caverns, and shape the shadowing around each piece of flowing cave stone. But while this was painstaking and extremely time consuming, the black shadowed background really made it feel like a true "cave" system, with any number of potential monsters and enemies lurking in the dark just out of sight.....


The pools were created using clear glass glue from the local hobby store, and then allowing to dry. I then painted with a watered-down purple-black hue in acrylic paint, allowed to dry, and dry brushed with a gloss varnish. this added the shiny wet look that m,watches that of the pools from Gale Force 9. I followed this same procedure with bits of broken sea glass purchased from the local dollar store that is designed to be used inside flower vases. When the clear glass was painted with the watered down purple acrylic, light was still able to show through. This allowed me to fix it to the caulk walls, and gloss varnish the painted glass for the look of giant purple crystals emerging from the natural flowstone. Again, mimicking the matching look of the Gale Force 9 Underdark crystals and keeping with the grey-purple hued theme.  

 



Lastly, I added gloss varnish to smalls sections of the dried and painted caulk material to give the entire cave system a wet look. 
Matching with the GF9 set was pretty close, although of course not perfect. But perhaps the small imperfections add only to the variety and variances of a real natural cave system. 


Next....treasure......