omens and ANOTHER BEHOLDER

Print PDF So I gots a little exhibition thing at Glue gallery in Dunedin and I'm making some creatures what I already made so I don't mind selling them, and beholder is one I just made and showing you now

And now some rpg gibbets.  The process of welding on the better bits of Feng Shui to D&d are going well, and I spent a sleepless night in christchurch last night giving feats/schticks cooler names. My favorites so far are "Over compensating", allowing you to use an over sized weapon at no penalty, "A professional relationship" for weapon specialization and"Will consider anything" for no penalty for improvised weapon use. I think I'm funny anyway.
Christchurch is little bit on the trashed side at the mo, there were some good aftershocks when I was there, and its a particular kind of adrenaline jolt you get from them, this "the world has stopped making sense" kinda thing that you also get from finding fire in unexpected places and seeing ghosts.
Anyway my folks are there, and not under a pile of rubble and I made my yearly attempt at a family connection.

So decided barbarians are gonna be called Abominations and be like this guy:

That's him at the top and below that him using his "barbarian rage/warp spasm" powers.
And yes he was modeled heavily on Cu Cuchulain (holy shit the spell checker knew that), an Irish folk hero who would flip the fuck out and mutate heavily and kill everyone
"

The first warp spasm seized Cuchulainn, and made him into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of.  His shanks and his joints, every knuckle and angle and organ from head to foot, shook like a tree in the flood or a reed in the stream.  His body made a furious twist inside his skin, so that his feet and shins and knees twitched to the rear and his heels and calves switched to the front.

The balled sinews of his calves switched to the front of his shins, each big knot the size of a warriors bunched fist.  On his head, the temple-sinews stretched to the nape of his neck each mighty, immense, measureless knob as big as the head of a month old child.  His face and features became a red bowl:  He sucked one eye so deep into his head that a  wild crane couldn't probe it into his cheek out of the depths of his skull: the other eye fell out along his cheek.

His mouth weirdly distorted: his cheek peeled back from his jaws until the gullet appeared, his lungs and liver flapped in his mouth and throat, his lower jaw struck the upper a lion killing blow and fiery flakes large as a rams fleece reached his mouth from his throat.  His heart boomed loud in his breast like the baying of a watchdog at its feed or the sound of a lion among bears.

Malignant mists and spurts of fire  the torches of Badb  flickered in red in the vaporous clouds that rose boiling above his head, so fierce was his fury.  The hair of his head twisted like the tangle of a red thornbush stuck in a gap; if a royal apple tree with all its kingly fruit were shaken above him, scarce an apple would reach the ground but each would be spiked on a bristle of his hair as it stood up on his scalp with rage.

The hero-halo rose out of his brow, long and broad as a warrior's whetstone, long as a snout and he went mad rattling his shields, urging on his charioteer and harassing the hosts.  Then, tall and thick, steady and strong, high as the mast of a noble ship, rose from the dead center of his skull a straight spout of black blood darkly and magically smoking like the smoke from a royal hostel when a king is coming to be cared for at the close of a winter day."

Omg I have such a wide-on right now from all the slaine and what the fuck? That's a barbarian, yes conan all very good but vanilla and fuck off ,  this tingles my jingle so  yes, Irish folk stories, very much on the drugs.

So Slaine was from the British comic anthology 2000 ad which was also very much on the drugs, and if you have not read it you should track down as much as you can. Like its pulp as all shit, but it blew my mind as a kid, like it scared me and traumized me, but in a good way. Like you go from reading spider man where peter parker spends half a story arc crying because he punched some guy too hard , to Judge Dredd, where there's cyborg pirates throwing people into a ocean of the future, which was so diseased you died in seconds. And then they shoot some cluster nuclear missles and kill a couple of million people and Judge Dredd goes and fights them all and it turns out the main pirate guy is actually a future russian, and so Judge Dredd's bosses ring up the future russians and are all like "hey what the fuck is this?" and the future russians are like "oh is our face red, here we nuke a couple million of our own people and we all even steven." And Judge Dredd's bosses are like cool, "all well that ends well" and my ten year brain is blown. I mean there was a moral, and it was government suxs but people are fucking stupid worms anyway. Compare and contrast to Superman, or batman whining about not killing people. 

Like 2000ad was a very uneven ramshackle type of thing, and the humour was aimed at kids. No really. It was. 

Other highlights include where the Atomic Biological Chemical warriors fought rogue t-rex's on mars. My poor childs brain can still remeber the scene where a trapped mother comforts her son to close his eyes because it will all be over soon, and then the t-rex eats them.

One of the robots was some kinda of chaos warlock ("deadlock") and did magic and had an awesome sword and another was programmed to betray ("blackblood") and he had photos of the sniper robot ("joe pineapples")dressing up in womens clothing and later there was Killdozer who thought he was a barbarian hero and yes very on the drugs.

Alan Moore wrote some of his first stuff for these guys, "Jr and Quinch" about 2 alien delinquents who killed and tortured people. The scene where Quinch is driving some kind of giant steam roller along a beach burned its way into my mind quite deeply.

I think the magazine had some system where the would give an artist X amount of pages and let them go for it without attempting to taper or moderate the end result, and it lead to phantasmagorical stoner spash pages, bizarre rambling plots, abrupt changes in mood and genre and why are you not looking this up right now? Abc warriors, judge dredd (especially anything with Judge Death, Judge Fear, Judge Mortis and Judge Fire) , Strontium Dog, Jr and Quinch, Nemesis the Warlock, anything drawn by Simon Bisley etc.

In conclusion 2000ad was a 14 year stoner metal geek in the best possible way.

anyway so ages back I mentioned a omen table thing and here's the system I'm using.

Basically the player draws (or you roll on a table or use  abulafia http://www.random-generator.com/index.php?title=Tarot_Card) a major arcana tarot card and each card has a little port folio and the player can get a +2 bonus or somesuch if they can say that this one roll is under its port folio.

But  also the card has a negative port folio and the d.m gets to put bonus/penalty on some appropriate adversarial roll for the player.

I'm doing it so the player has the option of checking for omens in the morning, and they draw the card and hold onto it and they give it over when they use it. And when I use the negative influence modifier I be all like "As you explain you situation to the Bastard King of Howling Meat, you have a horrible chill go down your spine. This is an unauspicious  day for such things.

Maybe you would prefer to use something tastier than a +2, like getting to use the bigger dice (d30 instead of d20 etc) or auto success. Anyway you get the picture.

here's a card list and their areas of influence  

The fool:

good:

Freedom

eg escape artist checks, pick locks, sneaking out of places, save vs paralyzing attacks

bad:

Caution

eg perception checks for enemy ambushes, search checks, number of wandering monsters

The Emperor 

good:

Authority

eg leadership checks, charisma checks for gaining official approval, court decisions

bad:

innovation 

eg craft checks, experimenting with potions, making new stuff

<thwump> there's your brother, pizza delivery man junior

The Empress

good:

Fertility

e.g stupid druid spells, survival checks to find nuts and berrys and road kill, spells to do with wellness and heartiness not healing per say. Baby eating. , animal summoning

Bad:

Deception

e.g sense motive checks ,bluff checks etc

The Magician

good:

personal power

e.g concentration checks, magic, spell durations

bad:

hubris

e.g

saving throws versus charm, pissing npcs off,  power level of demons summon, control checks for summoned creatures

The high priestess

good:

wisdom

e.g scrying, knowledge checks, the wisdom freaking stat

bad:

emotions

e.g save versus confusion, fear , rage etc, people over reacting to stuff

(it's the tarot, it's like 50 % gender stereotypes and essentialist clap trap )

The Heriophant 

good:

knowledge

e.g ...

bad:

stagnancy

e.g

weather preventing travel, bureaucratic nonsense

The Sun

good:

vitality

e.g resisting fatigue, any physical labour

bad:

naivity

e.g 

resisting deception, noticing traps or ambushs

The Moon

good: inspiration

e.g perception checks, int checks, we-are-stuck-come-on-dm-throw-us-a-freaking-clue checks

bad

insanity

e.g saves versus insanity, confusion , panic

The Devil

good:deceiving/manipulating people

e.g disguise, intimidate, bluff, basically any player relevant charisma check

bad: Imprisonment

e.g pick locks, evading the law, sentencing, saves versus entanglement

The Tower

good:

destruction

e.g breaking other peoples stuff, sabotage, arson , damage to inanimate objects

bad:

destruction

e.g the same as above but you and your stuff

Justice

good:

truth finding/punishment

e.g sense motive checks (again), um.. perception checks?, to hit criminals

bad: ruthlessness

e.g roles to avoid hitting allys in friendly fire, collateral damage

Temperance

good: bringing together opposites

e.g potion experimentation, making friends type cha checks, dilpomancy

bad:

passivity

e.g initiative, damage

Wheel of Fortune

good:

Surprise!

e.g ambush related rolls, inflicting unexpected plans on people

bad:

the same but against you

The World

good:

accomplishment/completion

e.g survival checks to make it home. healing checks after battle

bad:

responsibility

e.g to hit or damage rolls against hirelings or steeds that you have put in danger

The Star:

good:

healing

e.g ...

bad:

sacrifice

e.g item saving throws, stat loss due to spells you cast

The Hermit

good:

guidence

e.g tracking , oracle spells, path finding

bad:

isolation

e.g summoning animal numbers, sending messages out for help, communication attempts, getting lost

Death

good:

conclusion

e.g to hit/damage against boss type monsters, finishing blows

bad:

loss

e.g damage rolls, people stealing stuff, beloved pets stuffed with spiders

Strength

Good:

self control

e.g saving throws, strength checks

Bad:

Conflict

e.g chance of wandering monster, chance of people hating you

The lovers

Good:

union, bonding

e.g rolls to help out other party members

Bad:

Doubt,difficult choices

e.g fear saves, will saves arghha itsss latee

The Chariot:

Good:

Conquest

e.g hit/dmg killing people and taking their stuff

bad:

arrogance

e.g misreading situations, trip attempts against you, save versus taunt style effects

Judgement:

good:

hope

e.g anything you are trying to do with the odds against you

bad:

consquences

"so how many monsters heard that boulder come crashing down?", "gee I hope that girl we left behind in the ogre lair wasn't anyone important's daughter" etc

The hanged man

good:

patience

e.g spell duration, concentrate checks, stealth in waiting around

bad:

submitting

e.g saves, spell durations

That took too damn long and was a little scatchy but I hope its usable to anyone

sleeeep nowww for scrapprincess mistress of ruin boiler of children

d30 mutation table

Print PDF SO its dead quiet here at the end of the world and I have nothing I would be rather doing right now than typing another mutations table. But like a d30, another hundred just wasn't happening tonight.
It will be my jeweled malign gift to you all, in the time of the Fat Man. Like beetles in tiny gold suits, centipedes drenched in honeys, flowers of small broken skulls,  these are the things that spill from
my cornucopia horn, upon your up turned faces lips parted and eyes closed from the light of TOILETWORLD

I'm here listening to the machines hum and trying to cramp the Feng Shui into d&d all because I liked the feats but thought they had boring names.

01 At your elbow your arms split into 3 forearms. If you use an additional light weapon to one you are already using , um.. roll both weapon's dice for damage and keep the highest? Or do some kind botch ass 3 edition double weapon thing mechanic

02 Tiny gaping baby bird heads sprout along your collar bone, eyeless and silently cheeping.

03 You face and body is smooth like a cheap manikin, with "normal features" existing on it as a flat but vivid images.
 
04 All your body fluids will glow in the dark if exposed to oxygen

05  Your spine is ridiculously flexible. You now sleep curled up like a rattle snake. This gives you a +2 dodge bonus to your a.c

06 When completed submerged in warm or cold (but not hot) water you freeze solid and go into a staisis state until removed from the water and left to thaw for an hour

07 You can invert your stomach out of mouth like a frog, thus, (also like a frog) allowing you to excavate its contents manually. This allows you a new fortitude save againest something that's fucking with you that you ingested, or at least avoid secondary damage

08 YOu have a big tight mass along your spine and back of neck. This allows you to generate a powerfult eletric jolt like the famous electric eel! ie shocking grasp once a day. The day after a day that you don't use this power you get head aches, mild hallecanations and a 1 in 8 chance of a epilitic fit . Also? you can only use this power if you are really scared or angry.

09 Your urethra protrudes from your body encased in a hand span length of sensitive tissue
Gills. On your neck, that open and allow you to breath some kind of poison gas. Anytime you are exposed to a poison gas roll a d8, on a 8 that's a type of gas you can breathe to no ill effect.

10 Any opening in your body (eyes, ears, mouth etc) closes over with skin when you sleep, and every morning you must cut them open if you want to use them. The skin is thin, and bleeds little, but hurts still. The skin is still permeable to air

11 You may blow a shimmery bubble of muscus from your mouth. This bubble drifts at your urging , reaching a chosen location up to mile per cha point. When it reachs this loaction, it pops and 3 sentences of your voice are audible. The bubble moves at a brief walking pace

12. Instead of blinking, tongues insinuate themselves from your tearducts and lick your eyes clean.

13 You sweat a sweet smelling dust of a dull metallic hue instead of the usual

14 Your teeth are small bone pointed worms , writhing slowly

15 THe centre of your chest is a blacked gnarled ruin of bone and hair with red maddend eyes and thick tusks. If you forgo chest armour you can make an unarmed bite attack for a d10 damage

16 You hair is constantly in motion as if there was a stiff breeze or shit ass shampoo commeical

17 You always know which direction is north and crave small amounts of rust in your food

18 Flowers shoot, bloom and die in ten second cycles on the undersides of your arms. This, of course, allows you to restore 1d4 hit points per level if you eat the still warm heart of someone whos name you know.

19 +2 constitution  when you are at least 10 feet below the earths surface. Not being in contact with a solid surface is agonizing for you and you suffer -2 on all rolls. You feet are now like crude hooves of meat and bone.

20 Everytime you take electrical damage that is equal or higher to your constitution you change sex.

21 You body can concertina  on itself allowing you to fit into space a 5th of your size, if you spend a round "compacting"

22 Your skin hangs off your body in great sloughing sheets. If some of this skin is taken, and ploughed into the earth, nothing will grow there for a year and a day, and after then strange trees with malign fruit.

23 You can roll your eyes back in your head and watch your thoughts hump. Reroll a failed knowledge check per day per point of inteligence modifirer , minimum of one

24 Thy neck is liketh the giraffe, being at least half your body length again.

25 Your skin is furloughed and trenched in a elaborate labyrinthine patterns.

26 You have a long forked tongue of bright, dizzying hue. You can "taste" spoken words, and lies taste sweet, while the truth bitter. +6 to sense motive checks.

27 Your chin curves and tapers to a hard bone point, like a Egypt fake beard, or the business end of a spider wasp. If you jab this into a tree, you can hear the trees "thoughts" , as "speak with plants"

28 A canal like network of cartilage tubes runs under your ears, throat and jaw line, leading to your nose, which is flared and vaulted. Twice a day , you can spend up to your constitution score in rounds producing bizarre fluting  with this, just above and below normal hearing range. Everyone but you in 60 feet must fortitude save every round your play or become nauseated for as long as you "play" . D.c is 10 + twice your level

29 The fingers on your hands end in tiny hands, the fingers of which also end in tiny hands


30 A hour after your body lies cold and dead, your torso cracks like an egg, and out you pop in miniature. Play on brave hero, but be advised you are a size category smaller, and your str and con are reduced by 2 and your dex increased by 2. This may happen twice more, and only can happen if your body is mostly intact.



The current scrap fabric monster is a Red dragon and I'm dragging my feet coz dragons have such a strong visual identity and detail it seems not fun. I also should be making doubles of the cooler ones made already for a exhibition to  sell, but I'm finding it difficult to remake something I've already made, unless directly asked.

WERETIGER, GIANT LEECH , GREY OOZE

Print PDF Weretiger! I'm loving deciding randomly what monster to do next. Man, I got nothing to blather on about... um.. Actually working on that bestiary I mentioned, but I draw a whole bunch of pictures for it and go yeah ! its done ! , and then later look at them and go , actually there's like 3 that are gonna be any good. And I start again, but I find it hella difficult to try and draw the same picture twice and then fill up 5 or 6 pages with bird skulls, towers, menacing teeth recitations, laughing people on fire, etc,   before I realize I was trying to draw the mauling frog a little less like a turd.

The punch line being when it's finished , it's gonna look like I spent 5 minutes on the whole thing.
Anyway photos!

Grey Ooze, not a lot to go with here,

And giant leech;

ALso Guitar wolf played in the basement, here at none gallery, here's them eating sushi ;

lock and loll...

EARSEEKER and obscured Dunedin art

Print PDF Earseeker! Everyones favourite dungeon master dick move!

Also here's some photos of Dunedin art , grow forlorn and forgotten:

that urchin is one of mine

this issss meeeeeee

this is the thing I made that made me starting sticking rubbish together for fun and achievement

this is someone elssseeee

Tradional Fantasy Archtypes , bratz dolls, BEHOLDER

Print PDF It's funny how kids toys out of context can be a more cutting social critique than 99% of conceptional art made for that purpose..

That's surprise and smiling, respectively,  apparently...

Anyway so, like here's my most likely doomed attempt to put a spin/rethink/reboot/blahblah on the traditional classes of d&d, a land that has been trod very thoroughly by numerous minds both cunning and banal alike, yet onto this barren land, go I
PALADIN:
so like prayer wheels?

and this idea of automating religious ritual? So there's like scared words to be said but a human voice will falter or stumble or worse, misspeak them, so having a mechanical wheels ever turning the names of the divine into the wind is better right? And if you were a holy warrior striving for purity and truth you would drill you skull open and attach a prayer wheel on the back of it? And as you get holier you need more powerfully prayer wheels, which start looking like water wheels but all esoteric and what not and you have sluices and stuff like a cyborg with water wheels pumping holy water and you get more and like a... thing with spinny religous shit, like anime rpg go-to of making angels and light based enemy 

turn wheels turn! we got healing to do!

and I'm explaining this really badly, but just jam that with some Tibet prayer wheel with a Saracen warrior and some trepanning and this

...um, what are those things sticking out of your hips?

cut out the flesh! the flesh is weak! stop trying to see nipples!

This guy! But Tibetan!

Nothing holier than floating orbs

TIBETAN!!!!!

... kinda noise and that's a paladin for a better tomorrow. Or a poorly thought out gimmickNEXT CLERIC/PRIEST:
Now I know the idea of priests sucking power directly from the god in a parasitical way has been thrown around and damned if I can remember where. SO soz if it was you.
But lets back story it a tad and add some colour. So the god's they had a big rumble is god sky land and struggled but it was a draw and all fell exhausted to the earth, crushing the land beneath their sheer bigitude. And when the faithfully saw the forms of their faith made real and huge before them, they lost their shit something chronic! Faith cannot coexist with evidence! Piety turned to outrage! Outrage turned to hate! Hate turned to feasting! For the priests took to their gods and drove spikes into their bones and chains through their muscle and built there temples atop them, and took knives and each cut a new holy symbol OF MEAT which they then ate, but god-flesh is slow to digest and so each priest has this SWEET POWER LUMP to draw the god power from, in their belly, and with every spell the god weakens. Mwahaha. And when you can cast a new level of spells you go back to the temple and cut another hunk of flesh, and so the most powerful of the priests becoming CORPULENT and shit, maybe grow bits of god on them? Like spears coming out of their back for a war god? MEAT.
Yeah the priests have nothing but contempt for their gods, and maybe some sects hold fast to the tenets of the religion in a "well we are even better at this that the guy we used to think was cool" or flip out and do the exact opposite. Maybe these differing sects still get along despite having exact opposite views? OR only a special god eating day (the-feasting-on-liars day?) Or they keep stealing the temple from each other.
Anyway the should be called GODEATERS, or LORDS OF MEAT or DEIPHORES


Fighters:
Fighters is a generic broad term, and maybe therein lies a SECRET HISTORY and okay I'll give the caps key a rest, yes fighters know how to use all weapons and all armour because they have used every damn weapon, as a fighter will reincarnate endlessly as warrior after soldier after gladiator after thug. To die and to realize they are to live only to kill and die and this is all getting WORLD OF DARKNESS DOES D&D but yeah, and that's why you get harder to kill as you go up levels, you start remembering all your past lives and becomed imbued with the force of hating to die.

I did not like World of Darkness'es trait of going hey You are some much more bad ass than joe public and here's some cool powers, oh no wait, every time you use them there's a chance a policeman grows from your chin and its a baby killing police man, and you can only live in Wales because there's these dudes that have far cooler powers than you and no limitations and they hand your ass to you all the damn time and they hate you so so much. And its your fault the world sucks.

THIEVES/ROGUES
That man is a thief , ah no mam you are mistaken , he is a rogue, oh okay then I will have sex with him and you too yeah medieval sex party gonna get horrible diseases
Okay so what makes a thief more than a just  guy who nicks your shit?
Well a true Thief is someone who wakes up to find everything they know is stolen, like the past was rewritten around them or they shifted into a dimension exactly like the one they knew but this one never had them, or maybe some crazy mind wipe, in any case, you are now no one.
So its hard for people to remember or even notice you. People also seem to overlook that fact you a person who's very job description implys betrayal.
And you think, hey, why not steal everything? You had everything taken from you , so turn about is fair play. As you get more powerful you can become near invisible and stop existing for moments to bypass threats and get real good at ...climbing walls... because.. gravity.. starts not noticing you..yeah

WIZARD/magicuser/mage etc
Ah man this one has been done and done and done some more.
But here go, Spells are like quantum butterflys that rewrite reality with a flap of theirs and spells are like strange co-incidences  except no that's mage: the Ascension and a total fun kill, so less like butterflys and more like humming birds, that are hard to look at but if you do its like they are made of folded space like a origami bird, and except instead of paper folded its like someone took a photo of everything but now with a fireball and the bird is folded from that. When the bird unfolds it keeps unfolding until the photo covers up the previous scene and it becomes real so now there's a fireball in front of you.
Where does one keep spells? In a bird cage of course. One that you bolt to your head, and at night, when you sleep , you leave the cage door open and all the birds fly back BECAUSE THEY LOVE YOU SO MUCH. When you go up levels you have to get a bigger cage, until it's like those big wigs the french had from an era I can't be bothered looking up round now.

Ranger:

ah man, I'm hungry I'm gonna make this quick, Okay Skippy the kangaroo? Lassie?
The scene where the animal goes up to people and makes its noises, and the people go "timmy in the well? I will follow you now!". Is that not some Charm Person happening there or what? Basically, Rangers, you play the animal companion, and you are secretly calling the shots, and start with a henchman who takes the blame/credit for everything, and later you cast animal spells through him like a wand, as you hollow him out and fill him with yourself. And everyone is like wow Strider Strong Bow is so in touch with nature, and Strider Strongbow's soul weeps alone in the dark of his mind.
Never open your mind to nature.  Nature does not share.

BEHOLDER

I made Zak a beholder and sending it to him and he sends me Vornheim and here is picture of beholder, so the lesson here is you tell Scrap Princess if you want something, she MAKE IT REAL
if you give her stuff.