Cultists of R'lyeh - After four years of wear and tear

It's hard for me to believe it has been nearly four years since I finished my giant Settlers of Catan clone, Cultists of R'lyeh. I was very proud of it when it was first unveiled. And it has seen some players. It has been featured at Origins Game Fair, three times, and it has been to Groundhog Day Gaming Retreat, once. The last time I unpacked it, was for Groundhog Day Gaming Retreat, and I noticed that it was showing some significant signs of wear. I took a few pics of some of the defects that have developed and thought it would be a good idea to do a follow-up post to show readers how some of the construction techniques and materials have held up over time.

Starting with the player pieces, the roads/tunnels have held up fine. I mean, what can really go wrong with some painted MDF strips, right? But the Altars and Temples have shown some deterioration. Some of the little Cthulhu figures have come unglued from their bases. Also, the polyurethane resin that was used to close off one end of the PVC rings has started to separate from the PVC. Apparently, the two did not bond well and if you are not careful, you can easily just pop them apart. I was never really thrilled with the way they came out in the first place. It was kind of a rush job. To do it over, I would not use PVC and urethane resin for these.

The carved polystyrene foam has weathered surprisingly well. There are a few places where the paint has begun to chip off, but it could be touched up very easily. Only one of the foam pieces shows any sign of damage, and that is a mountain peak who's tip got a little crushed in transport. If you didn't know you would probably never notice.

I was a little concerned about the polyester resin that I used for the liquid at the bottom of the craters on the Pits of Despair. Its initial shrinkage upon drying made me think that it may eventually separate and pop out, but it did not. It has held up fine. If anything, the color of the resin has darkened some.

The one material that did not hold up as well as the others was the air dry clay known in crafting circles as cold porcelain. This was the first time I had ever used cold porcelain (a mixture of white glue and corn starch), and although I'm sure it has its uses, it also has its limitations. Most of the tiles that were made with the air dry clay show significant deterioration. Most of the problems seem to have been caused by the material continuing to shrink over time.

On the aforementioned Pits of Despair, there is some splitting along the sides of the craters, especially in the crevices where the clay was thin. You can now see some of the foil armature through the cracks. The crater walls still seem quite strong though, and there appears to be little to no breakage from wear. Also, the bottom edge of the crater, where it blends with the MDF tile base, has shrunk up and is separating from the MDF. They are still firmly attached to one another, but it is no longer a smooth transition from crater wall to ground. There is a definite fault line around the base of the crater. It is quite noticeable, but if you had never seen the tile before, you might think that it was supposed to be that way. It doesn't really ruin the effect, it just doesn't look as good.

There is some separating around the bases of the monoliths of the Cyclopean Ruins, as well. The monoliths themselves are fine, but where they blend into the MDF base, the air dry clay has shrunk and separated creating a visible fault line, just like around the craters of the Pits of Despair.

The tiles that show the most damage are the Ravenous Caverns. They each show the same signs of separation where the Clay blends into the MDF base, as the rest of the tiles. And they also show the same splitting over the foil armature that the Pits of Despair show. But the Caverns also show significant damage around the mouths of the caverns. The thin stalactites hanging from the cave roof have mostly broken off. Some of the outer rim of the cave mouth has cracked and broken off too. It appears that the clay used in this area was too thin, and also, the plastic cup used as the armature is too flexible. I should have made the mouth of the caves a little beefier. They were just too thin and delicate.

So there you have it. If you are planning on using any of these materials or techniques for your own projects, now you can get a glimpse as to how they will wear over time. My best advise would be to account for significant shrinkage of the air dry clay over time.


See also:
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.1- the Desolate Waste
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.2- the Pits of Despair
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.3- the Ravenous Cavern
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.4- the Cyclopean Ruins
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.5- the Sanguine Gorge
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.6- the Mountains of Madness
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.7- the Game Pieces, Portals, et Fini

Cultists of R'lyeh pt.7 - the Game Pieces, Portals, et Fini

Before we get to the game pieces, like the houses and roads, we have one more board piece to look at. Though not exactly a terrain tile, the island of Catan is surrounded by various ports where one can trade commodities. Likewise, the island of R'lyeh is surrounded by portals where one can transform one commodity into another.

The portals were a challenge in that there are a lot of them, all with the same design, which in my mind instantly said silicone mold and casting resin. I designed the portal to look like a stone ring surrounded by symbols, kind of reminiscent of a Stargate. I sculpted the original out of Sculpey. I rolled a large piece of Sculpey into a long snake, connected the ends into a ring and then flattened the top of the ring with a rolling pin. Then I sliced the flattened ring with a razor blade to make it look like there were a number of carved stones laid out in a circle. I used a screw driver and a bamboo skewer as tools to carve glyphs into the tops of each segment. I made a few random gouges in the clay with a razor to make the stones look cracked and worn. After it was baked, I mounted it to a piece of hardboard and sealed it with spray paint.

Then I used silicon RTV rubber to make a mold of the original. The first casting I made was a solid piece of urethane resin plastic. Once I saw how much resin it took, I started to panic. I had to cast nine of these things, and because they were pretty big (about six inches across) they took a lot of resin. Fortunately, I am a cheap bastard, and I know a lot of tricks to make resin stretch. First, I used a lot of filler. Normally I use powdered talc as a filler. This does weaken the plastic somewhat, but these were not load bearing pieces. Another cost saving measure is to do a slush cast. This builds up the piece in layers and makes the final piece hollow. It took about five or six times longer to finish these pieces than it would have, but I did save a lot of resin by adding a little resin at a time, brushing it around to coat the mold surface, waiting for it to dry, then repeating until I had a sufficient thickness built up to demold the piece. The last cost saving measure I took was to add play sand as an additional filler material on the inner slush castings (but not the initial coat, or it would have shown on the surface of the finished piece). This added a lot of bulk to each coat of resin. The biggest down sides to doing a slush casting, was the amount of extra time it took, and the final piece had no underside (it was a one piece mold) so there was no surface to apply the glue for fastening it down to the wooden base. I had to add a strong glue in a heavy bead along the inside bottom edge of the casting with the expectation that the glue would sag downward and touch the wooden base.

The wooden bases were cut on a band saw from the same MDF as the terrain tiles. I made them a different shape and slightly smaller, to differentiate them. Before gluing the resin rings down to the wooden bases, I painted the base where the inside of the ring would be. Each color represented a different commodity that could be traded at that portal, with white being a generic portal where all commodities could be traded. The colors corresponded with the colors of the terrain tiles.

Each portal was primed with black spray paint, sponge stippled, and dry brushed with grey acrylic paint. The stones were given a florescent red inlay in their glyphs. I was pretty rushed by the time I got to the portals, so my standard of quality began slipping. I only had a day or two left to finish the project. And I still had player pieces and game cards to make.

 The player pieces were problematic on a number of fronts. Again, I had to make a lot of them fairly quickly, so they had to be simple and cheap. I went through several design ideas before settling on one that would fit all my needs as well as my budgetary and time constraints. I had it in my head that I wanted to use the little plastic Cthulhu idols in the "Bag of Cthulhu" that I love so much. But scale was a concern. I needed to somehow make the small ones bigger, or the big ones smaller. I decided to put the smaller ones on a pedestal made from sliced pvc pipe to create "shrines" that would serve to replace the cities of Catan. I Also used pvc pipe slices to make the "altars" that would be analogous to the settlements in Catan.

Since pvc pipe is hollow, I needed to make it have a solid flat surface, so I poured a little plastic resin into each of the slices. I made sure to do this on a piece of hardboard covered with vinyl contact paper, as vinyl seems to be the one thing plastic resin won't stick to. Once dry, I just flipped them over, trimmed off any flash, and had a nice neat little altar top, ready for paint.

For the bases of the plastic Cthulhus I used a slightly smaller diameter pvc pipe and made thinner slices.

 Then I glued the small plastic idols on top of their bases, and they too were ready for paint.

For simplicity and time concerns, I used straight cut slices of MDF to serve as roads (or rather "tunnels" in my game variant vernacular").

Painting the pieces was also problematic. The raw MDF wanted to soak up the paint like a sponge. It was hard to get a finish that didn't look like spray painted MDF. If I had more time, I could have employed some sort of sealer, I suppose. The color scheme was a challenge as well. I needed to use colors that differed from those of the color coded terrain tiles. I had already used most of the useful primary colors for those, so I decided to go with metallic colors for the game pieces. Only one problem. There are four player sets and only three easily differentiated metallic colors- silver, gold and copper. For the third one, I chose a metallic cobalt blue (largely because I hadn't used blue yet, and I happened to have some metallic blue spray paint). Even still, since the player pieces didn't have any florescence to them, it would be hard to see them in the odd lighting of our game room. The gold and the copper ended up looking too much alike, so I had to change to a darker color of copper. I also added some verdigris patina to the edges of the copper to further differentiate it. The blue was rather dark, and I was afraid it would be lost entirely in the predominantly red lighting of our room, so I dry brushed the blue pieces with a little white, which would glow purple in the black lights.

I got the pieces to be easily differentiated from one another in normal lighting, though I didn't like the way they looked. They were blocky and poorly painted, at least compared to the terrain tiles. Once I got them into the red and UV lighting of the Rogue Cthulhu game room, they were a complete mess. They were hard to see, and difficult to tell apart. I had to put up a small white light above the game board just to make it playable. I didn't even take any final pics of the completed pieces, as they frankly didn't look worth the time to photograph. The pic above of them on the painting table is pretty much how they look, at least the gold ones. Clearly, the game pieces need to be overhauled before next year.


So, since you have all been so patient following along on this rather lengthy build, I decided to put the final wrap-up pics here instead of making them another post. Here are the game terrain tiles, sans portals, all laid out on the floor.

And here they are with portals. The portals are not properly arranged in these pics, as I was in a hurry, and didn't really know how to arrange them yet (I had only played the game twice by this point and in Catan, the ports are pre-fixed in position and do not need to be placed).

And here are a few pics of the game being played for the first time at Origins 2013.

 Thanks for following along. This was a fun and ambitious build for me. More than once I thought I had bitten off more than I could chew, but I'm glad that I pushed myself to finish it. It was a very rewarding experience and I am very proud of the final product.

See also:
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.1- the Desolate Waste
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.2- the Pits of Despair
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.3- the Ravenous Cavern
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.4- the Cyclopean Ruins
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.5- the Sanguine Gorge
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.6- the Mountains of Madness
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.7- the Game Pieces, Portals, et Fini
Cultists of R'lyeh - After four years of wear and tear

Cultists of R'lyeh pt.4 - the Cyclopean Ruins

The last of the terrain tiles to use the cold porcelain was the Cyclopean Ruins. I wanted something Stonehenge-like, maybe with some oddly shaped pillars. Maybe some broken walls coming together at odd angles. What I ended up with was five stone monoliths, with engravings, in a circle.

I originally glued these five MDF stumps to the hexagonal base to serve as armatures for my Mountains of Madness, which I was also going to sculpt out of cold porcelain. But my first attempt at sculpting the mountains was a disaster. It was clear that I had to go a different rout with that one, so I set those tiles aside for later. Later eventually came, and I recycled the armatures for my mountains into the monoliths for my Cyclopean Ruins.

The actually sculpting of the monoliths was harder than it should have been, because the posts were already glued down, and didn't leave much room for my hands to work. I wrapped flattened out sheets of clay around the posts and squared them off so that they looked more like Stonehenge monoliths and less like termite mounds. Then I carved a few cracks into the surface with a sharp point. Then I went about the laborious task of carving glyphs into the clay on each side of each pillar. For that I used a bamboo skewer. I also added a little clay to the base to give the ground some texture.

The color scheme for the Cyclopean ruins was going to be green. So, after a primer coat of flat black, I layered four different shades of green on the tile. Heavy coverage at the edge, and less towards the middle, just like the other tiles. The top coat was a florescent green that would react in the UV of our room. I also used some grey and a touch of green, both dry brushed, on the monoliths themselves, to make them look like weathered stone. The most difficult and time consuming part of the painting were the glyphs. I had to paint each one with a tiny brush, getting into the cracks and crevices. There was a lot of painting and wiping, and then re-painting. My first one came out OK, but the color in the glyphs didn't pop, so on the others I painted a base coat of white into the glyphs and put the florescent green on top of it.

 Because of all the intricate carving, and the double painting of the glyphs, these tiles were a real pain in the ass to make. Buy they turned out nice. Not quite what I was originally picturing, but they convey the essence of a Cyclopean Ruin.

See also:
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.1- the Desolate Waste
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.2- the Pits of Despair
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.3- the Ravenous Cavern
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.4- the Cyclopean Ruins
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.5- the Sanguine Gorge
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.6- the Mountains of Madness
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.7- the Game Pieces, Portals, et Fini
Cultists of R'lyeh - After four years of wear and tear

Cultists of R'lyeh pt.3- Ravenous Cavern

The second terrain tile I made for the Cultists of R'lyeh game board, was the Ravenous Cavern. Long before I started sculpting the tiles, I had the idea to use part of a plastic disposable cup for the armature of my cave style hex. That is one of the reasons that I needed an air dry clay, rather than something like Sculpey, which you bake in the oven. I cut a nine ounce plastic cup in half (well, a little less than half, actually) on an angle to give me the shape I wanted. Shorter in the rear and a little taller in the front. I added a little wad of aluminum foil near the base of the cup to help with the transition. Before setting them on the tile, I smeared a layer of cold porcelain on the tile where the pieces would sit. This was to help adhere them to the tile, to help keep them from sliding around while I worked, and to pre-texture the inside of the cave floor.

 I positioned the cave entrance somewhere sort of near the center of the tile, since that would be the focal point of the terrain. That didn't leave much room for blending it down into the ground. I decided to give the thing a sort of tail that wrapped around. It would imply that the cavern wound around as it descended. It also made the whole thing look kind of like a Dune-esque sand worm coming up out of the ground, and I decided I was OK with that. I think of it as a visual double entendre. Maybe it's a cave. Maybe it's a monster. Maybe it's both!

 After laying the clay down over the cup and foil armature, I worked on the surface texture. Like the Pit of Despair, I used a pointy tool to carve lines in the surface, running from the ground up the sides and sweeping from the tail to the mouth of the cave. Again, I left the little balls of clay the formed and let them add to the texture. Getting the clay wrapped around the front edge of the cup was the hardest part. It didn't want to stick to the plastic very well. I wrapped it under as best I could, and pulled down on the edge, like with the rim of the Pits, to give it a sharp stalactite sort of look. In an effort to hide some spots where the clay had ripped away from the plastic cup, I also added a few pieces of clay, and then rolled them down into points, making much larger stalactites, which sort of look like giant sand worm teeth.

 After the whole thing was dry, I still wasn't happy with the surface texture. It was too simple and plain. It didn't look natural enough. So I decided to try the stippling technique I had planned to use on the Desolate Waste. I rolled up a ball of clay and smashed it down onto the tile surface, and then ripped it up again sharply. The effect was not as good as I had hoped, but it was all I had. It seems that the temperature and "stickyness" of the clay has a lot to do with how successful this technique is at giving me the texture I was looking for. I dabbed the clay all over the surface of the tile and over the cave, blending the two together. When that was dry, I gave the tile a coat of flat black primer.

 The color scheme for the Ravenous Cavern was going to be orange. I used four different shades of orange acrylic paint, from golden brown to neon florescent orange. I followed the same sea sponge stippling technique I used for the Pits of Despair, and which I intended to use for all the tiles. I layered the colors on with the sponge, heavier at the edge of the tile, and more sparsely towards the center. Then I dry-brushed the cave with the florescent orange to make it pop in the UV lighting.

 After the paint was dry, I coated it in a spray matte sealer. Here are the four Cavern tiles I made, sitting all together. When I made the terrain tiles, I made each tile of each type all at once, and I painted each tile of each type at once too, that way I felt I could keep the look of the terrain type more consistent across all the pieces.

Stat tuned for more board pieces!

See also:
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.1- the Desolate Waste
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.2- the Pits of Despair
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.3- the Ravenous Cavern
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.4- the Cyclopean Ruins
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.5- the Sanguine Gorge
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.6- the Mountains of Madness
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.7- the Game Pieces, Portals, et Fini
Cultists of R'lyeh - After four years of wear and tear

Cultists of R'lyeh pt.2- the Pits of Despair

It took me longer than I would have thought to come up with the terrain types for the Cultist of R'lyeh board. I needed five distinct terrain types, plus a wasteland. They needed to be visually distinct, they needed to be within my sculpting capabilities, and they needed to have cool names and produce resources that sort of made sense. I bandied around several options for a few days until I finally decided on; Pits of Despair, which collect Tears of the Forsaken; Ravenous Caverns, filled with Echos of Anguish; Cyclopean Ruins, strewn with Dust of Lost Aeons; Sanguine Gorge, steeped in Blood of the Innocent; and of course Mountains of Madness, where one finds Nightmares of Delirium.

The Pits of Despair was the first terrain type that I made for my Cultists of R'lyeh game board. It was also the first time I had ever worked with cold porcelain, so it was a bit of a learning process. I chose this one to start on because I already knew how I wanted to do it, and I thought it would work out pretty simply. My design plan was to create a low jagged ring, like the edge of a crater. After painting, I would fill the crater with some polyester resin (the kind used for fiberglass), which would look like water collected in the crater.

After reading about the shrinkage factor of cold porcelain, I decided it would be best to use an armature of aluminum foil for the dead space, rather than a thick piece of the clay. I rolled up some foil into a long snake and bent it into a circle of the desired diameter. I was a little concerned about adhesion of the cold porcelain to the wooden tile surface, so I spread a thin layer of the clay onto the tile first, then put down my circle of foil. Then I covered the foil ring with more clay.

I tapered the ring upward to a thin jagged point along the ridge. I wanted it to look uneven and natural. Using my fingers, I pinched off the top edge of the clay, pulling it away, and leaving a sharp serrated edge. I also smoothed the clay out along the base, blending it into the tile surface. This would serve to give me more surface contact for better adhesion, as well as provide a seamless transition from tile top to crater edge. It also provide more surface texture to the otherwise barren tile surface. I made sure not to over extend past my edge boundary, or the clay might interfere with placing the roads and cities.

At first the surface of the crater looked too smooth, so I got out some carving tools and started tracing vertical lines all along the crater sides running from the base up to the rim. I didn't try to remove any clay that balled up in little pieces on the sides, as that would just add more surface texture. I still wasn't thrilled with the way it looked, but I didn't know what else to do to make the texture more realistic, so I just left it and hoped it would look alright after painting. I figured I might be able to do a little carving after it was dry if necessary (you can't).

In the game,each of the terrain types is repeated 3 or 4 times (except the wasteland). Since this one was a pretty easy one to sculpt, I made four of them.

It took about two days for the clay to air dry (the first day was rainy and cool). In reality, I sculpted all of the terrain tiles before I painted any of them, but for the purposes of these posts, I'll show each tile start to finish.

Painting started with a coat of flat black primer for all of the pieces. Then I had to figure our my color scheme. Since I didn't have any iconic symbols, like sheep or bricks, that I could use to easily identify and associate my terrain types with my resource cards, I decided to do matching colors. For the Pits of Despair, the definitive color was yellow.

To give me an organic natural look, I used a sea sponge stippling technique to paint almost all of the tiles. I also used layers of similar colors in differing shades, because the real world isn't just one color. Even dirt is a mixture of colors. I used four different shades of yellow, from a golden brown to a neon florescent yellow, as well as some grey and light brown. I stippled heavy on the edges, to create a border of nearly solid (layered) color, and then lighter towards the center to let more of the black base show through, like the black rocky earth being thrust up from below the surface by the impact of whatever caused the crater.

Most of the stippling was done to the tile surface. The crater got a little stippling to blend it in, but its coverage was fairly light. I finished up with the florescent neon yellow stippled around the edge and dry brushed along the surface of the crater, so that it would pop in the UV lighting in our game room.

After the paint was dry I gave it a spray of matte clear coat sealer. Then, when that was dry, I started mixing up some polyester resin. I mixed 2oz. of resin, which dries a sort of translucent yellow, which is why I thought it would be good for this tile. To make it pop in the UV lighting, I mixed in a few drops of UV reactive dye, which was much harder than I thought it would be, as the dye was water based and didn't want to mix with the resin. I had to just stir the crap out of it and make the tiny droplets of dye smaller and smaller until it looked like an even color.

After it dried, the resin separated a little bit from the sealed surface of the sculpt. The effect was odd and not what I had originally wanted, but it looked acceptable, and it was still stuck in place, so it is what it is.

Stat tuned for the rest of the board pieces!

See also:
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.1- the Desolate Waste
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.2- the Pits of Despair
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.3- the Ravenous Cavern
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.4- the Cyclopean Ruins
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.5- the Sanguine Gorge
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.6- the Mountains of Madness
Cultists of R'lyeh pt.7- the Game Pieces, Portals, et Fini
Cultists of R'lyeh - After four years of wear and tear