Rogue Cthulhu Dice Box

 Just a few months before COVID shut down all gaming conventions all over the world, I regained control of Rogue Cthulhu, the gaming club I co-founded over 20 years ago. In those few months between Thanksgiving 2019 and when the world shut down in March 2020, I was hard at work trying to prepare for the next Rogue Cthulhu show at the Origins Gaming Convention. One of my areas of focus was to re-establish the prize table and point system that had been dismantled while I was away from the helm. 

This is one of the prizes that I was working on at that time. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of its construction. It's a portable dice rolling box, with a side area for storing and transporting your gaming dice. The lid slides open like a pencil box top. The sides of the box are oak. The top and divider are sapele. The bottom is lined with bonded leather. The sides and top are all laser etched. 

I'm not sure if or when Rogue Cthulhu might return to the gaming convention scene, but if it does, I will probably make more of these. I initially only made two, and since the future of the club is currently uncertain, I think I'm going to give these two away to some friends.

Key Fobs v1.0

I recently returned to the leadership position of my old gaming club, Rogue Cthulhu and due to changes in policy during the four years I was away, our once vaunted prize table now has to be rebuilt from scratch. So, first I made a list of reasonably simple and inexpensive craft items I could make to begin rebuilding our stock of prizes. We often get gifts of larger prizes, like RPG books, as prize support from publishers connected to the games we run, so what we mostly need is smaller prizes that work with our point chip system.

The first such project that I thought of was a line of laser engraved wooden key fobs with various Cthulhu Mythos related images on one side and the Rogue Cthulhu logo on the other. I mean, after all, what good is having a laser cutter if you can't use it to make prizes!

The design for the fobs was fairly simple and laid out in Inkscape. Then they were cut and engraved, double sided, on the Glowforge laser cutter out of 3mm birch plywood. I made about 60 of these in total. About half were left their natural color, while the rest were stained with varying hues of wood stain. All were sealed with a clear gloss top coat.

The metal split rings came from Michaels. The split rings were attached to the fobs with a 15mm x 75mm strip of bonded leather. Some are black and some are brown. I got the bonded leather in large rolls off of eBay some years ago. The strips were glued into a loop connecting the fob and the ring, using Barge cement, and then a nickle finish double cap rivet was used to cinch the loop.

The engraving and cutting took about 45 minutes per side for each batch of 20. The staining and top coating probably took about an hour total. Cutting, gluing and riveting the bonded leather loops probably took about an hour and a half to do all sixty fobs.

Copper Elder Sign Box

I thought I had posted this item, but now I can't find it anywhere on this blog, so, I guess I will do a quick post about it now. I made this Elder Sign box several years ago. It started as a small cheap trinket box that I bought on clearance from a local wholesale club. It had a nice dark stained rustic wooden body, that was well made, and a ceramic tile set into the top. The tile had Christmas art on it- a snowman, I think. I liked everything about the box, except for the art.

I had purchased wooden boxes with tile tops from this place in the past, and the last ones I had, I sanded the surface of the tile, painted over it, and added a cast resin applique to the top, and sold it in my shop. No pictures of those ones I'm afraid. This time I thought I would try something different.

A couple of years ago, I found a roll of heavy copper foil on clearance at the hardware store. It had an adhesive backing on one side and I guess you are supposed to use it as flashing around the foundation of your house. I think it is supposed to repel termites. I don't know, I threw away the box a long time ago. I bought it because it was a big roll of copper foil, and fairly cheap.

My first few attempts at using this foil, I was tempted to make use of the adhesive that is already on the foil. It seemed pretty strong, as it was a bear to get the vinyl backer to peel off. Unfortunately, the adhesive does not stay strong. Over time (a few months), it will inevitably loosen up and the copper foil will pull away from whatever you stuck it to. So, I have since learned that I must scrub off the adhesive and use a different glue. Kind of a pain, but whatever.

This box has a cast resin Elder Sign appliqued to the top, underneath the copper foil. I carved the sigil by hand out of a block of wax (years ago). I think this was actually the first thing I tried to carve in wax. Then I made a latex rubber mold of the carving. I use the rubber mold to cast all kinds of stuff, plaster and cement disks, resin appliques, whatever I need an Elder Sign for.

I put the resin casting on a work surface covered in vinyl contact paper (a.k.a. shelf liner). Vinyl contact paper makes a good non-stick work surface. Then I cut a square of copper foil and covered the casting with room to spare around the edges. I used various sculpting tools, mostly ones with round metal tips, to work the foil around the casting and into all the contours and creases. Sort of like chasing. When it was done, I carefully peeled the copper loose from the table and the casting. I sprayed the reverse side of the copper with strong spray glue and put the casting back into the cavity. Then I masked off and sprayed the tile with glue too. I glued the foil, along with the casting, down to the tile and trimmed the edges of the foil. Then I smoothed everything out and worked the edges of the foil around the edges of the tile, making them disappear. I didn't do anything to weather or seal the copper. I just let it gain a natural patina.

I had this box on the Rogue Cthulhu prize table for a while. But lately I have been thinking of giving it as a gift to someone in the Mythos prop community. I'm just looking for the perfect thing to put inside of it first.

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

Howard's Place

My photoshop-ing skills are meager at best. But I thought this picture of Howard Phillips Lovecraft tending bar turned out reasonably well, especially given how little time was put into it.

This image was hastily 'shopped together to use as a web advertisement for the Rogue Cthulhu - Friday Night Speak Easy; an alcohol, dance and gaming party held at Con on The Cob, 2015. I liked it so much that I did a little additional touch up to it and had it blown up into two 36"x 48" panels, which were then printed out at OfficeMax on their engineering (blueprint) copier and then glued together with spray adhesive to make one 6ft.x4ft. poster. We hung that poster on the wall next to the actual bar set-up for the Speak Easy party. Total cost: $12 and change.

This second image was also put together as an advertisement for the same event. It didn't turn out nearly as well. The lighting and shadows are all wrong, but it served its purpose.

If I'd had known how little it would cost, I would have blown up more pictures of 1920's bar and party scenes and wallpapered the room with them, instead of spending more than a week making carboard cut-outs of gangsters and flappers.
...But that's another post ;)

In Ink

I was scrolling through my FaceBook feed the other day and I just happened to stumble onto this image of Charlie Platteborze's new tattoo. I'm not even sure why it showed up on my news feed. I don't know Charlie, and it was posted to a FaceBook group of which I was not a member. 

I'm not even sure how my eye caught it, but a small detail in the above bounty of imagery grabbed my attention. Look closely at the book The Old Gent is holding.

It was the central sigil that first caught my attention. I had to pull up the full sized image to see if my eye really saw what my brain said that it saw. They did! That's a glyph I created for my Book of IOZ manuscript, which has subsequently been used on my Necronomicon fragment pages, as well as on the interior pages of my De Vermis Mysteriis, and on the cover of my Necronomicon that I created for the indie film, Doctor Glamour.

 Yep, the corner bosses and the lock escutcheon cinches it! That's a representation of my Doctor Glamour Necronomicon. Boy, this thing seems to be getting around, doesn't it?

Anyway, it made my day seeing a piece of my work out in the wild like that, so I thought I would share it with all of you.

Imitation

is the sincerest form of flattery. The other day I was doing a Google image search, looking for Mythos prop ideas, when I stumbled on this picture on Crudelia's Deviant Art page.

Look familiar at all? I was immediately struck by the similarity of the bosses and hinges to those from my Doctor Glamour Necronomicon, shown below.

Of course, once I got a closer look at the picture, I could finally make out the text that specifically mentions that the design was inspired by my Necronomicon (squee!). I love seeing and hearing about how my work has inspired someone else's! It gives me fuel to trudge on.

I quite like Crudelia's book. In many ways, I like it better than my own (though not in all ways). The sculpts of the hardware are very stylish and have a lot of character to them, though they are a little over the top and cartoonish for a "serious" Necronomicon (imho). He is clearly a better sculptor than me. I wish I could sculpt with that much flair. The painted leather on the boards and the finish on the hardware is also quite nice, and the multiple bookmarks are a nice touch.

I had never seen any of this artist's work before, but having a quick glance at his resume on his Deviant Art page, he has quite the list of accomplishments. It's very impressive.  I am flattered that anything I have done should have made such an impression that he would choose to simulate it in a work of his own.

Seeing as Crudelia's book was finished in 2012 (the year after mine), I'm surprised it took me this long to notice it. If anyone who follows this blog happens to spot something of mine, or clearly inspired by my work, out in the wild, please let me know. I would love to see it.

Lighting Rig v2.0

Since 2001, my gaming group Rogue Cthulhu has used special effect lighting in our game room at Origins. To hold all the lighting equipment overhead, I constructed a custom lighting rig, which consisted of four telescoping upright posts and two 20 foot long sections of an aluminum ladder.

 It has undergone a few modifications to improve its stability over the years, but it has essentially remained unchanged since it was first built. Like any system, it has its drawbacks. The fact that all four posts have to be raised and lowered simultaneously was a big one. Also, those ladders are difficult to store and transport, and they don't provide any adjustability. I've been telling myself for years that I was going to build something better, but cost, portability, weight, and simplicity kept bringing me back to the same design. This year I finally made some progress on improving the RC light rig- starting with getting rid of those damned ladders.

While it's hard to beat aluminum for its strength to weight ratio, the ladders were really overkill in the strength department. They are capable of holding several hundred pounds of load, while we only really needed to use about fifty pounds of cords and lights. I looked at several (many, many) material and design options to replace the ladders. I needed something lightweight, easily portable (probably modular with sections no longer than 8-10ft), durable, cheap to build- requiring no equipment or skills to which I did not have access, and able to span 20+ feet with no center support. That last one was the killer. Lots of things can span 10ft. with no problem, even 15ft. if pressed, but 20 or more feet with no center support and you start to have troubles. In order to have the strength to span that distance and hold any kind of load safely, your truss starts to become huge and heavy, and its own weight becomes an issue. Although I had trouble with using wood as a material for the upright posts (warping, splintering, etc.), it gave me the best strength to weight ratio that I could afford. After looking into several truss designs, I decided to make telescoping sections of square tubing out of 3/8in. plywood.

 The plan was to make several sections of rectangular tubing. Some would be slightly larger and would slide over the others. Each truss would be made from three sections; one outer tube in the middle with one slightly smaller tube coming out each end. The outer tube would have to be completely hollow inside, but the inner tubes could have bulkheads to give them strength and stability without adding much weight. I ripped a sheet of 3/8in. plywood into strips. The strips, when put together, would make a box (tube) roughly 6in by 7in by 8 feet. I also cut 5/8in. MDF into rectangular bulkheads to fit inside the smaller tubes. Though I didn't have an immediate need to, I drilled out the centers of the bulkheads because I would never have the opportunity to again. Also, it cut down a little on weight.

Five bulkheads were equally spaced along the 8ft. length of the tube. They were glued and stapled in place. A prodigious amount of clamping was done to ensure a tight glue bond. The edges of the plywood, where they came together, were also glued and stapled. For maximum strength, I used a LOT of staples. About one every two inches. Hey, staples are cheap!

 Before the last side was glued and stapled into place, I gave the interior a good coating of stain and polyurethane mix. Then, after the last side was in place and the glue dry, I sanded the exterior smooth with a belt sander, making sure to round off the corners to avoid splintering and to give a little clearance at the corners when the sections were fitted together. Since the sections would need to fit together with minimal clearance, and yet slide smoothly, I needed the exterior of the inner tube (and the interior of the outer tube) to be very smooth. After sanding, I gave the exterior two coats of stain and poly mix, sanding between coats. Here are two of the inner tubes finished. One is still waiting to be stained.

Putting together the outer tube was a little trickier. The interior of the outer tube had to be nice and smooth, so the strips had to be sanded before assembly. Since it didn't have interior bulkheads to keep the sides square while gluing and stapling, I used one of the inner tubes as a temporary bulkhead. I put some glue along the edges of the boards, then clamped the walls of the outer tube to the sides of the inner tube, got everything square and even and then stapled the crap out of it. I had to be very careful to send the staples in straight. I couldn't have any staples sticking through on the interior side, and I couldn't have any splintering.

After the staples were in, I removed the inner tube so I could clean up any glue that smooshed out the seam. I didn't want it to end up gluing the two tubed to each other!

This process was repeated for each side, letting them dry before moving on to the next side.

When three of the four sides were together, I gave the interior a nice heavy coat of stain and poly mix. Then the fourth side was glued and stapled into place (without the inner tube).

 I was careful to make the seams as strong as I could, but without interior bulkheads, the outer tube would be too weak to be used the way I wanted. The stress of the inner tubes prying the sides apart at the ends as the load bore down on the center of the truss would be far more than the glue and staples along a 3/8in. edge could safely handle. And since this thing would be holding lighting over the heads of dozens of people, it needed to be reinforced. I accomplished this be using steel strips to bind around the outside of the tube, like the rings of a wooden barrel.

 The steel flat-stock was bent at right angles in a vise, then taken over to the work piece and measured for fit before the next angle was bent. This was repeated until the steel wrapped all the way around the tube, very snugly. The steel was cut so the ends would just meet and then they were welded together while being clamped tightly to the tube.

I wouldn't have been able to do this last part a few years ago. I just learned how to use a MIG welder at my current day job. I'm no professional welder, but I get by.

 I put four steel bindings on the outer tube. One at each end, and one more about two feet from each end. When the inner tubes stick into the ends of the outer tube, they will only go in about two feet. That will put most of the stress from the cantilever action on the seams at this two foot section at the end. With two steel bindings at each end, it should have no trouble holding together under that stress. I did a stress test with a scrap outer tube (I glued the wrong sides together) without any steel bindings. It held up over a hundred pounds of dead weight, but started to crack when I stood on it (300lbs.).

 After the bindings were in place, I gave the exterior two coats of stain and poly mix. I wanted to have every part of the truss stained and polyed not only for looks, but for smoothness and to help prevent warping.

Here is the full length truss being held aloft by two DJ lighting rig stands that I bought off of eBay. The center section is not stained or bound with steel (it was the scrap one that I glued wrong). With two feet of overlap at each section joint, the overall length is 20ft. I can push it to 22ft if I only overlap 12 inches, but that's as far as I think I should go. As you can see in the photo, there is no deflection at full extension without a load.

I made two of these trusses, to replace the two ladder sections. For their implementation at Origins 2013, I put one of them on the old telescoping uprights and one on a pair of new DJ lighting stands I bought on eBay, and then modified (more on them in another post). You can see a slight deflection in the picture below, but that is not due to the weight. That is due to the 1/8in. gap between the large and small tubes. It was hard to cut and fit the pieces together under tight tolerance, and I was afraid to make them fit together any tighter, for fear that future swelling and warping might make them not fit together or slide properly.

Once the pieces were slid together on site, laying on the floor, I drilled through both outer and inner tubes simultaneously and pinned them together with a piece of all-thread and some nuts and washers at each end. I was going to pre-drill a bunch of holes along the length so it would be adjustable but decided it would be easier to just re-drill holes at whatever position I wanted on site. When it gets full of holes and hard to line up properly (in 10-12 years, I can always re-make them.

The lights were held up with mechanic's wire wrapped around the girth of the truss. The electrical cords were taped up with vinyl electrical tape. I did drill out more holes in the old uprights to make them more adjustable for height. Now that Club Carcosa is over, we only use about 25 pounds of lights and cords on each truss. These trusses can hold more than four times that amount, so we have lots of room to expand our effects repertoire, and a stable platform on which to mount it.

The truss sits on top of the uprights without being clamped down. The wide base of the truss allows it to sit flat on the top of the post with no worry of twisting. The truss has a hole drilled in the bottom near the end which rides on a pin made from a 1/2in. bolt, which sticks up from the top of the upright, about 3in. In order for the truss to fall or slide in any direction (other than straight up), it would have to jump straight up more than 3 inches. I figure, if it does that, we've got bigger problems! And I can always put in a strap or something to keep it from moving in that direction.

 The sits-on-pin design means that the truss doesn't need to be clamped down. Since it can float on the pin to some degree, the two uprights can be raised and lowered independently (or at least they don't have to track perfectly with each other like they did before). Also, one of the modifications I made to the uprights was to put bigger bases on them, so they would be more stable without having to have all four joined together. This allows us to move the two trusses farther apart or put them at odd angles, and allows us to raise and lower them independent of each other. That's a big improvement over the previous design.

 During Origins, we extended the new trusses to 22ft, and they seemed quite stable and safe, and were much easier to work with than the ladders. Sadly, the new DJ stands didn't work as well as I had hoped and the old uprights I had build out of 2x4s ten years ago actually worked better than the new manufactured steel ones. The trusses are a bit lighter than the ladders, but not as light as I wanted. They do, however, transport much easier. Each section, truss and upright, is no more than 8ft. long, so they all neatly fit inside the bed of a full sized pick-up truck.And two of the truss sections can be nested inside one another to conserve space.