Halloweenstone

Over the last couple of days I was thinking about where I want to go with this. Yesterday I decided that this is the way I want to go. It’s not painted yet but the story is in my head. There is this little mushroom merchant who travels the region with his female ogre companion. The ogres job seems to be pull the caravan. Where the merchant gets his stock is a bit of a mystery. The fact that he and his ogre companion always seem to stay close to graveyards, her giant shovel, and the skulls on her shoulder are all just a funny coincidence, I’m sure.

For the pumpkin patch I wanted to create some spooky jack o’lantern scarecrows. I used some resin pumpkin heads and put them on wooden skewers. to give the bodies more volume a wrapped some aluminium foil around the chest. Finally I clothed the scarecrow in pva soaked tissue paper. After everything dried I gave it a quick paint job and was done. No I have five scarecrows and no patch.

I built the bridge with thin cardboard, pva glue and paper mache. Once the structure was complete I added xps foam bricks, which I roughed up with a ball of aluminium foil. There are still quite some gaps between some of the stones which I want to fill with either sand or grout. Not sure yet.

I scratch built the crypt with a variety of materials. I used some XPS foam, styrofoam and cardboard to create the basic shapes. I used some paper mache to cover the hill and Vallejo earth paste for texture. For details I used some thin packaging cardboard cut out with my partners cricut cutter. Since the cutter cuts perfectly layered details are easily achieved.

I slapped on some paint before gluing the tree in place, so I could reach everything better.

So I came up with this basic layout. The board will consist of different set pieces that can be moved around for more variety. Most of the the set pieces should be done rather quickly and I don’t worry too much about them. The exception is the mansion where I might have bitten off more than I can chew, but we’ll see.

I think the correct term would be mausoleum but crypt sounds scarier so I’ll go with that. The plan is to have a small crypt on a little hill, surrounded by modular rows of graves.

This set piece will be a little diorama with a mysterious salesman who has set up camp with his caravan.

I thought about about adding a Sleepy Hollow style bridge, but I thought the roof would have to much of a negative impact on the gameplay, so I’ll go for a stone bridge. The river is not supposed to be too much of an obstacle. There will be several places where it can be crossed either via walkways or big stones in the river.

This is straight forward. Just a small pumpkin patch guarded by a scarecrow with a Jack O’Lantern for a head. The biggest challenge of this set piece will be the sculpting of a lot of pumpkins.

My goals for the mansion are to make it visually interesting and allow for multi level gameplay. The mansion will not have a playable interior though. I haven’t planned that much ahead so I’m not quite sure where I’ll go with this eventually.