Earthbound but aspiring

The Dohwar are a race of space penguins from the Spelljammer setting. I don't know too much about them, but even though I am a fan of whimsy in fantasy, I'm lukewarm about Dohwar which seem to have devolved into yet another quirky comedy relief race that populates the D&D universe.

A couple of miniatures of Dohwar appeared in the Icons of the Realms line. There is a standard Dohwar (Adventures in Space #5), and a Dohwar & Space Swine (Adventures in Space #18).

I wonder if the creator of the Dohwar had the flying pig with the motto "To the stars on the wings of a pig" used by John Steinbeck in mind when designing them.

In any event, I was interested in re-purposing the miniatures as giant albino penguins from the H.P. Lovecraft novella At the Mountains of Madness.

Most depictions of the albino Lovecraftian penguins make them distorted and grotesque.

For it was only a penguin—albeit of a huge, unknown species larger than the greatest of the known king penguins, and monstrous in its combined albinism and virtual eyelessness.

I prefer something a bit more unassuming like the Dohwar miniature, but sadly it is only about 19mm tall, which makes it closer in size to Inkayacu paracasensis than the full 6 foot height of Aptenodytes albus described in the Lovecraft story.

I slapped some white paint on the miniatures, and colored the feet, beaks, and horns in a coral color. The result was rather mediocre, and the penguins look a lot like oversized chickens...

Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!

Maybe a dark wash, and perhaps a different color for the horns will make them look a little less chicken-like.

My burning feet of fire!

Ithaqua is an addition to the Cthulhu Mythos created by August Derleth, inspired by Algernon Blackwood's novella The Wendigo. An interesting exposition on the story can be read at Dark Worlds Quarterly.

In the Blackwood story, the Wendigo is described only vaguely:

...a sort of great animal that lives up yonder," he jerked his head northwards, "quick as lightning in its tracks, an' bigger'n anything else in the Bush, an' ain't supposed to be very good to look at...

Ithaqua from Derleth's The Thing That Walked on the Wind is also described with broad strokes:

...I threw that startled glance into the sky and saw that the stars had been blotted out, I thought that the ‘cloud’ which had obscured the sky looked curiously like the outline of a great man. And I remember, too, that where the top of the ‘cloud’ must have been, where the head of the thing should have been, there were two gleaming stars, visible despite the shadow, two gleaming stars, burning bright-like eyes!

In the June 1944 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, the Wendigo is illustrated as a giant antlered beastman, which perhaps is the original inspiration for the antlered Wendigo.

Matt Fox, 1944

The cover of the Valdemar edition of collected Blackwood stories, is illustrated with a bizarre antlered beast that looks like it came straight out of Kingdom Death.

The Wendigo
and Other Strange and
Macabre Tales, 2020

My first exposure to the Wendigo however, came through Marvel comics, which portrayed the Wendigo as a large furry white anthropoid monster.

John Byrne, X-Men

This type of Wendigo can be seen from the likes of Crocodile Games.

WarGods of Hyperborea

More often than not though, the Wendigo is thought of nowadays as a skeletal antlered monster that is part beast, part man.

Peter Johnston for AE-WWII

Pathfinder 2nd ed.

Dark Heaven Legends 03673

Pet Semetary, 2019

Hannibal, S2 2014

Personally, I find popular culture versions of the Wendigo such as the Stag Man from Hannibal more reminescent of the Horned King from the The Chronicles of Prydain, or the Horned God Cerunnos (when not muddling matters further with other types of imagery).

Cover by Evaline Ness

Cerunnos, Nationalmuseet

Hannibal, S2 2014

Algonquian descriptions of the Wendigo or Windigo (ᐄᐧᐦᑎᑯᐤ) portray a corpse-like being which can be several times taller than a human.

Depictions of Wendigos by First Nations artists are also quite different from mainstream images.

Cover art by Norval Morrisseau

Carl Ray, 1971

Jackson_Beardy, 1967

I agree with the notion from Incidental Mythology that modern iterations of the Wendigo continue to build on pop culture depictions, appropriating and obscuring the original material.

In any event, I'm ambivalent to the antlered Wendigo, and don't have any miniatures of them (although I am rather partial to the difficult to find AE-WWII miniature which would make a good undead broo).

The miniatures I do have are from the Windwalker faction of Cthulhu Wars by Petersen Games. In the game, Ithaqua and Wendigos are different entities. The former being ranked among The Great Old Ones, while the later are a servitor race.

I have a translucent blue version of the Ithaqua figure. The standard version is in pale blue plastic like the Wendigo figure.

The Wendigo is the hairy humanoid type, but doesn't look too compatible with 1/72 scale figures since they are said to be roughly human-sized in the game. This makes complete sense of course, since it is scaled to human figures that are at least 32mm tall.

The set also contains Ice Age Tokens which make for good terrain pieces, as well as Gnoph-Keh, another servitor race.

For whatever reason, the Gnoph-Keh are typicially described as six-legged polar bears with a horn sticking from the forehead.

The Cthulhu Wars Gnoph-Keh however, fit the game image of mysterious monsters that loom in the snowy wastes, while watching their surroundings silently and ominously.

Sandy Petersen says the design of the Gnoph-Keh turned out rather underwhelming, but I like their somewhat goofy, slack-jawed look.

Interestingly enough, Clark Ashton Smith also uses the name Gnophkeh to describe a race of hairy, Ithaqua-worshipping creatures. They are described as cannibalistic (which I think is a misappellation, since he probably meant they eat humans rather than other Gnophkeh), which makes me think that they are not different from the Wendigo.

You have been eaten by a grue

The mysterious light-fearing grue is a monster that hails from the days of the green-screen monitor, and appeared in Zork and other interactive fiction games made by the now defunct Infocom.

The creature was created by Dave Lebling (as the equivalent of a bottomless pit) to limit the ability of a player to progress in the game without first solving puzzles related to getting a light source with which to see.

The name was taken from The Eyes of the Overworld, in which Jack Vance provides little information outside of one cryptic line of text.

Well...hmmm. Here is a statement, somewhat less explicit than others, in which he analyzes the half-men, little more than a brief set of notes:
'Gid: hybrid of man, gargoyle, whorl, leaping insect.
Deodand: wolverine, basilisk, man.
Erb: bear, man, lank-lizard, demon.
Grue: man, ocular bat, the unusual hoon
Leucomorph: unknown
Bazil: felindore, man, (wasp?).'

- The Eyes of the Overworld

The descriptions found in Zork are not clear either, and often conflicting since grues are never actually seen. In one game a grue is said to have a scaly gray arm, but in another, a grue is described as being covered in fur. Various pictures of the grue (found in The Zork Library) have shown the creature as scaly and reptilian.

As far as miniatures go, you can probably use any type of monster to represent grues. My own choice was to use 6th ed. GW Chaos Furies minus their wings.

Kneadatite was used to fill in the slots for their wings, and sculpted to match the fur on the miniature.

The Furies are somewhat bat-like, have variable numbers of eyes, and suitably fanged and clawed.

A couple of the Furies are holding skulls, which I'm going to say are grue-lanterns. These lanterns project the equivalent of a Sphere of Darkness that give the grue some degree of protection and vision in the presence of light.

Startled adventurers may see the eyes in the lanterns and mistake them as being part of the grue's hand, but this is just their minds playing tricks on them due to the stress of seeing a grue.

Another monster which reminds me of the grue is the ghast. I don't know if the Infocom grues were influenced by ghasts, but both creatures live in the darkness and are harmed by light.

Ghasts are described in some detail in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, and are said to tear at victims with their teeth and maul them with their sharp hooves in a manner similar to descriptions of grues with their fangs and claws. They are also described as having eyes that are colored similarly to those of the grue.

"...there glowed in the gloom of that great cavern's mouth first one pair of yellowish-red eyes and then another ... After a moment something about the size of a small horse hopped out into the grey twilight, and Carter turned sick at the aspect of that scabrous and unwholesome beast, whose face is so curiously human despite the absence of a nose, a forehead, and other important particulars."

- The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

Many artists draw ghasts with a tail, while others depict ghasts as being more human-like. I lean toward the more human-like interpretation since it aligns with the AD&D assertion that ghasts are practically indistinguishable from ghouls, but I think tailed ghasts can look quite horrifying as well.

Dreamquest Ghast Hunt
by Deviant artist Ito-Saith-Webb

Ghast by Deviant artist Dragon-Storm

Ghast by Deviant artist TickleMeCthulhu

The only ghast miniatures that I have are made by RAFM (Call of Cthulhu 2942).

They are massive compared to the Grenadier ghouls (being closer to the size of a large 1/72 horse), and their legs don't really have the kangaroo-like appearance described by Lovecraft, but I think Bob Murch did a great job with the face.

I also plan on making a tailed ghast using the RAFM war newt (Reptiliads RAF03010).

I cut the head off of the war newt and was going to attach a random kroot head that I had lying around, but now that I need it I can't seem to find it anymore.

Ummm... Now what?

Rock paper scissors

3D printed models

My shipment from Shapeways arrived on a rainy Friday morning. I thought it was a bit odd when I saw the e-mail notification since postal delivery is typically in the afternoon on weekdays, but when I got home, there was the package.

Everything came packaged in padded bubblewrap envelopes, with additional padding to prevent the contents from excessive movement during shipping.

The box is huge compared to what was actually being shipped, but it probably helps to prevent fragile parts from being broken in the mail.

Anyway, the models I ordered were:

• 1/72 Kosmoceratops by David Krentz (David Krentz Dinosaurs)
• 1/72 Arsinoitherium by Manuel Bejarano
• 1/72 Quetzalcoatlus by Aaron Doyle (Mesozoic Miniatures)
• Land Squid from Many Angled Studios (I'm thinking it's a Chthonian)
• HO Scale Frogs and Fire Hydrants by Dave Yale (Dave's Model Railway Stuff)

My impression of the models made with the White Strong & Flexible (WSF) material is mixed. Apparently WSF is Nylon 12 (aka polyamide 12), but it seemed very different from the material that was used to make the Serúdla models that I reviewed a couple of years back.

The models seem very light and don't feel particularly robust. I'm guessing that is because they are partially hollow. The material really reminds me of the type of plastic used to make caps for fast food drink cups.

The surfaces are very powdery/grainy looking, and edges that should ideally be sharp and smooth are covered with burrs. I tried to smooth the beak of the Quetzalcoatlus with some fine sandpaper, but it just made the burrs worse.

Perhaps some Mr. Surfacer will work to make the surfaces smooth, but I'd be open to suggestions from anyone with any experience polishing this material.

From a foot away, I'd say that the models look really good. The contours and poses are all top notch. However, close up they really look like rapid prototypes. My son examined the models a bit, and commented that they looked like "outlines" rather than detailed models.

The fine details of the mouth and eyes of the creatures are very soft or non-existant.

Here is a comparison of details from a Krentz resin styracosaurus and the WSF kosmosaurus.

Most of the skin texture that you see on the 3D render is lost in the print.

Krentz Kosmoceratops from Shapeways

Even so, I'm always impressed by the fine digits that are possible with 3D printing.

I won't go into the models made with FUD , but they look pretty fantastic. It's just that they're tiny, and the material is really hard to photograph in its natural state.

Dave's Model Railway Stuff  Frogs from Shapeways

I should have ordered one each of the WSF models in FUD to do a true comparison, but ordering another model at twice the cost didn't seem like it was worth it to me at the time. However, now that I think about it, in monetary terms, the FUD version of a Krentz model is still probably only ⅔ of the price of a comparable model in resin.

In addition to the Shapeways models, I had also purchased 3D printed elephant and mammoth models from an eBay seller. These models were made with ABS, which feels a lot more sturdy than WSF.

1/72 Columbian mammoth and Asian elephant

Layer lines are clearly visible on the models.

The underside surfaces have an odd fingerprint-like pattern to them.

The nice thing about ABS however is that it can be polished. Sanding is one option, but acetone vapor treatment also seems to work wonders. I will try this out and post about it at a later date.

In conclusion, my thoughts are that WSF is good for models that do not have delicate surface details or require hard edges. There could probably be a good market for sculpting dollies made with WSF. In the future, I'll go with FUD when ordering models. However, I don't really see myself ordering many models for the moment, because the price point seems rather high.

Modeling Notes:

WSF is heatproof to 80℃ / 176℉ and has a melting point at 172℃-180℃ (I wish I had known this when I was modifying my Serúdla). Additional specs can be found in the MDS.

A tutorial found at Shapeways recommends CA glue or Araldite epoxy resin for gluing Nylon 12. I also found additional information about bonding Nylon at RELTEK.

Frosted Ultra Detail (FUD) is some sort of acrylic polymer. Specs can be found in the MDS.

The layer lines on ABS models can be smoothed out using acetone vapor.  There are a number of tutorials that can be found online, but the method that I plan on using will probably be similar to the one described in this Airwolf 3D video tutorial.

I like this method because I don't particularly want to be working with fire and acetone at the same time, as described in many other videos. Having the liquid acetone above the the model (but not dripping onto the model) also makes a lot of sense, since acetone vapor is heavier than air.