Ebonized Wand

McCormick Wands returns to our pages with this wonderful tableau featuring one of their ebonized master wand designs.

 

Like a Hole in the Head

Spooky Jack returns to our pages with a pair of prop skulls bearing the distinctive signs of trepanation.  The practice is surprisingly ancient, with skulls dating back almost ten thousand years showing signs of the procedure.  Even more amazing, we have hundreds of examples with new bone growth around the excised area.  The patient not only survived the operation, but lived long enough for the years-long process of healing.

 

Death Maggot

The talented Patrick Magee returns to our pages with this delightfully awful death maggot.  Click through to see the full video posted on Instagram.

 

Beethoven Letterlock

Letterlocking Videos brings us this recreation of the pentagonal folding technique Ludwig van Beethoven used in as 1814 letter to Johann Rupprecht.  If you're not familiar with letterlocking, it was the technique used to keep correspondence private before the widespread adoption of postal envelopes.  It's a great way to kick up the immersiveness of any pre-modern era written messages.

Reliquary

The gifted Ugo Serrano returns to our pages with this ornate reliquary.  The chasse was made with an off the shelf wooden niche that was leafed in real gold and then flame aged.

 

 

Lord of the Forge

Slagovir returns to our pages with another idol for the gods of old.  This time it's Svarog, the Slavic deity of fire and blacksmithing.  

Handout Help

Check out this video from the appropriately named Eldritch Tabletop.  On the surface, it's a look at his system for creating "Call of Cthulhu" tabletop handouts using Canva, ChatGPT, and AI generated art.  The rundown of how to use the template system in Canva for creating documents from faux newspaper articles to letters is worth a look by itself, but he also touches on some of the issues with AI use.

Personally, I think generated text and art is an incredibly valuable tool for individuals.  I've previously raved about the imagery from Midjourney.  With the proper prompts you can quickly generate some impressive artwork for all sorts of handouts.  What I'm definitely not crazy about is the massive proliferation of AI generated slop.  There was a time, and it wasn't that long ago, that you could ask a search engine for "cthulhu idol" images and see the latest sculpts posted to the internet.  Now?  Those works are buried under a tidal wave of AI images.

It's an issue that hits close to home for me, since it's become increasingly difficult to find work I want to feature here on Propnomicon.  Things were just about perfect right before COVID hit.  Now the rising tide of visual noise and the intentional de-optimization of Google makes actually discovering new things an order of magnitude more difficult.