Chris Heisman is getting ready to wrap up his current Traveller campaign, and he's doing it in style. Each of the players will be getting one of these custom-made "Grand Star of the Directorate" medals. It's a brilliant idea, and the kind of prop that players will remember for years.
Master tomecrafter MilleCuirs returns to our pages with this Grimoire of Cthulhu. I love the custom embossment design.
Oh, my. What strange and mysterious creature could have washed up on shore in Kent?
Beachgoers have found a "strange skeleton-like" figure which washed up on the shore at a British beach and left them puzzled over what it could be.
Paula Regan stumbled across the eerie object while enjoying a seaside walk with her husband Dave in Margate, Kent, on Monday, March 10, and a crowd gathered to look at it. Photos show what looks like a skeleton and mermaid hybrid, partially buried in sand and surrounded by seaweed- with a skeletal head and tail-like structure.
Followers of the blog will immediately recognize the creature as a traditional sideshow-style Fiji Mermaid. It's hard not to congratulate the Regans for a hoax well played, but I really wish the reporter hadn't played along quite so enthusiastically.
Richard Svensson is a dedicated amateur filmmaker who specializes in hand-animated fantasy. Over the years he's produced dozens of short films, including a number of Mythos-inspired works. He created this puppet to appear as the creature at the climax of his adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's "Dagon". It's a fantastic sculpt, built using techniques that Ray Harryhausen would be familiar with. Click through the link for a detailed look at the film, and the puppet's construction.
Sculptor Luke Welch brings us his take on the traditional Cthulhu idol, heavily influenced by Lovecraft's own sketch.
These beautiful Aragorn-inspired leather bracers come to us from Outcast Props. What makes them unusual, other than the level of craftsmanship, is that a gambeson-style bracer nests inside the ornate outer armor. Click through to see a full gallery, including some cool color variants.
McCormick Wands returns to our pages with this wonderful tableau featuring one of their ebonized master wand designs.
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.
The talented Patrick Magee returns to our pages with this delightfully awful death maggot. Click through to see the full video posted on Instagram.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I love fantasy specimens, and this unicorn horn from Burned Raven Tales is right up my ally. The subtle pearlescent finish is perfect.
