Carved Cthulhu

This primitive-style wooden Cthulhu idol comes to us from Italian artist Fabio Stazi.

 

The One True Way of Aging Paper

Don't let their name fool you.  Magnoli Clothiers is one of the premier producers of movie prop reproductions in the world.  Yes, they specialize in bespoke clothing, in particular meticulously researched shirts, ties, and jackets from famous film franchises, but they do so much more than that.   The One Eyed Willy's treasure map from "The Goonies" featured in this video is a good example.  More importantly, at least for our purposes, it provides a master class in aging paper in less than three minutes.

1.  The paper is stained brown with a light spray of tea solution and immediately dried with a heat gun.   The entire process takes place on a flat working surface.

2.  This is one of the very, very few cases where burning the edges of a paper prop makes sense.  It's how the original screen-used prop duplicated the look of edge-browning caused by oxidation.  Importantly, note how controlled the process is.

 3.  General dirt and grime is recreated using pastel chalks, with particular attention to the extra material caught by creases in the paper.

4.  Finally, just for you closet pyromaniacs, some actual paper burning!  Again, it's a very fleeting, controlled exposure to recreate the scorch marks on the original prop.

This is the way.

Against the Dark

 Spooky Jack returns to our pages with this nicely done momento mori skull serving as a candelabra.

 

 

Stop, A Head

This wonderfully gruesome mummified head prop comes to use from the appropriately named Blind Dead Relics.

 

Mummified Vampire Heart

I love seeing alternate takes on subjects I've done myself.  In this case, Levi Combs of Planet X Games shares his version of a mummified vampire heart.  That includes a look at how he actually made it:

"I found the box at a yard sale. Got the heart from a Halloween Express and then coated it with multiple layers of adhesive and ash from my fireplace to give it a withered color/texture/look. The pages were taken from a small book inside the Hellboy Special Edition DVD."

Reproducing the texture of very old mummified body parts using layers of ash is a brilliant idea.  

 

 

Berserker's Thorns

These are most definitely not LARP safe.

 Blacksmith Tyler McCormick brings us his Berserker's Thorns, a matched pair of hand forged axes.

 

 

Big in Japan

For once the YouTube algorithm kicked out a banger.

If you're a Call of Cthulhu tabletop player you're probably aware the game has a huge following in Japan.  What I never actually grasped is that Chaosium's creation effectively is tabletop roleplaying there.  The Weird Place channel has a great look at some of the cultural quirks that made that happen.  

There's a lot to digest here.  I was vaguely aware of how important "Record of the Lodoss War" was to popularizing pen and paper RPGs, but never realized CoC campaign recaps were so insanely popular with the Japanese fanbase.  More importantly, now I know why a Japanese schoolgirl and her friends pop up whenever I Google "Nyarlathotep".