My House is Full of Mod Bosses!

A Blog Mostly About Jenn Creating Stuff

[goldronin]

Shortcuts

So I’m back. The First 5 Year story arc is done, and we’re rolling right along into the next arc. I’ll be getting back to actual props soon, but in the meantime, I want to take a moment to talk about a few shortcuts.

When you’re dealing with fast deadlines, you’re inevitably going to come up against some walls you can’t get around without doing things ‘not quite right’. You can’t reason with a too-short deadline. You can’t reason with weather, or shipping times. You have to make do with limited space if you live in an apartment.

A lot of this can be managed with good planning - Start projects as early as possible. Order your materials ASAP or keep them stocked. Know your local suppliers, and which online suppliers will be able to deliver on short notice without you paying out the nose for shipping (we use Amazon Prime, and if I am on a tight deadline I’ll keep my Ebay search parameters to sellers within 100 miles of me, though that can be risky). Check weather reports, find friends with a garage or basement you can borrow for crafting in so you don’t have to breathe fumes or particulate in your home.

**** The following notes are from my own experience, specifically for LARP props (mostly EVA foam ones) that can be less than perfect. YMMV. If you’re making something for sale or for a customer, or something you want to last a good long while, I really suggest doing things as ‘right’ as possible. ****

CUTTING AND SANDING - How neat do you want it?

The Right Way: For clean foam work, there is really nothing that beats a sharp knife and sanding tools to make that surface perfect (OK, -maybe- a laser cutter). The Problem: Sanding foam throws up a ton of non-friendly dust, and if you’re stuck indoors and don’t have a dedicated workroom this can be a huge pain. It’s also going to take time to get it to look right... which is fine.... if you have that time. The Shortcut: I don’t sand. There are cases where a design might require it, but I design to avoid those. For thin and medium foam, I will sometimes use scissors for cutting. I will not, however, skimp on a sharp knife for thick foam. A few seconds every 3 cuts or so with a sharpening tool is entirely worth it. Consequences: Potentially ragged seams if you don’t cut well. You’ll have to make sure your angles are right ahead of time.

GLUE - Grab fast, Stick well.

The Right Way: Arguably, contact cement is one of the better adhesives for foam work. You get a crisp looking seam and consistent adhesion between the surfaces you are gluing, right to the edges. The Problem: But, oh, those fumes, and that 10-15 minute dry time (which can be reduced slightly with heat), and that sticky mess if you’re not careful. Meanwhile, super-glue sticks like heck at first, but can snap off or eat away at your materials or paint. The Shortcut: My go-to for foam has always been hot glue. It sticks as quickly as superglue and has no fumes. Adhesion doesn’t seem to be a problem - if your glue is sufficiently hot when applied you’re more likely to rip the foam than to get the glue to let go, particularly if you score the two surfaces with a knife before gluing (like with pottery). I haven’t had anything come unstuck in hot weather. Consequences: Again, your seams will probably not be pretty, and you have to be careful with thin craft foam because the hot glue is hot enough to deform it, leaving lumps where you applied the glue.

COATING - A step you can skip entirely.

The Right Way: Much debate is had over what base coating is best for foam. Plastidip and rubberized coatings are a go-to for many (again, an issue with fumes being toxic, and 'dip is fickle when it comes to weather), and some still use layers of wood glue or mod podge (I don’t recommend these, they are time consuming to apply and tend to crack or crease badly). The Problem: This is another coat, or coats, of something you need to have the correct weather for and time you can spend waiting for it to dry. Is it worth it? The Shortcut: For LARP NPC costuming, my favorite coating is none. Heat-seal the foam, and paint that sucker up. Don’t bother with a top coat, either. Consequences: Your paint job will possibly crack (more likely if you coat it heavily with paint) and scuff more easily.

To be fair, this armor took a serious beating over the course of a year.

PAINT - As fast as you can?

The Right Way: Use plastic-friendly, indoor/outdoor spraypaint/primer combos, of the same brand, follow instructions regarding coating times, weather conditions, and dry times. Don’t paint indoors. The Problem: Uncooperative weather conditions, lack of time, limited materials. The Shortcut: Yes, you can paint in any weather conditions. Yes, you can mix brands or use paints without primer or plastic adhesion. Yes, if your event is tonight, you can paint it now and be okay. (No, do not do this in your apartment. You will regret it.) Consequences: Your surface finish will not be perfect. If it’s humid in your garage, or raining outside, you’re going to end up with paint that will run or stipple. If it’s very cold, the paint may bead and run. Use a heater or fan to help reduce the extremes, or at least wait until it isn’t raining. Mixing brands? Be aware not all brands like each other, and may react to each other in an undesirable way. Non-Plastic and Non-Primer paints will work okay, but will not coat your prop as well. Not enough dry time according to the label? If you have given it at least the minimum “to handle” time, it should be okay. Your project will smell strongly of paint and might be mildly sticky. Additional: If I can skip painting, or reduce it to something I can do by hand with acrylic paint, I will. I try to use foam that is the final color I want, or close to it. Even if you are painting, having a base foam that is gray or black is preferable in most cases, so no ‘funky’ colors show through at the edges, seams, or anyplace the paint gets damaged.

Rainy weather and humidity combined with a rush paint job caused this paint to run and pool at the bottom of the foam.

Again, these shortcuts may or may not work out for you. Test them, consider what you are willing to sacrifice in terms of quality in exchange for the ability to finish your project on time, or to get a few more hours to work on other things... like getting a reasonable amount of sleep.

[goldronin]

Some like it Hot...

I’m going to skip around the timeline slightly, since there’s some overlap of what props were built when. Probably only Jeramy will get that the title of this post means we’ll be talking about THE POWER STATION.

They’re all taking Radiation Damage right now. The systems that power the Island/ship have always been troublesome, both in and out of game, and the props were just as much of a pain. Power isn’t coming from nowhere - it’s something that needs to be replenished and monitored to make sure stuff doesn’t stop working. Mechanically speaking, the systems we had in place made sense. But in-game it was a chore, and out-of-game we didn’t have the manpower to make sure everything was kept up-to-date and to make sure there were penalties if it was misused.

We started with a power station represented by a network of silver pipes and LEDS, in an enclosure marked with RADIATION signs. The team wanted to have Power Cores as items that would be required to power in-game systems. These cores (represented by Voss bottles, filled with water and glowsticks) would be charged up at the power station. To house these, I built four containment units. The central core would be considered ‘charged’ and could be removed for use and replaced with an uncharged one.

There were a few problems with these. The power station was located part-way up a hill, a decent distance from the main building. Hauling water for the cores to and from the power station was a pain - we stopped using water after a point. Then, we stopped bothering with active glow sticks, since they weren’t particularly visible during the day. And any time a battle broke out near the power station, one or more of these were certain to get kicked (this was before I learned not to make fragile props). I was usually repairing at least one between events.

Despite that, these props actually managed to hang in there for a couple years before they were replaced. More on that in a bit...

I also built a main systems board and mini-boards for each designated area in-game. These were mostly EVA foam, silver matteboard and laminated sheets (before I swore off using paper in prop construction). I printed and cut out the lettering, then laminated it so that plastic sheets that could be swapped out between green, yellow, and red to indicate system status, and installed a light which would illuminate the sheets from inside the prop. The mini-boards had various rank levels accessed by turning a knob, and had interchangeable labels for the area type where modifications could be written.

Unfortunately, the battery that powered the light in the Status Board had an extremely short lifespan, the props themselves couldn’t be easily hung or taped to walls and kept falling down, and the various pieces that could be inserted to designate specific areas or statuses were lost almost immediately. No one actually used the system board to indicate issues in-game, and only a few players used the mini-boards to indicate upgrades in Areas. After finding the Status Board crushed under some heavy items it had been packed with, I retired these props and started handing out plain paper printouts of the mini-boards instead.

There was eventually some talk in-game about upgrading the Power Station to an Eberon Reactor, which could produce more power cores. Now, I’m not sure the town ever actually agreed to have the reactor installed, but by that point I had already built the prop, and up it went.

The Eberon Reactor is a prop I am still relatively proud of. After a couple initial tweaks and repairs, it’s managed to stay mostly in one piece and functional. The central prop was built mostly from pvc, a recycled dehumidifier, Voss bottles (recycled from the previous power units), and a bucket. LED lights with a variable controller made it so the station could pulse eerily with purple light. Since the Eberon Reactor produced more in-game radiation than the old power station, I set up pylons around it to designate an area where radiation damage was more intense. There was also a power core holder that could hold up to 16 power cores. Four cores could be ‘charged’ on the reactor at a time.

With the Eberon Reactor installed and producing more power cores, we changed the Area plans so that a designated Area could get benefits if a power core were installed there. I assembled a bunch of battery-powered LED lighted canisters to hold the power cores, but those pretty quickly ran into the upkeep issue again - no one had time to change the batteries in them (which didn’t last a whole event) or make sure the power core present wasn’t the same one from the previous event - in other words, ‘used up’.

The only major problem with the Eberon Reactor was an in-game one: It was too dangerous, and the players decided to blow it up before anyone else could.

With the Eberon Reactor blown up... well, technically nothing should have been working anymore, right? ... right?

Lessons learned: Make props sturdy as heck. No cardboard. No batteries if it’s gotta be on all day long. Upkeep and penalties... still a problem, those things aren’t fun for anyone. But that’s a rules problem, and I can live with that.

At least we didn’t actually blow up the prop. Because that has happened before. More on that soon!

[goldronin]

Decorating the Future

You can really never have enough props and decoration at a sci-fi LARP. While a campground is perfectly reasonable for a fantasy LARP, it isn’t particularly futuristic-looking without a lot of help and a good dollop of suspension of disbelief. We wrote around this to some degree, claiming that the island-ship our game takes place on had tried to build an acceptable home for its residents... explaining why the building looked relatively normal.

The future is ... rustic?

The other problem, which comes out of renting a site, is that all the decor has to get put up before game and taken down after, again and again, in some semblance of the way it was the previous game. This adds a fair bit of wear and tear to items which might last longer were they allowed to stay in place indefinitely (Rope lights in particular do not care for this sort of treatment). Many of our year 1 and 2 props didn’t last.

ISSAC’S BAR, circa 2013

Currently, we decorate mostly with lighting - LED strip lights and color bulbs.  The dining area has a background soundtrack (mostly instrumental electronic) and the living room has an in-game news reel that players can run. There are flavor-text posters scattered throughout the building and, more recently, flags in the main room for various groups the town is allied with.

[goldronin]

A Lesson about Durability

One of the early projects I took on was a commission from one of our players for their Aesir (essentially, space-viking) character - they wanted an Aesir-style eyepiece which could be worn while crafting items in-game. Also, they told me it would probably get broken.

It did. I think the first time they wore it out in-game the LED light I’d installed on it ended up getting broken off. And again later, with the replacement light... eventually I think they stopped wearing it because it was too fragile.

If I re-made this, or something like it, I’d probably use thermoplastic/worbla instead since it would be less likely to break.

LARPers don’t treat things gently. I figured this out pretty quickly after a few packing/unpackings of the props and supplies. Things get treated roughly, tossed in piles, dropped, thrown, slammed against walls, left in sunny cars, dropped in puddles and put away wet.

Adding to the difficulty, Sci-fi props are complicated affairs and look better with all kinds of (read: breakable) bits and bobs and wires and LEDs. Almost all of my early props got broken, if not immediately, then after only a few events. It is hardly ever intentional, so I don’t tend to get mad about it (despite the warnings issued to players that I will eat their faces if they break things). There are a few wonderful people who treat anything delicate with extra care and have protected many props from the usual hazards, but accidents happen. Any time I put out a new prop, I am pleasantly surprised when it -doesn’t- come back to me broken.

So what’s to be done? Here are rules I try to abide by:

Make things as water resistant as possible: No paper or cardboard unless you’re using it only once or guarding it with your life (way too easily ruined by water, and very liable to grow mold). Use waterproof lights or seal electronics against rain or spills. No water-based paints or dyes, they will run or bleed and make a mess of themselves and potentially other things. That goes for glues/sealers too.

Make things washable: For anything fabric, it’s best to make the fabric part removable so it can be washed. Otherwise, eventually you’ll need to figure out how to wash it without ruining it. Worse, you may find it has moldered and ruined the prop/costume - any anything packed with it.

Make things as durable as possible: Foam is pretty tough and the worst you will see is a rip here and there or scratches to the paint. Plastic is also a good option, but make sure you secure the hell out of the pieces with fasteners and screws so it can withstand being dropped. Related: no amount of sealant will keep your paint job safe.

Still, expect it to get broken.

Note, this is only for things that you want to keep, store and re-use. Depending on where you’re storing things, these may also need to be able to withstand extreme temperatures. Interestingly, I have found hot glue can handle a hot shed just fine. Any props with freezable liquids in them are probably not a good idea, though.

I put out a prop last event that I was pretty sure was LARP-proof. I had used ultra-durable epoxy putty to shape it, the base was an extra-wide christmas-tree holder, to prevent it from being easily tipped over, and the structure was hard plastic, held together with many screws. I tested it by dropping it myself at home (I would say intentionally... but not so much) and it was fine afterwards. I thought I was good to go! Our setup team handled it with care and the marshals running the mod it was out for made it explicitly clear not to hit it or knock it over.

It still got broken. Ah, well.

[goldronin]

The -er Costume

The first official Doomsday LARP Event was in June 2012. At that point I had not been very involved in the game planning (besides helping to design the logo, promotional fliers, and in-game printed materials). I’d been to the campsite we were going to use, and decided that the giant taxidermy head in the lodge needed to be suitably alien - one of my first projects was to make an extra eyeball to stick on that thing.

I asked what else I could help with, and was tasked with building a main boss costume. I’m not sure if there were any guidelines beyond that - make something scary and sci-fi looking.

This first piece of costuming was cobbled together from an odd assortment of items, using a helmet and sports armor as the base and building on it with EVA foam, duct tape, pipe insulation, bits of tubing and glow-in-the-dark plastic. If I were re-building it now, I would probably make more of it out of EVA... but I’m not sure it would have held up as well as it did. For certain, though, i will not use fabric-based armor again. It’s too difficult to clean.

This might have been my first time using the EVA foam mats for costuming, though I am not entirely sure. I coated the whole thing with Plasti-Dip and a color-shift purple-blue spray paint, which worked great on everything except the plastic arm guards (the only part I’ve had to re-paint, due to the dip peeling off).

The result looked like some kind of weird plant-bug-Guyver hybrid.

This costume got used as the main boss for the first four events (!), and has been used a few times since then for non-combat roles. Parts were added or removed from it to make it represent different things - it was used as the Purifier, Arbiter, Liquifier... it became known as the -er costume due to the names all ending in -er.

(Players eventually found out that these creatures were once something else, but now were manifestations of the systems that control the island the game takes place on... which is actually a crashed alien space ship belonging to aliens known as the Exiles.)

The -er costume helmet design would be used to make the -er helmets (headbands worn by NPCs to represent they have control over a certain aspect of the ship’s systems - a less developed form of the -er creature) and eventually would determine the design of the Exile alien species.

[goldronin]

So Much Stuff

A couple months back, at New Years, I became aware of a slight problem with putting guests in the space designated as our Art Room. It is possible anyone staying in that room will wake up in the middle of the night and find various monster costumes were looming over them as they slept.

GOOD MORNING. WOULD YOU LIKE SOME COFFEE?

(The T-Rex head is precariously placed and has a tendency to attack without warning. Our cat has experienced this several times.)

A bit of background for this first post: This is not exactly a new problem for me (though, the monster costumes are a recent development). My sense of decoration evolved around displaying art and curios I made or collected when I was younger. My dad is a carpenter and my mom is a traditional artist, and both of them encouraged my sister and I in our artistic pursuits. The setting we grew up in was also a contributing factor - historical district, mostly conservation land and antiques - there was plenty of material around to experiment with or be inspired by, and not too much to do otherwise unless you were playing outside or at a local library.

I was skilled in a lot of different techniques and mediums even before I made it to middle school, and picked up more through the strong art programs at my schools. Eventually I was told I needed to pick a focus for college, and because of my interest in anime and manga at that time, I went with Illustration. Unfortunately, the college I attended was strongly biased against anime-stylings, and the Illustration program was skewed heavily -away- from fine art (emphasis on graphic design and advertising)... and after graduating I ended up with a career in pre-press and graphic design, though I continued to make things and paint in my free time.

One of the things I started to make for fun was foam wings. A friend who was vending hairfalls suggested I try selling them at conventions (This was before it was common to see them around... tons of people make foam wings now. Maybe not ones this weird, though).

Eventually I met my partner at one of these conventions and that lead to my current situation - with an accumulation of 4+ years of props from a LARP in the apartment, garage, and shed.

I was originally not sure how much help I would be able to provide in running a LARP or making props and costuming - I was a non-LARPer, and used to making purely aesthetic pieces. I had to make some changes to how I built things: One, they had to be safe. Two, they needed to be able to take a beating - and I don’t just mean when people hit them with foam weapons. Three, I couldn’t really do WIP or project posts until after the event, because of spoilers. That last one meant usually I wouldn’t post pictures or info about the projects at all - I didn’t notice until I went to update my portfolio.

A lot of the work that goes into LARP props is underappreciated. I’m not saying people don’t appreciate the props - on the contrary, I often get tons of compliments on things I’ve made; its a big part of what makes doing this worthwhile. But I know I’m not the only propmaker who treats each piece they make as artwork - durable artwork that gets hit by people - and I want to showcase the projects I’ve done in a more public way.

And that is what I am hoping to do with this blog: show off some of the monsters creeping around my home, and share some of the details about how I built them or what I learned from the process.