#monsterworks

[monsterworks-studios-blog]

Getting ready to start recording for our behind the monster podcast. This is our second recording and planning session.

This is gonna be great!

@starwarssith13

@quietdumbassbitch

[monsterworks-studios-blog]

Welcome to MonsterWorks Studio, a place where fear becomes reality in our short films and in our artwork. After a 4 year hiatus, we are happy to be back.

Monsterworks is a small channel on YouTube run by two friends who write the stories, do the makeup, and film it ourselves.

The main creator of MonsterWorks is @starwarssith13, and he is assisted by his co-creator @strawberriesneoncigarettes

[monsterworks-studios-blog]

This is the main icon for our studios.

It's a sigil @starwarssith13 and I developed a few days ago using moon glyphs. The glyphs I used were fear, death, energy, dark, and blood. I know it sounds like something an edgelord would do, but there's a reason these were chosen.

At MonsterWorks we hope to inspire fear and feed the little bits of darkness in everyone. We want our films to make your blood turn cold and for our sfx makeup to look as good as possible with what we have.

***I also wanted to make it an actual sigil that could be used in witchcraft and the like, the glyph for energy was incorporated to help charge and empower the sigil to create the desire affects

[lex1nat0r]

Astral Spiders

(CW: arachnids, webs, body horror)

Monster concept for OSR-type games, including a stab at statting them up.

Arachnids that drift down from the stars on glimmering webs. Their colors range from black to blue to purple and where a spider's eight eyes would be are humanoid faces with hollow eye sockets and open, toothless mouths. All astral spiders can focus a terrible heat through these empty orifices, causing them to glow with an orange light. The heat ray from a small juvenile can immediately cause painful heat blisters while adults can cause lethal burns. It is not known how astral spiders perceive the world or even if they can see like humans can. Juvenile astral spiders are the size of large dogs, adults the size of humans, the more mature starcallers are the size of warhorses, and legends persist of starspinners the size of dragons.

All astral spiders have strangely knobbed backs, the bumps and ridges of their dorsal carapace becoming a multitude of humanoid arms and six-fingered hands when an astral spider has undergone enough molts to become a starcaller. When sufficiently angered, a starcaller or starspinner can wave their arms in arcane motions to bring malign stars overhead to curse the object of their ire. This curse can of course be undone by another starcaller or starspinner.

After its first few molts an astral spider is able to start spinning a web by producing an unknown crystalline substance. The spider will bring this web with it, adding to it over its lifetime and perhaps using it to glide to other worlds on strange currents. Aside from the inherent material value of the glittering web, each one is an unerring star chart and any scholar with an interest in the heavens will pay handsomely for one.

It is possible for an astral spider to be immediately hostile on encountering a person or group - angered, perhaps, by what it sees in their star-graven fate. It is advisable in this case to attempt to convince the spider that you were born under a different sign, or - much more difficult - persuade it that its interpretation of the stars is wrong. Sometimes astral spiders will seek to aid strangers, having read a pleasing fate in their stars.

More likely, on meeting any travelers an astral spider will accost them with questions about their birth-signs in voices echoing from their eye-mouths in eight different languages. Astral spiders have been known to get irate at people ignorant of the stars of their birth and any omens attending it. It is recommended that anyone likely to encounter an astral spider be up to date on their horoscope.

What happens when an astral spider's web-chart shows a star that cannot be found in the sky?

What happens when an astral spider determines that certain people born under certain signs are vital to its own plans?

What happens when an astral spider attempts to rebel against the stars themselves?

Age: Juvenile/Adult/Starcaller/Starspinner

AC 13/13/13/15

HD 4 (S)/8 (M)/16 (L)/24 (L)

Mv 40'/40'/50'/60'

Atk 2 claws (1d6/1d6) + heat ray (2d4)/2 claws (1d6/1d6) + heat ray (2d6)/2 claws (1d8/1d8) + heat ray (3d6) + curse/2 claws (1d10/1d10) + heat ray (4d6) + curse

Sv 11+/8+/6+/4+

ML 9/7/6/6

Heat ray: Takes action, save vs. breath for half

Curse: Takes action. Target saves vs wands -2, or if in combat the target is automatically afflicted with a curse of severity related to how much hp damage the spider(s) have inflicted during the scene (e.g. reduce max HP by amount of damage, malus to all saves based on % of total hp lost, etc.)

If adapted for MÖRK BORG, a starspinner can cause a Misery but the world will end before they can finish studying its effects and cause a second.

[lex1nat0r]

Getting into the weeds slimes about encounter checks in old-school tabletop RPGs (i.e. those that try to emulate the feel of pre-3e Dungeons & Dragons, though not necessarily the mechanics).

I read a blog post yesterday: https://illusorysensorium.com/doom-clock/

Normal old-school D&D encounter check, you roll a d6 every turn or two and on a 1 you get an encounter. The overloaded encounter die is a tool that's become popular in the current generation of old-school-inspired games. Overloading the encounter die lets you abstract the need for actually tracking how long your torches have been burning or your spells have been going.

The post up there goes into a list of potential problems with this approach and the author suggests quite a neat mechanic: the doom clock, a usage die (i.e. decreasing in size) until your expedition is "doomed and lost". I think usage dice are a neat mechanic - my beloved Alien RPG uses usage dice to track how much oxygen your character has and I love that approach.

But I kind of like the overloaded encounter die. At least the way I've been doing it, I like the sense of the dungeon being a more dynamic place. So my immediate inspiration on reading this was a compromise. Here's my revised OED table:

1 - DOOM 2 - Encounter (A Slime Draws Near! Command?) 3 - Local Effect (A mixed bag, varies by dungeon and level - one of the options I always include here is to have a door become stuck because I never include enough stuck doors normally. Sometimes it means a character gets cold dungeon water leaking on them from the ceiling. This is also where I put what I consider non-monsters from the monster manual - yellow mould and shriekers and the like. Were I a more courageous man I'd also put corridor traps under this result) 4 - Local Clock (Tick one of the dungeon level's clocks. This is something that will definitely change the situation in the dungeon level, e.g. [faction name withheld for spoiler reasons] invades the level. Though I've yet to see one of these clocks completed so this may require tweaking.) 5 - Omen (I'm not actually sure how omens are intended to work - whether they just fix when the next encounter roll is going to be or if the next time you would roll an encounter check, there will be an encounter with the omened result. The way I've been doing it is to treat it as an encounter far enough away to avoid (my players rarely choose to avoid the encounter)) 6 - Free (Nothing happens) So that DOOM entry would basically mimic another result on the table based on how many times that result has come up on that delve. First - Free Second - Local Clock Third - Omen Fourth and onwards - Encounter

Well, it's got the spirit of the Doom Clock right? Getting that sense of time pressure because the Mythic Underworld is starting to hate you. It does remove the extremes - there's no hard time limit until you are lost in the underworld, and there's no organic room to have beneficial encounters that diminishes as time goes on (however: the first DOOM result (Free) could be replaced with a beneficial encounter if I really want to add that back in).

Couple notes: this would be an every exploration turn roll, until now I've been going with the Basic roll every two turns. Though I would probably stick with 1 roll / 2 turns for characters level 1 - 3. I also don't track torches in my game - one character can make infinite (minor) fire and another is an elf with darkvision so I suppose I was never operating in the original spirit of the overloaded encounter die to begin with.

[lex1nat0r]

You thought Halloween was over!?

I'm here to keep the Spooky Season going, with a 5-map DOOM2 WAD I've made called Zombie Base.

It's pretty basic, five levels total, playable in about 30-45 minutes by my reckoning. Difficulty levels are implemented but I haven't really tested outside of Hurt Me Plenty. I suspect this is on the easier side, I don't really consider myself a veteran DOOM player.

I've only tested it with GZDoom but it should work with other ports since all the maps are in vanilla DOOM2 format.

And finally here's the link to the thing. Thanks for checking it out!

[lex1nat0r]

Hmm!

[monsterworks-studios-blog]

@starwarssith13 when he presents me with our newest little monster film stars.

Our newest film is in the making.

We're still working on scripts and character designs, but by spring we should have it figured out lol.

Smiley boi is our spooky little guy who will bring fear and love into everyone's cold, dead hearts 😃

@quietdumbassbitch

@starwarssith13