"Loooviiing yoooouuu...is easy 'cause you're beauuuuutiful. Doo dooo doodoo. Aaaaaaiiiiiiii"
Ahem. It isn't always this easy.
The height of a freelancer's satisfaction on any given project is often mute and unheralded. When a project is finally turned over, dutifully and painstakingly crafted over the course of months, only your developer, and perhaps your long-suffering spouse, are the ones who even know. In other words, the echo of popping champagne corks isn't commonly experienced by your typical RPG designer. Since you can't say anything, by the time a project does reach the public eye, from the initial murmurs of messageboard excitement to the dramatic unveiling of the finished product, you've usually moved well beyond the groundswell, that special creative place in your brain long-since vacated and re-inhabited with new assignments. And since words are cheap and art isn't, you're often surprised to find things have changed significantly since you last saw them, adapted to fit the artist depictions that aren't always what you remember describing. So when the gaming world starts to get excited, you often have to flip through along with everyone else, read what's become of your orphaned ideas, and figure it out all over again.
But then there's that rare time in a freelancer's life, particularly when you've cultivated a great relationship with your publisher and regularly attend the same conventions, when your excitement never quite gets a chance to quell, because they keep stoking those fires that got you so excited to work on a project in the first place. Most recently, Paizo has facilitated this with a growing list of awesome tie-in products unveiled at various stages of development, most of which stand a good chance of possessing snippets of your game design. With the introduction of the Wizkids' partnership with Paizo, this opens up intriguing new possibilities to see fantastic 3-dimensional depictions of your work, something I've always wanted to experience. Which is how I remember so vividly the first time I saw the Clockwork Reliquary.
Concept artwork for the Clockwork Reliquary.
The chance to revisit Azlanti technology was the reason I immediately jumped when I saw the outline for The Dead Heart of Xin. I had set myself up for this chance years earlier in some of my first works for Paizo: From Shore to Sea, and later the Sun Temple colony in Lost Cities of Golarion. But nearly all the Azlanti devices PCs experienced in those products were dormant or malfunctioning, only providing the merest hint of the incredible power wielded by Golarion's first advanced civilization. Given the chance to see some of that stuff working as it should, all set in the hallowed halls of the palace stronghold of Rune Magic's inventor and a true master of those arcane arts? Well... I could barely contain myself.
It wasn't long after I finished crafting the adventure (and turned over a month early, at that!) that I flew to Seattle for PaizoCon 2012, and visited a recently-transplanted Daigle and the rest of the crew at the offices. As usual for a working freelancer, most talk is on upcoming projects, but James and Erik called me over for a special little surprise: the initial sketches for the Clockwork Reliquary. I had worked hard to realize James' outline notes into a terrifying mechanical monstrosity that was at once ancient and advanced. As you'll see when the adventure arrives next month, I had settled on a technological design aesthetic inspired by the skeksis architecture and weaponry from The Dark Crystal. As a result, I remember having the most trouble with headless design and top-mounted arms the outline tentatively described, as I desperately wanted to avoid a "helicopter-head" creature. I even sketched it out myself as part of my turnover in a bid to prevent that depiction, in an almost-embarrassing drawing with more spidery legs that turned out surprisingly close to the finished rendition (admittedly done well before I knew who the cover artist would be, but shown here for your snickering amusement). I was really concerned with having the BBEG of the AP invoke the same kind of mind-numbing fear when you see a really good human-versus-dragon illustration. You look at it and and wonder "how in the world could a real person even survive for a second against that thing?" Not that my sketch depicts that, but I'm not an artist, and I was trying.
Of course, it doesn't hurt when you've got the master himself—Wayne Reynolds—working toward the same goal. When I'd heard Wayne was the cover artist, I was immediately embarrassed for my presumptions to do my own sketches, and I remember sheepishly asking Wayne at PaizoCon if he'd seen that terrible thing (mercifully he had not). But even without the visual reference, words and art connected perfectly through the descriptions he'd been provided, because his pencils sent shivers up my spine in a way I'd never experienced in seeing my work realized in two-dimensions—and I've seen a lot. The gangly arms were spot-on. The stilted legs. The clawed hands. The skymetal construction. The crystal coffin. (Fun Fact: 4 arms + 3 legs=7 limbs corresponding with Seven Virtues of Rule!) Most of all I appreciated the noticeable lack of too many gears. Despite my early enthusiasm for the steampunk genre and the creature's name, I never wanted this adventure to delve into that aesthetic, and, in fact, I had tried to skip gears entirely in my early designs which called for the various joints to be bonded not quite by clockwork, but by mini-miasmas of arcane energy. You can still see a hint of that attempt in my sketch, which would allow its individual limbs to orbit its body in weird magic ball-and-socket joints and prevent my "helicopter-head" dread, and it kept with my established Azlanti-stuff-always-orbits themes. Sure, I would liked to have seen a burnt-black skeleton and a transparent-green noqual crystal as originally designed, but those concerns vanished with the way Wayne conveyed the maliciousness of a partial skeleton without eyes or flesh to work with was just perfect, and the sloping, arched-back shoulders of its four clawed arms just conveyed the terrifying power of this mechanical horror. It was so... antediluvian... so... perfect. Truly an imperial monstrosity capable of leading a clockwork army to world domination!
But there was more! I think while James and I just sort of oo-ed and ah-ed and nodded in wide-eyed unison over just how perfect the depiction was, Erik tugged on my sleeve and led me—stunned and glassy-eyed—to his office, where he revealed that not only would Wizkids and Paizo be producing an accompanying miniature line for Shattered Star, but production was well underway... AND the Clockwork Reliquary would be one of them AND... well, he showed me the initial sculpt.
Like many Paizo fans, I grew up surrounded by action figures. Now as then, I've always been fascinated by a world in miniature. Star Wars was, of course, my first introduction, but I recall my first RPG purchase was a Ral Partha beholder mini when I was only 7 or 8 years old. Hundreds more followed. Scaled down, I could lord over these tiny figures like some deranged deity, a habit I'm afraid has never subsided in adulthood, as I still have an unhealthy habit for minis. And as I'd grown up chopping up and rearranging figures into variations that matched my imagination's own ideas—I remember a Ithorian head superglued to Obi-Wan's body as a "Hammerhead-Jedi-Knight-Bounty-Hunter" being a particular favorite—seeing something I'd imagined brought into the world in 3-dimensions was always some secret passion of mine. So imagine the thrill of seeing one of your creations actualized in the real world! Here we had a hunch nestled in James' head for years, entrusted to me to flesh out and build in imaginative words, descriptions, and statistics, then passed on the an incredible artist to realize in two-dimensions, and, finally, passed on to another artist—this time a sculptor—to realize in a third. I was speechless. Just as Wayne Reynolds had realized nearly every nuance of my Clockwork Reliquary designs, so, too, did the sculptor at WizKids realize every nuance of his concept drawing. The gangly-yet-powerful skymetal frame. Those oddly hunched shoulders that reminded me of the cocked hammer of a gun ready to fire. The howling skeleton encased in super-cool transparent epoxy. Those misleadingly dainty legs. The great details of Azlanti glyphs and Thassilonian runes and the ribcage-like reservoir and the scrolls flapping in the breeze and... *gasp.* I marveled, as your PCs soon will, at the sheer power of a reborn tyrant hellbent on reclaiming a kingdom lost 100 centuries before.
Just as I'd struggled in design with the Clockwork Reliquary's size before striking the right balance, so, too, does this mini take advantage of the best of both worlds. On paper, Large didn't seem quite imposing enough, and Huge didn't seem to fit the dimensions of a cradled skeleton and the gangly, whirling-dervish agility I wanted to convey for Xin's penultimate creation. As a result of those design assumptions, this mini is by far one of the largest Larges I've ever handled, suitably imposing and towering over PCs at just under 4-inches. Since the reliquary's longer arms are about 3 inches from shoulder to claw-tip, and bent at that, I'd say this mini gets the "gangly" theme I so wanted to convey down! The internal skeleton is fairly big in relative scale, but since The Dead Heart of Xin allows you to actually witness Xin's final moments, it isn't hard to assume that maybe the old emperor was maybe under the influence of enlarge person or other arcane augmentation, or we're simply seeing the distortion of the eldritch-warped crystal coffin. This was one bad dude, so anything's possible!
So here it is, Paizo fans! The Clockwork Reliquary, finally unveiled after 10,000 years of slumber, risen from the waves and ruins of Thassilon to claim the lives of your PCs before moving onward to world domination at the head of its clockwork army! Can they stop it, or will all of Golarion once again kneel before the skymetal tyrant? Erik was right last week when he called this figure "the coolest mini in the whole set, possibly the most complex and awesome-est prepainted plastic mini ever made for any set." I couldn't agree more, and I know your wait was worth it.
The Clockwork Reliquary is the primary villain of the Shattered Star Adventure Path's final chapter, The Dead Heart of Xin, on sale next month here at Paizo.com.
Brandon Hodge
Freelancer
