Okay, just for fun and maybe for some ideas--
What is the most unusual or creative item you have used as a visual aid or prop during your game when using miniatures?
Here's some of mine:
Pinecones = Trees
Coffee Filters = Canopy Tents for a retinue of knights!!!
Dominos = Dungeon Walls
Cigar Boxes = Buildings
Florist's Moss = bushes
Styrofoam shipping inserts from computer/electronic items = boats/ships/gatehouses
Stethoscope = colossal dragon
What have you used?
A candle holder painted like a flower pot. It had about an 1 1/2 inch base, so it was almost every Huge-sized creature before the Giants D&D miniatures came out.
It was generally refered to as "the dreaded potted petunia."
....reminds of a female half-ogre NPC from a friend of mine's campaign whose name was "Petunia.".... :-)
Jolly Ranchers as Dire Rats...You got to eat your kills.
Also I've uses bullet casings when playing in Iraq. 9mm for small creatures, M-14/16 or Ak-47 for medium creatures, SAW or M-60 for Large. One player used a .50 cal tracer round as his Barbarian. Grenade rings made decient orcs. Another character used one of the mini Tobassco bottles out of an MRE as his Rogue. A kevlar helmet once made a high and very steep hill. The Rogue Character used a piece of broken marble from Udai's palace as his mount.
Oh the joys of playing D&D in a combat zone.
Silly Putty also makes good slimes/oozes and puddings
ASEO out
Game over.
ASEO wins.
: )
- rob
Game over.
ASEO wins.
: )
- rob
lol.
I'm sure that there are many other unusual props out there... i just happened to be somewhere with only the books and dice, so all the minis were improvised.
ASEO
ASEO
Did you ever use the Pork Patties from MRE's as "brown mold"?
...or did they get rid of those nasty things finally?
When I was in the Army ('84 to '89) there was always one sick bastard in the unit that actually liked those disgusting things...
...for those who don't know--the dehydrated pork patty had to have water dripped on it and you 'd get a soggy, cold piece of vaguely pork flavored brown mold.
I ate 1/8 of one one day and decided that I'd rather just hunt down live rats and boil them than eat one of those again.
ASEO
Did you ever use the Pork Patties from MRE's as "brown mold"?
MREs have gotten pretty good over the years...Although after the second month living on the 24 different meals you get pretty board with them.
The old dehydrated pork, beef and potato patties are long gone. We used to chew on them like cheap jerky. Some of the new ones now have the snack "Combos" in them...of course they are labeled as:
Crackers, Cylindrical, Cheese Product Filled, 25-30ea. Fortified.
We did get one box of Breakfast MREs...Stay away from the Ham and Cheese Omelet ::shudder::
The best thing I ended up with over there was a care package sent from some kind American citizen: 5 lbs of dark chocolate covered Espresso beans...Talk about hog heaven... Packed amongst packages of Wet Wipes and extra socks, they weren’t even melted into a huge blob despite temperatures of over 140. Thank you who ever you were...
ASEO out
Banzai juniper tree with grass... used to work it into an outside scenes. Poor thing died a few years later.
Ever buy one of those fiddy jillion six sided die packs? No one needs that many six sideds but if you ever find yourself in a pinch for dungeons walls you can just stack 'em.
Any time I've ever found myself in an antique store or a gift shop I've kept my eye out for anything that could spruce up a field of minis.
I once bought a plaster object d'art that was a miniaturized, highly detailed, nonfunctional fountain recessed into an ample section of wall. The spigot was a stone ram's head and I painted the entire fountain to look like dark stone. I sprinkled pink bermuda sand into its basin then filled the basin with glue which became clear like water upon drying. When metal men heroes encountered this eight inch tall fountain, it was of a mythic proportion.
On to something more jury rigged. To simulate the splash field of weaponized acid I used a dropper to simulate the affected area then poured powdered alka seltzer into the water. The resulting sizzle definitely got the players attention.
I was recently walking alongside the road and discovered many boardgames had been discarded in the high grass. I returned a few days later and no one had reclaimed any of them. One of these games was full of plastic knights and their horses. A few were missing limbs or heads but I was equally interested. I scooped up handfuls and kept walking. Over the next two hundred feet I found twice as many of these small plastic figures in the grass. Glad I had pockets.
My plan is either to just spray paint them a dark gray then dry brush/mottle on a lighter gray for a stone statue look or to play around with a reddish brown base with drybrushed tans and highlights for a clay statue look, in which case I can create a chamber of martial statues not unlike that archeological find in China, where they found thousands of clay militia standing below ground, ready to defend against the spirit world.
The figures, though a bit muted in detail for actual minis thus become perfect for statuary, and the broken pieces lend the whole the authenticity of ancient origin.
pork patties from the old mre's have been gone for years. but they were not THAT bad to eat. i've made many a delicacy from those patties. well as long as i had some other things to go with it. ahhhhhhh the joys of cooking with explosive mre heaters.
ASEO
Did you ever use the Pork Patties from MRE's as "brown mold"?
MREs have gotten pretty good over the years...Although after the second month living on the 24 different meals you get pretty board with them.
The old dehydrated pork, beef and potato patties are long gone. We used to chew on them like cheap jerky. Some of the new ones now have the snack "Combos" in them...of course they are labeled as:
Crackers, Cylindrical, Cheese Product Filled, 25-30ea. Fortified.We did get one box of Breakfast MREs...Stay away from the Ham and Cheese Omelet ::shudder::
The best thing I ended up with over there was a care package sent from some kind American citizen: 5 lbs of dark chocolate covered Espresso beans...Talk about hog heaven... Packed amongst packages of Wet Wipes and extra socks, they weren’t even melted into a huge blob despite temperatures of over 140. Thank you who ever you were...
ASEO out
since i am an avid warhammer/40 k fan, i've used alot of my scenery that i have scratched built for both games. but at times it can be a pain in the rear trying to transport any of it if i am playing at a friends house.
Like I said--there was always somebody in every unit who actually liked the dehydrated pork patties.
Imagine soaking pork rinds in sweat and then eating them...that's what they tasted and smelled like.
**spoiler** AOW
In the Whispering Cairn adventure there is an encounter with a frenzied owlbear who recently severed the tatooed arm of a thug. I drew the tattoo on my arm and in dramatic fashion 'flopped' it on the table. Everyone got a big laugh out of it, and it really made an impression!
Peace to you all
**spoiler** AOW
In the Whispering Cairn adventure there is an encounter with a frenzied owlbear who recently severed the tatooed arm of a thug. I drew the tattoo on my arm and in dramatic fashion 'flopped' it on the table. Everyone got a big laugh out of it, and it really made an impression!
Peace to you all
Cool, I may have to try that.
It reminds me of the time my barfing cat hacked on the Chalk board we lay on the table to play. One of my players was in the bathroom when it happened and had just returned to the table.
Form the kitchen I heard:
"Woah. What, we fighting a Chaos Beast now?"
"Naw dude. DM's cat just ralphed on the board. He's in the kitchen getting paper towles to clean it up."
ASEO out
The most unusual...
Hmm...well back when 3.0 came out our group ran through Castle D'Amberville (I think that's it...) ...one of the many classics our DM translated to 3.0.
At the end, when we had to fight the colossal undead we used my daughters stuffed Pikachu as the monster.
So here are the minis, Reaper minis I think, and Master Maze stuff set up...fighting...Pikachu. *LOL!*
Kind of reminds me of when the Ghostbusters fought the Stay-Puff marshmellowman.
Okay, I just ran a little side game for my sister-in-law, my wife and two of my sister-in-law's high school students. I didn't bring my miniatures with me, so we used wire nuts as minis (you know, the plastic thingys to connect electrical wires to each other). I had some in my toolbox in my wife's van....we used an "Academie" Sketch Diary with guidelines as a battlemat...each 1/2" gridline was 5'...worked great.
When we started our current campaign the DM started bringing candy for monsters. If you killed it you ate it. It led to some odd tactical decisions--
"I know I should go for the spell caster, but he's an orange starburst and I'd rather have a red starburst, so I'm going to attack one of the mooks instead."
The cleric is always b&$@+ing about having to wait until the fighters have had their fill and then he gets to eat. Until the night of 1000 zombies. He was dusting them left and right so the DM scaled down to M&M's.
Horses are usually mini candy bars (Krackle, Mr. Goodbar, Hershey's). We've eaten many of our horses.
One of the players developed a medical problem and has had to swear off chocolate. We have white chocolate and various gummy things, but the DM has to anticipate where his monk will strike.
Dollar store bag 'o' toys are great. Silly string can have a number of applications. I also use play-do or pudding in a zip-lock sandwich bag for oozes/jellies,etc. Cheese-cloth also has a large number of applications (it can be cut, dampened, sprayed with starch and left to dry - instant shapes!). Small pom-poms make great fireballs or minute meteors.
One of the best creations I ever did was building a cube out of toothpicks and Saran Wrap for a gelatinous cube. I only built it with 5 sides so I could set it on top of a miniature character and voila - you've been ingested!
Dollar store bag 'o' toys are great. Silly string can have a number of applications. I also use play-do or pudding in a zip-lock sandwich bag for oozes/jellies,etc. Cheese-cloth also has a large number of applications (it can be cut, dampened, sprayed with starch and left to dry - instant shapes!). Small pom-poms make great fireballs or minute meteors.
One of the best creations I ever did was building a cube out of toothpicks and Saran Wrap for a gelatinous cube. I only built it with 5 sides so I could set it on top of a miniature character and voila - you've been ingested!
Those are some great ideas!! I really like the cheesecloth idea, I'll have to try that.
I ended up using chess peices as orcs and the various remotes, boxes, and weird-looking toys (i think it was some variation of bop-it) as their tents. The PCs were represented by rocks.
While running a d20 Modern campaign at the home of my friends, Joe and Sarah, I needed something to represent a fishing boat that the bad guys were using to launch Stinger missiles at the heroes' aircraft. We ended up using their 4-year old daughter's Sesame Street toy boat. There's something disturbing about seeing rocket-toting demons standing next to Bert & Ernie. :)
Elsewhere in that campaign, we used a three-inch tall plastic Snoopy to represent a Large monster ... an urban wendigo, IIRC. "Giant Snoopy shall pick the flesh from your bones!"
Speaking of boats, I just picked up a great little sailboat, totally in scale for minis, at Hobby Lobby for $5
I also picked up green chenille stems for use as bushes, and some silk plant stems, which I cut apart to make great looking trees.
My wife came up with a pretty good one last night (although most people probably don't have the resources to replicate it). She used the cake plates (they probably have some official term but I don't know what it is) that belong to the top tier of our wedding cake. The columns are cool and the white platforms can be clouds from a cloud giant's home (which they represented in my wife's game) or just the upper level of some columned prommenade. They come in various sizes (the platform plates and the height & design of the columns). My wife decorates cakes from time to time so we also have clear posts and I'm thinking right now that they'll work great as "water columns", waterfalls, or even the column of air from AOW.