A New Challenger Appears: The Akrid

Welcome back and this time around I'm dredging up an old project that didn't turn out all that great.  But with any luck it will still give someone out there a good, workable idea.  This "mini" is functional but just didn't end up looking what some would call "good."  But first, story time.

  My players like to travel.  Like, a ton.  One of them is a druid and so as long as there is a tree nearby, they are pretty much able to teleport wherever.  I like that about tabletop games.  The freedom to go anywhere you want, larger story arcs be darned, is so much fun.  So I didn't want to discourage that notion.  But at the same time, like any DM running a campaign for high level PCs, I was getting pretty tired of always having every world location prepped just in case.

  My solution was to keep them in a single place by other means. A plot hook.  I created a whole new village, an offshoot of a now prosperous town (and something they themselves helped to create via earlier campaign choices), drew out an entire map, made it all gloomy and creepy and then got them involved with the offer of copious amounts of gold.

  Unbeknownst to my players, I had essentially turned the village into Invasion of the Body Snatchers with some fantasy elements.  I had fun and (I think) they had fun exploring the various locations, picking up red herrings, finding clues and generally just trying to sort out this creepy town.  In the end they were successful and came away with some new friends, some cash and some more kills under their belt.

  So what was the creature?  

The BBEG

The minions

  Giant bugs of course.  I had temporarily nicknamed them the Akrid (I was a big LP2 fan) but it ended up sticking around.  But, let's get to the how-to.  First the minions.  I made half a dozen of these since they were so simple, and really required very little effort.  Dollar stores, especially around Halloween, carry lots of toy spiders and other assorted bugs.  The minions were just giant spiders with a couple legs clipped off and the head replaced with one large eye.  Base, paint, good to go!  These turned out decent and I still use them as large insects every now and then.

  The large boss model was very large, technically a gargantuan monster.  The base is dollar store wood planks and comes to about 5" x 5".  Some dollar store craft sand and PVA glue made the dirt mounds around it.  The thinking was that it would ingest some earth as it burrowed through vast amounts of dirt and stone.  The mini itself is almost entirely popsicle sticks cut and glued.  I layered them over the base as "scales" of a sort but was only partially successful.  The teeth are toothpicks and the tentacles are obviously pipe cleaners.  The giant eye was an old rubber dollar store toy that I carved into an eye shape.

  That pretty much covers it.  I consider this build ultimately a goof but hopefully it gives some other crafter some ideas!