Normally, I like to set up a scene where the adventurers in the batch are assembling to fight the monsters in the batch, but this batch is all monsters! I guess we can imagine a brave Carnivorous Pudding (with its Acidic Ooze sidekick) adventurously blobbing along, devouring revenants (and a couple golems), slowly making the world a little less undead. Of course, the end result of this is a lot of big, bad, man-eating blobs.
What the hell did I do to these blobs? Okay, let me explain: one of my favorite video games is the award-winning critically-acclaimed farming simulator Slime Rancher. The deadliest slime in the game is the Tarr Slime, and it's all black with a rainbow swirl. I assume that this color scheme is an attempt to simulate the rainbow sheen of an oil/water interference effect, as if the Tarr Slime is a deadly ambulatory tar pit. This seems to describe a Carnivorous Pudding pretty well, so I used holographic glitter paint to attempt to simuate a rainbow interference finish on the Carnivorous Pudding and Acidic Ooze.
If you can't get past this paint job, imagine I'm giving the Twilight "sparkly romantic monster" treatment to The Blob.
These grave-robbing hungry ghouls will make a nice appetizer for our amorphous heroes! Welcome to not being the top of the food chain. Ghouls eat the flesh of the dead--they usually incapacitate people with their paralyzing touch, then kill them and eat them--but they will also eat it right out of the grave. I theorize that a paralyzing touch doesn't work on an amorphous monster with no central nervous system; but even if it did, what would happen? Would a Carnivorous Pudding congeal into a statue? Or would it collapse into a puddle?
There's a castle with a moat! What's this swimming in the moat? Everybody sing:
Zombie Shark doo doodoo doodoodoo
Zombie Shark doo doodoo doodoodoo
Zombie Shark doo doodoo doodoodoo
Zombie Shark!
Because sharks are scary and zombies are scary; what if we combined them? But it turns out that Carnivorous Puddings can't drown, and shark bites only split big Carnivorous Puddings into many little Carnivorous Puddings. If the zombie shark eats the Carnivorous Puddings, the Carnivorous Puddings could eat the shark from the inside.
First to notice the Black Pudding oozing through the front door is a Wight employed as a doorman.
Responding to the ruckus is a flesh golem and his female companion, kept by the master for security and some amusement. I tried to go with a true blue for electricity with these two.
Soon a mummy and his mistress are brought into the fray. She's an aristocrat like the master, she is exotic, and she has so many fascinating stories. (Side note: the earliest movie I can find with a revived female mummy is Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1971); in the Universal movies and the early Hammer movies, the mummy menaced living women, who he considered reincarnations of his beloved Princess. Here, I was inspired by Hammer's The Mummy (1959), where the marvelously imposing Christopher Lee plays an unstoppable brute motivated (and, finally, controlled) by his love for his Princess.) I tried to go with a teal theme with these two. Normally the top of the mummy princess' staff should be orange to correspond with the sun; I went with an emerald color to indicate that her source of life has changed as a result of her reanimation/rejuvenation.
And finally the master vampire and his bride must address this amoeboid invader. For these two, I went with black/gray and a blood red color scheme.
Personal Note
I had kind of an emotional breakdown while painting this batch of miniatures.
As I write this, the COVID-19 pandemic is killing thousands of Americans every day; like a September 11th attack every 3 days, like a Vietnam war of American deaths over the course of 2 months.
Against this backdrop, I see my 17-year-old cat Hansel painfully hobbling on wobbly legs, emaciated to half his weight, and I realize that I must take him to the veterinarian. And then I am moved to tears by the final episode of Midnight Gospel, where a man my age interviews his sweet mother as she is dying from late-stage cancer.
And I am painting these vile undead revenants, imagining ambulent corpses in various states of putrescence. Painting these is something I used to do for an escape, but it seems that there is none for me.
I took Monday off work to grieve, even before I take Hansel to the vet.
After visiting the vet, tests reveal that Hansel's kidneys are failing, his heart murmurs, and he has arthritis. Hansel eats little, he doesn't need the litter box. All I can do is hold him and stroke his fur, desperate to provide some form of familial consolation. The decision to end his suffering is straightforward, if emotionally painful; and with a return to the veterinarian, Hansel is now free from his burden of agony.
