Kraken Week

This was my first draft article for Kraken week.  Skip to the next one for the corrected and updated one here:  https://tabulasordida.blogspot.com/2024/07/kraken-week-mini.html

This is my little oddball contribution to Kraken Week.  A pictorial of some of the toys that I have purchased from gift, thrift and dollar stores.  These are excellent pieces to use with your miniatures.  I love to go shopping on-the-cheap for things that can be used as set pieces.

I got them at a locally owned card, game and gift shop (Kards Unlimited).  They're finger puppets of octopus tentacles, as well as crab claws and a disembodied brain.  They were $2.50 apiece (so don't pay any more than that online - I've seen them both cheaper and more expensive.)

I naturally bought eight tentacles, two claws, and two brains.  

I wanted to buy a brain for each tentacle (like octopi have), but I was spending enough money as it was.

I did some further googling, and it looks like a lot of different companies make them, but handicat and mcphee are the brand names and import companies that pop up the most (for all of the finger puppets - there were other kinds at the store.)

They're 40 ft long if I adhere to scale - but you don't need to stick to that length for actual purposes of measuring 'reach' - make it anywhere from 10-40 ft. during combat, depending on your need - these figures are representational, not literal.   I straightened out the tentacle below to show the full outstretched length by inserting a chopstick into it.  In the future, I may use something like a wire coat hanger if I want to change the shape, but I don't think it's worth the trouble, again, representational.  

I do want to make a base for them, weighted so that it doesn't tip easily.  

I figure a 20' or 30' square base with a pedestal insert would work.  

A nice blue ceramic tile would be perfect.

Four of them mounted vertically with a nearby claw surrounding the ship would be gnarly, dude.

A Kraken this size would easily overpower and destroy the typical ship on which our adventurers would find themselves.  To spice things up, I'm going to use the props to create two Kraken.  

This Kraken is not a typical octopus.  It is a creature that not only has tentacles, but claws.  For purposes of combat, only one claw is large enough and equipped for battle, much like a Fiddler Crab, or this, a relative of it.

Illustration of a modern-day southern giant crab, Pseudocarcinus gigas, which can reach the weight of a small child.

 

The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo

It is unknown how many tentacles this Kraken actually possesses, but only four at a time are ever used for grabbing and combat.  

The rest are presumably being used for propulsion and swimming underwater.  

The brain pieces can represent the approximate location of the head/brain case for purposes of combat.

The-Kraken-attacking-the-ship is an obvious scenario, and therefore quite boring.  Let's mix it up - these are two male Kraken battling each other (4 tentacles and a claw apiece) and our intrepid explorers' ship is caught in the middle of a fight for territory or mates (but the party doesn't necessarily need to know that).  In fact, start the scenario with two to four tentacles, leading the characters to think it's one Kraken attacking them, before it splits off to reveal it's actually two.

Treat each tentacle as a separate creature with its own HP, but if the pool of HP drops below a certain percentage, all tentacles begin to suffer attack penalties.  Since the brain case is an obvious target, hold off on revealing its location for a couple rounds of combat.  This helps drain the party of resources at the beginning, but provides a quick method of ending the fight towards the end if the party works well together.

Stat blocks are not my forte, so go to town making your own!

This is my first post showing my homebrew crafty ideas from stuff I find.  I've been procrastinating doing this for sometime, but Kraken Week is a good excuse to get the series started.  Keep checking back. 

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