Kraken Week mini

This is my little oddball contribution to Kraken Week 2024: a narrated step-by-step pictorial of putting together some 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 just happened to buy these a couple weeks ago.

I wrote a version of this article yesterday, but like an idiot, I misspelled Kraken as Karken in the title, and Blogger is a pain when it comes to fixing title links.  I was going to fix it today, when I saw that Treantmonk posted a video describing a Kraken encounter, so I incorporated some lessons from him and added some links and republished it today.

The complete Kraken Week '24 YouTube playlist is embedded here.  Over 100 videos to date! 

I got the toys at a locally owned card, game and gift shop (Kards Unlimited) a few weeks ago, before I knew anything about Kraken Week.  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 - I've seen them both cheaper and more expensive.)

Naturally, I bought eight tentacles, two claws, and two brains to make an octopus and a crab.  

I wanted to buy a brain for each tentacle (like octopi have), but I was spending enough money as it was for an impulse buy (30 bucks, my largest expense for the whole caper)!

I did some further googling, and it looks like a lot of different companies make these finger puppets, but Handicat and McPhee are the brand names/import companies that pop up the most often.

They're 40 ft long if I adhere to scale - but you don't need to stick to that length for the actual purpose of measuring 'reach' - make it anywhere from 10-40 ft. during combat, depending on your need - these figures are not literal, just special effects.   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 because again, representational, not literal.

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

I figure a heavy 10' square base with a pedestal insert would work.  

A nice blue ceramic tile would be perfect, but I have a better idea, 

and I know exactly where to get the pieces.  

I'll let you know what I find in a later post, when I actually make them.

I happen to live down the street from two excellent stores that specialize in the salvage of construction and other crafting materials.  I visit them weekly for oddball supplies to create gaming accessories.

Check in your area to see if you have any wonderful organizations like these:

Construction Junction:

https://cjreuse.org/

Pittsburgh Center for Creative Re-Use

https://pccr.org/

(edit: went to the craft store that afternoon and found all that I needed, and much much more.)

Back to the Kraken mini:

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

This Kraken is not a typical octopus.  It is a creature that not only has tentacles, but also claws.  For purposes of combat, only one claw is large enough and equipped for battle, much like a Fiddler Crab, or this 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, or are legs.   Instead, substitute the four front legs on the Fiddler crab for tentacles.  So from bottom to top, it has four legs, four tentacles, a large combat-claw, and a beaked brain case at the head of the shell.

The brain pieces can represent the approximate location of the head/brain case for purposes of combat, or the location of the bite attack, if you decide to give it one.  Describe the head of the tentacled crab above like a grell - a brain-looking shell with a large beak on the front.

This is one Gnarly Kraken.

I'm not a combat encounter designer, so the rest of this is just spitballing random narrative ideas for how to treat 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 for territory or mates (4 tentacles and a claw apiece) and our intrepid explorers' ship is caught in the middle of a fight (but the party doesn't necessarily need to know that).  In fact, start the scenario with just two to four tentacles, leading the characters to think it's one Kraken attacking them, before the tentacles start attacking each other (WTF?!) and splits off to reveal it's actually two Kraken fighting over their meal of the ship.

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.  Every 25% of damage per tentacle reduces the reach and movement accordingly (the tentacles are retreating) Since the head/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!

Or better yet, watch Treantmonk's excellent video that he just released today for Kraken Week (I wrote the bulk of this article last night, and I've already edited it based on his video, fixed a spelling error in my title and republished this today.).  His Kraken has ten tentacles - so in my case, since I only 8 tentacles and 2 claws, I could treat the claws as arms instead, or adjust my monster accordingly.  It's a mythical creature that has never been seen in its entirety - you can make it anything you want!  I still like my original idea of two 4-armed, 1-clawed feuding males, though.

https://youtu.be/4401XqsP5J8

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.  I just uploaded the next post where I do more shopping and put stuff together here:  

https://tabulasordida.blogspot.com/2024/07/kraken-week-parts.html

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