BSC2023 Dolmot Backwoods New England

[Dolmot]

OK, let's try this. I'll start by listing things that I won't do.

I was pondering the high level options. In the last two years I built something for By Fire and Sword. (Well, mostly glued rocks on cardboard but anyway.) My Cossacks might still need some divine help. However, as a basic level solution I've already painted some simple shrines and monks (pictured here). The more grandiose version would be a church, but scratch-building one might be too elaborate in my current situation, I may already have a proper resin one there somewhere, and there's already one East European Church on the entry list. Too many reasons against it.

Another option would be returning to WHFB, but in there everything is buried too deep to jump into planning any coherent project right now.

But then there's...pulp. Or actually Mythos. That's kind of active, because I just participated in two more related kickstarters. There's stuff coming this way at some point so why not build a bit of extra terrain.

The work title comes from the relatively often quoted opening paragraph of The Picture in the House (1923):

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

I'm not building a mausoleum. A sinister monolith...who knows? Not on an uninhabited island, though. Not even a lonely farmhouse, but something else that is ancient and ghastly in New England. That ambiguity should buy me some extra time to figure out the details.

Just for general inspiration, the first chapter of The Dunwich Horror (1928-1929) tells

No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror, can say just what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak of unhallowed rites and conclaves of the Indians, amidst which they called forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great rounded hills, and made wild orgiastic prayers that were answered by loud crackings and rumblings from the ground below.

--

Dunwich is indeed ridiculously old—older by far than any of the communities within thirty miles of it. South of the village one may still spy the cellar walls and chimney of the ancient Bishop house, which was built before 1700; whilst the ruins of the mill at the falls, built in 1806, form the most modern piece of architecture to be seen. Industry did not flourish here, and the Nineteenth Century factory movement proved short-lived. Oldest of all are the great rings of rough-hewn stone columns on the hilltops, but these are more generally attributed to the Indians than to the settlers. Deposits of skulls and bones, found within these circles and around the sizable table-like rock on Sentinel Hill, sustain the popular belief that such spots were once the burial-place's of the Pocumtucks; even though many ethnologists, disregarding the absurd improbability of such a theory, persist in believing the remains Caucasian.

I have one stone circle already, used many times (and it's commercial resin stuff, despite being fairly easy to scratch-build), and other similar pieces used in games and LPL entries, but nothing truly original. Maybe it's time to fill that gap?

Right, I think that suffices for this starting post. I'll save some additional thoughts and references for another one. Really detailed thoughts haven't even been formed yet.

[Vanvlak]

Nothing beats a stone circle - this was my backup plan, not in the Stonehenge style, something closer to our local Neolithic locales:

Looking forward to seeing what this will look like 

[has.been]

Good luck mate. I too am still trying to figure out details of what I'll do.

[marianas_gamer]

Dry laid stone field walls kind of define backwoods New England. They should be fairly low and can be formal or ramshackle depending on the former farmer's skill (or possibly sanity).

[Dolmot]

Nothing beats a stone circle - this was my backup plan, not in the Stonehenge style, something closer to our local Neolithic locales

Well, I won't promise a stone circle because I have the one from Ainsty. It started appearing in LPL maybe on round 2 of season 7. I think their version fulfills the Dunwich role well enough so no major reason to re-invent the circle there. (Although this style would probably be fairly easy to make from carefully selected pieces of bark.)

Dry laid stone field walls kind of define backwoods New England. They should be fairly low and can be formal or ramshackle depending on the former farmer's skill (or possibly sanity).

I agree and that's why I made those specifically in 2011, shown with instructions here. 

Actually, I still have that bag. It lasts a long time in this scale.

Stone walls themselves are unlikely to be a place of worship, but structures like that could appear as extra decoration. Depends on what the main subject will be. I have one idea with potential and support from previous purchases which were for something similar. I have to check a few references and draw an initial sketch of what I'm thinking now.