Created for Round 1 of MOC League 2023, Bestiarum Vocabulum.
Mission: Build a folklore creature.
Target: Indus Worm
Designer’s Notes:
What do you mean it’s been five months since I last built anything?!
Ahem. Hi. I don’t have much to say on the build itself, other than it’s primarily made of out this piece from the Hockey dudes. But I do have a lot more to say about how I eventually reached the desperation point of building the giant worm.
So we’re supposed to build some folk creature, cryptid, or some sort of monster. Cool. First thing that came to mind was the Axehandle Hound from Fearsome Critters. It’s a funny little dog, one I’ve used before as a pet for an RPC of mine. Figured the shaping would be easy to accomplish…but wasn’t happy with any of the results. So the good boy got scrapped.
Looked at some of my State’s local cryptids and stories…but none of them were interesting enough to build, so I figured why not the tooth fairy? The tooth fairy has no consistent design, it could be anything. The plan then was to build a large molar tooth and have the fairy lounging on it. At this stage, the fairy was going to be a draconic humanoid with bat and fairy wings. Couldn’t get a design for the tooth out of Technic and Constraction parts that I liked. And if I couldn’t get the main staging for the tooth fairy, the overall product would be very boring. But oh well, I don’t have much time, so I might as well start trying to build the fairy.
This is where the Hockey dude parts come in. I thought they would look good for the lower half of the torso, both for shaping and giving a segmented look. But as I stared at it, I realized they would work better for either a worm or a snail. Thus, I switched my goals to try and build the Lou Carcolh instead…and ran into two problems.
- 1 - Despite all my piping attempts, I couldn’t get the pieces to hold/position themselves in the pose I wanted. The snail would have been completely flat, which would have been lame.
- 2 - Couldn’t get the shell to work. Or at least not within the timeframe. It was either oversized or the wrong shape.
So the snail was a no-go and I still needed something quick. It was either repurpose what I built so far or put something together fast. I went with the worm direction first, going for Tremors the Mongolian Death Worms. It was the wrong color, but I could excuse it with it being an Arctic cousin…But I didn’t like any of the heads, so I pivoted towards doing the tree octopus. After some brief experiments and realizing that I couldn’t do the shaping correct at the sizes I needed it to be in order to make the tree branches, it went back to worm. After some Google searches, found the Indus Worm, made some changes, and we go this result.
…Oh. And at one point the tooth fairy was going to be a monstrous molar with wings, due to misunderstanding a suggestion from a friend. I was a bit all over the place on this one, which was not great when I only had three hours to work with in the original deadline.
Special thanks to the team extending the deadline, wouldn’t have been able to make it otherwise.