“Dark spirit, your summons has finally been answered. If your guidance is true, you shall be free again.” - The Skull Caster
A gilded shaman from a far away land, the Skull Caster has been led to the island of Okoto by Makuta’s spirit. With promises of empowered gold, the Caster and his crew of undead seeks the masks of power to take for his own. Though unknown to him, both the Makuta and his old rival the Skull Grinder have been defeated. The Toa are gone and most of the golden masks went with them. But this will matter little to Skull Caster, who will melt gold out of the islander’s bones if he must.
Skull Caster can commune with the dead and send vengeful spirits at his foes. Some believe his spear can even rend the spirits of the living and cast them as spells against their friends and family.
Turnaround:
Function:
Designer’s Notes: Why must simple functions vex me so?
So back in 2022 when I made a bunch of skull villains, my goal was to use every skull mask. Within reason of course, I wasn’t about to go buy a very expensive Comic Con mask and I already had all the 2015 sets. But I didn’t have the gold Skull Warrior mask then and been meaning to build something with it ever since I got it. Figured it would serve well as my contest reminder. Just need to figure out a name for what to build, since several of the skull set names were actions, basing it on a motion seemed like a good idea.
Originally, they would be holding a cauldron and would lift it up and down in a slamming motion. But given I already named a prior skull villain after slamming, I needed something else and throwing seemed like a good option. After all, if it was in the Bohrok Va, how hard is it to build a gear activated catapult with the 2015 gear box? Plus, maybe I could reuse the cauldron and have an option to remove it from the hands and attach it to the back for the catapult’s bucket.
Two weekends of experiments later, we have given up on the gear function aspect and left it to flicking…Though it needs the gears plus rubber band to flick appropriately.
The issue is not getting the arm to swing, that’s easy enough. It’s getting it to swing in a swift, jolting motion and stopping mid-way so it doesn’t just slam its ammo on the floor. And I would prefer it to stop without it slamming into something. That I couldn’t figure out as I learned the hard way that I won’t actually understand how gears work. When I wasn’t solving the issue of them grinding too much, it was figuring out why they kept slipping. And getting them to operate consistently. I could get the motion I wanted in several configurations, but only for the first few swings. Then it slip, get caught, bust itself apart, or somehow move itself in such a way to start grinding.
For a couple of hours, I did try making lever-activated versions for the catapult - even some using the gear box - but none of those worked out either. Oh and in an earlier version my goal was to have two functions - catapult launching and swinging one arm up and down to still slam the cauldron. But I wasn’t happy with any of the cauldron design and with the catapult taking up both sides of the gear box to give the tension I needed, that part got dropped.
…As an aside, if you were wondering what happened to the other villain build for HeroFebruary I mentioned in the Toxic Puppy notes, that’s still WIP for similar reasons. What I thought were simple functions, and in practice are simple functions, revealed how much I don’t actually know and we’re still fixing those issues. At least one of the most basic functions on that build is no longer grinding the plastic to literal dust.
But outside of that, not too much else to say. I probably could have done better on the legs, but eh. It makes it stable for the catapult and I’m out of time for this one on the project schedule.
