Showing posts with label Little Cairo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Little Cairo. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 31, 2023

Little Cairo: The Little Cairo Constabulary

                                        

The Little Cairo Constabulary - guardians of Law and Order (of a sort) within their er...most beloved and beautiful city.  You see my friend?  See how they labor tirelessly to suppress the wicked Cthulhu cult!  (Until the cultists pay them not to).  See how they lay down their lives to protect Egypt's beloved cultural antiquities!  (Until those Westerners can come up with a respectable bribe.)  And see how they seize contraband wherever they find it!  (keeping a modest bit for themselves of course.  Hey, they're not constables for nothing!)  Whether monitoring foreign activities, hauling trouble makers off to the gaols, or deftly avoiding the latest clutch of blood curdling eldritch horrors to emerge from the catacombs, the Contabulary always have their hands (and their purses) full.

Inspector Ibrahim, fearless leader of the constables!
Shawish Mustafa loves nothing more than enormous meals and fine hashish.  To ensure he always has a surplus of both, he long ago entered into the very profitable business of collecting and selling secrets around Little Cairo.  By clever and calculating abuse of his position, he has become a man or no small means and influence.  Most consider him to be the Constabulary's real leader.
Mehmed and Mamoud, two brave constables who have already seen enough horror and strangeness in little Cairo to last them a lifetime.  Still, they can't quit...the money's just too good!
The inspector sets out with his trusty sidekick Abu to set up a shake-down...er a sting!  Yeah...a sting!

Tuesday, December 27, 2022

Little Cairo Part 3 of Many: Horrors From the Tombs!


Little Cairo is a haunted city.  Two-fisted adventurers, sinister spies and corrupt bureaucrats share the city with the remnants of dying races, agents of Eldritch powers and the restless dead.

Malign spirits haunt the shadows of shunned alleys, cellars and crypts...

...striking down the curious and the foolhardy with horrid crushing strength or with pure terror...


"Marian, Don't Look at it!"
The shade of some denizen of Little Cairo rises out of the dust of two thousand years... 

            Shapeless forms stir in hell and make their way into the shadowed streets of Little Cairo!

                              "Hybrid Children watch the sea, pray for Father, roaming free..."
In dark tombs and forgotten temples hidden beneath the steets, the Hybrid Children of Great Cthulhu plot and scheme.  Products of a mating between a Cthulhu Spawn and a human female, the Hybrid Children gather humanity's lost souls under their sway, forming blasphemous cults whose every effort is aimed at bringing about the return of their mighty father.
                                                     
This Hybrid Child priest prepares for a sanguine sacrificial ritual...can our heroes stop him before it's too late?  Well...no.
Awakened from the sleep of centuries by vile cultists, an ancient curse, or just really bad luck, the Pharoah Rummitep stalks the lightless corridors of his Pyramid, thirsting for revenge on those who condemned him to a living death...
...or maybe all those moderns who have decided to help themselves to his rightful Kingdom! 
Deep beneath the dirty streets of Little Cairo are innumerable tangled hallways, corridors and passages, remnants of the subterranean dwellings of races who were dying before man descended from the trees.  In the lightless, echoing halls and chambers of their ancient abodes, they brood upon the passage of the milennia, dreaming of past glories and plotting a future resurgence.
Once encountered by the Hero Conan when Egypt was still known as Stygia, Akivasha, the eternally youthful and beautiful Vampire Queen of the dead still dwells in her palatial tomb deep beneath the crowded streets of Little Cairo.  King Conan has been dead for eleven thousand years, but a mile beneath the earth, Queen Akivasha "lives" on...
Perhaps the last vestige of her long vanished race, the Lamia shares the eternal, echoing darkness with Akivasha, dreaming the dreams of the Black Lotus and and occasionally accepting the sacrifices of her handful of devoted human cultists...
"That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange Aeons, even death may die!"   

Saturday, March 13, 2021

Little Cairo Part 2 of Many: NPCs!

Any game setting needs a splash of local color running around doing their day to day business.  Most of that business would naturally be mundane, but a good deal of it would undoubtedly be nefarious, especially in a nest of adders like Little Cairo.  Take William S. Burroughs' fantastical Tangiers, stir in a real life Cairo of the 1930s, smouldering with espionage and revolution, add a cup of H.P. Lovecraft, a dash of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a teaspoon of Casablanca, and you've got an idea of the spirit I'm going for.  These folks are a necessary part of the back drop that my Adventurers, Secret Agents and Cthulhu Cultists will be acting out their roles against. 

Random citizens wandering about a market that has nothing in it for them to buy yet.  I just got some Scotia Grendel fantasy bazaar pieces to use for the market stalls but of course I haven't painted them yet.
Ali from Pulp Figures gets the drop on a resolute fellow from Old Glory,
Random citizens.  I bought all of these on the Old Glory Miniatures website, but I think they come from different lines...

Lovely Ladies of Little Cairo in outdoor and indoor wear...
Desperadoes three...
Fatima!  (of the seven veils)....
...The swingingest, number one dancer in the Sultan's whole harem!  (If you get that reference, you're probably really old.)

Sinister, be-fezzed monkey meets sinister, be-fezzed gunman!
I like this figure, whatever he's about to do, he is sculpted like he means it!
Snake guy.  Got to have a snake guy, I guess.
Ack!  The dates were poisoned!  
More to come soon!

Friday, July 31, 2020

Pulp: Little Cairo Part 1 of Many: Intrepid Archaeologists!


Deep into the desert we go in search of great mysteries and maybe, just maybe...great fame and fortune as well! These minis are the very first in another big project I'm calling Little Cairo, which I'll finish God knows when.  These are, of course, from Bob Murch's Pulp Figures line and they were a joy to paint.  Nice clean lines and very easy on the eyes.  Little Cairo is a Pulp fantasy setting which I intend to populate with heroes, villains, mummies, Nazis, Cthulhuoid terrors and whatever else I can dream up.
Striking a heroic pose as he gazes out across Ozymandias' lone and level sands is the leader of our little expedition...
Thoughtfully fingering the holster of her pistol as she holds her lantern up to illumine the darkness of a desert tomb, a pretty professor prepares to plumb perilous plutonian...p...I ran out of p's...
A pair of investigators scour the sands in search of clues to mysteries better left unsolved...
We'll start digging right about...here, I should think...
Billy Barnum was captain of  the rowing team at Miskatonic.  Not the greatest Archaeology student, but a good natured fellow and useful in a fight...
Dig not here, O stranger, Lest ye awaken Nyar...Nyarlat...Nayarlathotep from his ageless slumber?  Nyarlathotep?  What the bloody hell is a Nyarlathotep?

Into the desert!
A snap of Little Cairo I took before I left home...just have to paint about a hundred citizens, adventurers, gendarmes, spies, Indiana Jones types and the like.  That should take a while.