Watcher in the Water Tentacles

I finally got a copy of the Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game The Fellowship of the Ring campaign book on ebay for a reasonable price.  First tough part was the title.  It is somewhat generic and when you search on the title you get a zillion listings for the core rule book.  Not what I wanted.  I wanted the campaign book because it allows you to play the entire campaign of mini adventures for the Fellowship of the Ring movie and novel.  This is actually something I can do in my basement with only one other player, but I do plan to run at least some of these at my gaming club.  Second tough part was when I did find it, getting it for a reasonable amount of money.  Some of the prices for this old GW LotR stuff is really staggering for some reason.  Some books they are giving away, others, like this one, are usually really expensive!

What I really want to run for the club is the Mines of Moria section, which is made up of four mini games/adventures, specifically The Watcher in the Water, Balin's Tomb, The Escape from Dwarrowdelf, and finally The Bridge of Khazad-Dum.  Already having the Fellowship figures and goblins and cave troll done, and having done a test run of the Balin's Tomb game, I decided to try and tackle the rest of the figures I would need to do all these games in order.

For The Watcher in the Water game, in addition to the Fellowship figure wise all you need in addition are 6 of the Watcher's tentacles.  So I decided to have a go at making my own Craftee version of the tentacles.  I only need the tentacles for the game, but I'm sure I am going to make a head sticking out of the water as well, just because it looks cool.  But at this point, I've just got the tentacles.

All they are made of is beads of various sizes, from larger on the bottom towards smaller at the top, that are glued together with PVA for strength.  After they are dry, I took a hot glue gun and wrapped bands of hot glue first in the space between each bead, then around the center of the bead itself.  Finally, I used hot glue to make ripples of water on the base (I believe these are 1.25" round precut thin wooden bases).  Then, I just painted them up to taste.  At first I tried to do it all with the hot glue gun, but when you start adding the bands of glue around the beads and in between the beads, the new hot glue heats up the old hot glue that is holding the beads together, and it just kept falling apart in my hands.  So this took longer to glue the beads together with PVA before adding the hot glue final touches, but it was much easier in the long run.

Here is what they look like with some of the Fellowship figures I finished a while ago.  You get a better sense for the scale.  What I don't like about the ones from GW is that relative to the Fellowship figures, although the tentacles are very tall, they look a little thin and wimpy.  I wanted mine to look very thick and scary, clearly capable of taking poor Frodo down into the murky depths.

The four hobbits as well as Gandalf, Legolas, and of course Aragorn.

Closer up just with Frodo, Sam, and Aragorn.

I'm pretty happy with them, I think they'll look good on the table top when I get the rest of the terrain done for the game.  And honestly, they were a piece of cake.