"Terrible Unknowable Terrain pieces?" Topic

I'm looking for something to use in 15 MM as an impossibly ancient artifact of unknowable age. I'm open to a wide range of things, only stipulations are:

1. Needs to be "passive." I'm going for artifacts vs cthulu rising at this point, and it's supposed to be "dead" in my mythos

2. Preferred creepy stonework. If there's any technology involved it'll be too knowable for my tastes.

As far as scenario:

I'm looking for a piece to center my 15 MM scifi research post around. I've got a bucket of Khurasan's space demons, and I envision them being tied to the artifact, and tampering with said artifact leads to all sorts of badness. Missions to try to contain the horrors, or destroy the artifact are certainly in the cards.

As the case is though I want to keep my aliens as alien as possible. Something dark, mysterious and unsettling, that serves as the origin for chittering horrors would be awesome. I'm open to lines/series of terrain too, a larger set of ruins would be cool for future scenarios.

anything like these helpful?

TMP link

Well a hugh black rectangular block worked for Clarke and Kubrick.

Google your local taxidermist and ask to take or buy cheaply (hey, they gotta eat, too, and the fact that you want their detritus means it does have value) some of their treated bits and bobs. Putting together bits from different (the more different, the better) animals will hopefully hit the Uncanny Valley of realism I think you want.

Don't do this on your own with foodstuffs. A taxidermist knows how to treat bones for making models and does it all the time.

I would recommend basing them in some air-dry clay (Crayola Model Magic is my fave), and using the clay to meld them together a bit.

The result should match the Geiger-esque motif of the Khurasan minis.

Re: Idols

That thread gave me a lot of hope something good exists out there, but I'm trying to actively avoid Cthulu or similar characters.

Re: Monolith

That was neat, but it doesn't quite fit the motif I'm going for.

Re: Taxidermists

A bit above my skill level. Also worried if my wife walks in while I'm fiddling with dead animal parts she might lose it.

I'm not looking down my nose at any of the suggestions, I gave a very vauge concept and those are all good ideas, just not quite a good match for what I'm looking for. Here's some more refinements:

1. I'm looking to avoid things that are actually Cthulu or monoliths. I'm making my own sort of setting, and I'm a bit worried about giving a player false cues from something "known" from other fiction (or, if I want the artifact to cause zombies or somesuch, I don't want to hear player objections that the monolith in 2001 didn't create zombies)

2. Looking for fairly minimal crafting. I'm an average painter, and I can fill gaps with greenstuff, but changing a human head on an Egyptian statue into something else is totally outside my ability to craft.

If you can find a piece of obsidian at about the right size, you could base that and have a ready-made Mysterious Stone Artifact that looks suitably glossy and sharp-edged.

Or you could try this:

link

Check out your local bead stores and or lapidary type stores. You can find all kinds of cool, odd, polished stones.

I just did a search on polished stone on e-bay and there are a ton of reasonably priced ones that would be good for this.

I have some of these.

auction

I have all of these too.

auction

I like those weird WW2 monuments the Yugoslavians put up.

My favorite