The Monster Mash

Yax's Sunday morning quiz was a fabulous query involving monsters! I'm proud to say that I managed to pass this one with an 84% (I usually fail spectatuarly!), mostly by guessing on the Devil/Demon portion.

I love the Sunday morning quizzes, even when I fail spectactulary, because they are fun and there's a lot of good Red Dragon in there. This one was especially fun as there's a little aside to one of our favorite creatures. I won't tell you which one, that would give it away!

Take a peak at the Sunday Morning Quiz - Mystery Monsters and see how you well you can do the Monster Mash!

My belated introduction to D&D Miniatures...

Over the weekend, SR and I hosted a houseguest in one of my old college buddies, Boyle. He brought with him this magnificent trio that you see (parts of) above, along with the rest of his collection of D&D Miniatures to show me.

Wow, you're late to the party, Dante.

Why yes, yes I am. I had originally purchased a starter set of miniatures when they first came out because I wanted them to augment my D&D campaigns with. Unfortunately, money was tight and I didn't end up getting too many that were directly applicable to my setting so I threw them quickly back into the starter box where they resided for many years.

Luckily, when Boyle produced his miniatures it was exactly two days after I had recognized that starter box in the top of my closet and made note of it, so down it came and before long we were creating our parties and having some fun.

It was better than I anticipated!

I'm not going to lie... when I first got the miniatures a few people tried to convince me to play the game that goes along with it and I rejected that idea on the premise that I knew the D&D combat rules and anything based on that was probably far too complicated for me to actually ENJOY. Could I play it? Probably, but rules lawyering is a pursuit best left for SR as she enjoys the ancient art of being right.

Boyle is one of my dearest friends, and I could never tell him that I wouldn't at least try it... besides... there were adult beverages involved so it couldn't be that bad, right?

Right! I have to say the simplified rules, coupled with some familiar D&D characteristics made the experience immediately recognizable and fun. It also helps that my starter set happened to include a Medusa, which I understand is somewhat sought after. I'm sure there are a few of you that are kind of sick reading that, sorry!

Regardless, we played several rounds but I stopped short of playing any scenario involving the dragons pictured above, since I was barely having any luck at all with my meager starter set.

From what I can tell, much of the stat blocks that I have seen related to the D&D 4th edition seems to approximate the simplicity of the miniature rules, so I have hopes that all combat will take place in similar fashion as the new edition hits. The only thing that bothered me a little was the rules for routing and running... it seems to me that shouldn't be so much determined by a die roll but I understand that miniature games are based more solidly in concrete rules so I can tolerate that minor annoyance.

It was a really fun evening, special thanks go out to Boyle for bringing his stuff over so we could give miniatures a try!

Monstrous Pictures

When I was a little kid, I had lots of little plastic dinosaurs and aliens and monsters. When I was about 7, TSR came out with a line of completely awesome toys featuring creatures from the Monster Manual. I personally had about 2/3 of the creatures on this list, and man they were cool. Sadly, I gave them all to a friend's little brother when I was in high school. I'd found a couple cool ones I still had around and my lovely wife Efreak loaned me the macro lens on her camera so I could take some pictures for show and tell today.

My favorite of these creatures was the Shambling Mound. Mine was called "Shambles". (You may think that was a silly name, but I also had a Tauntaun named "Bryan" at the time.) Recently, I decided that I would like a new shambling mound as my good luck dice totem for D&D, and so it was that I used the magic powers of Ebay to summon one for me, which I named after his predecessor.







The same auction also came with a Fire Elemental figure, which I also had as a kid. My new Fire Elemental and Shambles II now reside above my fireplace and guard the Christmas stockings during the dangerous pirate-infested holiday season.





I was also going through some boxes of stuff I had when I was a kid a few weeks back, and I found a bunch of the little tiny dinosaurs and monsters that I used to play with. One of them I had when I was very young, and didn't know what it was called until my brother called it a "rust monster" when we were both a little older. Well, I was surprised to find out that it wasn't called that for years by anyone until Gary Gygax picked up a the same set of plastic monsters, saw the same figure, and was inspired to create the rust monster as we know it today.





I also had another little monster that we used to just think of as a weird beetle bug, but it didn't occur to me until I found it again recently that I was staring at a little figure of a bulette. Turns out, just like the rust monster, this thing didn't get its name until Gary Gygax went plastic monster shopping either. (Apparently, the owlbear has similar origins, but I didn't have one of those to take pictures of.)





There was one other monster of similar construction to my rust monster and bulette, and we called it a "blue dragon" when I was growing up. That could well be exactly what it is, but I didn't notice any special D&D significance to this one. (Efreak says he looks "way friendlier than that gross rust monster with his sickass tail -- blech!")



I've created a couple of wallpapers from a few of these images in case anyone's interested. (Shambles II now guards my laptop against pirates as well.)

Shambles II: Normal | Widescreen
Rust Monster: Normal | Widescreen

I hope you all enjoyed a little trip to what's left of my former menagerie. Is it sad to say that I really can't wait until I have kids so I can play with their stuff?