MonsterBook

More deliveries from Wizards today. This time it was ‘The Plane Below – Secret of the Elemental Chaos’. It was fun working on this book as I got to do some of my favourite monsters – the Slaad :-

Although I do think they should do evil Fruit Slaad – Blackcurrant Slaad, Banana Slaad etc.

Dava

In the 70s, in Ayr, on the west coast of Scotland, there lived a bearded shopkeeper called Malcolm McDonald. He ran a games shop called Mac’s Games that sold old lead Napoleonic miniatures and wargames rules until the D&D explosion of ‘78. Suddenly, and briefly, Mac’s dusty, dry-rot infested games shop became a hub of activity for the local gamers. Funny-shaped dice sales funded a refit and a new sign, and bought him a Lochaber Axe he displayed on the back wall behind the till, replacing the faded poster of the one-legged flautist.

Ogre's Lunch logo

(continue reading…)

There was a time when I was a gamer. A proper, full-on, buckets of polyhedral dice, stacks of books gamer. I knew how 1st ed AD&D overbearing, grappling and pummelling rules worked and I had a 216:1 bell-curve mapped in my head. It was Owlbears and Rust Monsters all the way down. (continue reading…)

Look at that bad boy – the OWLBEAR.

Splendid, isn’t he? A towering, squawky mass of furry, feathery weirdness, ready to demolish the party. Wipe that grin off your face halfling, he’ll have you…

This image, an interior illustration from the famed ‘Keep on the Borderlands’ D+D module was pretty much the first ever rpg image I saw. I was immediately hooked at 11 years old. Before then I’d been fascinated with Greek and Norse mythology books, and any Ray Harryhausen films I could catch on BBC 1. The little scene above was something completely new to me – what *was* that thing they were fighting? And where could I get the miniature?…
(continue reading…)