A couple of months ago, I read Playing at the World, a history of early wargaming and its evolution into Dungeons & Dragons. It’s a massive brick of a book–700+ pages in an ant-sized font–and almost too definitive. Still, if you want to truly understand from where this hobby sprung, you need to seek it out.

I came away from it with a much greater appreciation for D&D co-creator E. Gary Gygax, who–if not the sole progenitor of the role-playing game–was clearly the chief architect of the classic dungeon crawl. But what impressed me most about this account of Gygax was his work in classifying and codifying the monsters of our shared mythology.

Allow me to backtrack a bit. I’d been doing some research into creatures of legend in an effort to create a bestiary for the Dungeon World RPG. My first step was to consult my treasured copy of Mythical Monsters. Published in 1973 by Scholastic Books, I bought this cartoon guidebook in grade school and have kept it to this day.*

It drew heavily on Jorge Luis Borges’ 1957 work Book of Imaginary Beings, so I sought out that volume as well. From it, I learned two important things:

• Many mythological creatures took no definitive form. Accounts of their appearance and attributes varied wildly depending on who was telling the tale.**
• Pliny the Elder would believe pretty much anything. You could walk up to him and claim that a hippopotamus breathed poisonous gas and foraged for pearls at the ocean’s bottom, and he’d write it up for his Natural History, no questions asked.

“No! Really! You say that one look into its eyes would kill you stone dead? Yet you’re still alive and telling me this? Why, I believe every word of it!”

Returning now to E. Gary Gygax, it’s well-known that he drew on many sources in developing his extensive list of dungeon denizens: Tolkien, Conan the Barbarian, Ray Harryhausen films, comic books and dime store toys. But as Playing at the World describes, Gygax went one step further than Borges: he pinned down these mutable myths. He distinguished the cockatrice from the basilisk, the gorgon from the medusa, the goblin from the kobold. Much of what we think we know about the catoplebas, the peryton and the manticore came by way of the Monster Manual.

As a fan of all things dark and dangerous, I tip my flagon of ale to you, Gary, for your role in preserving and cataloging our heritage of horrors.

*Unfortunately, in scanning the artwork for this article, I broke the binding of my beloved 40-year-old paperback. You may now feel sorry for me.

**Reading the wild descriptions of beings widely agreed upon as purely fanciful, I was struck by how similar they were to those found in the core beliefs of accepted, mainstream religion. Which of these is the myth?

• “(It) was larger than a mountain. Its eyes shot forth flames and its mouth was so enormous that nine thousand men would fit inside..the beast had three gullets; all vomited forth inextinguishable fire.”
• “(I) saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns…the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion…”

Trick question. They both are.

Dave Games Dungeons & Dragons, monsters

I’d been running a 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign off-and-on since 2008, but last year I began to tire of it.

Oh, there was still a lot that I still liked about 4E. It was the first iteration of D&D in at least 25 years that gave me the confidence to run an ongoing game. And I had a ton of fun crafting custom monsters and building memorable tabletop battlefields.

There were downsides as well. Combats tended to be long and somewhat mechanical. The underlying math of 4E’s level advancement assumed that player characters received frequent (and rather generic) magic weapons so that they could maintain parity with increasingly deadly opponents. And, more than anything, I found I didn’t have the free time to achieve the level of customization that I wanted in my campaign.

For these and other reasons, I folded my D&D game late last year. Yet I still have a dungeon-building itch that I need to scratch.

This is where Dungeon World comes in. It’s a hack of an earlier role-playing game called Apocalypse World, rewriting those rules to give them the flavor and feel of an old-school dungeon crawl. Coincidentally, I stumbled across DW on the very day it launched its wildly successful Kickstarter funding campaign. I plunked down my cash, and I’m told that the softcover rulebook should be along any day now.

Dungeon World is one of a new breed of rules-lite RPGs that emphasize storytelling and player interaction over pages of charts and copious lists. I’ve looked at a bunch of these (Risus, Cosmic Patrol, Old-School Hack) but have often felt that there wasn’t enough there there. Sure, I don’t want to have to memorize a ton of rules, but I need some structure. I need dice to roll. DW hits my sweet spot in terms of what gamers term “crunch.”

Players are given one of several fantasy archetypes–fighter, wizard, thief, cleric, etc. Everything that they need to know about their character fits on one double-sided sheet of paper. (Clerics and wizards each have a second sheet of spells, but even those are far more compact than the extensive lists found in traditional pen-and-paper RPGs.)

The basic gameplay of DW revolves around “moves.” The game master asks “What do you do?” and the players describe their characters’ actions; if these trigger one of a number of predetermined moves, they roll dice to see what happens.

For example, if a player says, “I leap at the orc and swing my blade at his neck,” it might trigger the Hack and Slash move. The player rolls a pair of six-sided dice, adding modifiers as appropriate. On a result of 10 or more, the action succeeds. On a 7, 8 or 9, the action still succeeds, but there are complications. The orc may wound the character, or perhaps he shouts to call out the reinforcements in the next room. A 6 or less is an outright failure, and an opportunity for the game master to make one of his own moves in response.

The main precept of DW is that everything “follows the fiction.” Players can attempt just about anything, but only so far as it fits the fictional world. (Poking a heavily-armored dragon with a dagger isn’t a Hack and Slash move, it’s just a bad idea.) And, as one player pointed out on the Dungeon World forum, there’s nothing in the rulebook to explain how a medusa turns people to stone…a medusa turns people to stone because that’s what a medusa does.

Combat runs smoothly. There are no battle grids, no rolling for initiative…and no turns. Players act in whatever order they choose, and  therefore can build on each other’s moves. And because the non-player creatures only react to the players’ moves, the game scales easily to fit the size of the gaming group.

Even more so than 4E D&D, creating monsters is a snap. Here’s my attempt at writing up Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock.

Aside from a brief description, this is all the information you need for a fully-realized monster.

And while the moves in the rulebook cover pretty much all of the things one typically does in a dungeon crawl RPG, it’s easy enough to create custom moves for specific situations. Here’s one I wrote to simulate the “Room of Pools” from the classic 1979 D&D adventure In Search of the Unknown.

All this freedom does come with a cost. The game master has to be on his or her toes, tapdancing madly in order to keep up with the players’ improvisations and to give them meaningful choices to make.

In fact, Dungeon World actively discourages preparation. It instructs the game master to show up to the first session with only a vague set of notes. He or she asks the players questions about their characters and the relationships between them, and together the group builds the fictional world out of whole cloth.

This presents challenges for a gamer such as myself who is used to fully mapped-out dungeon complexes and predetermined storylines. I volunteered to run a DW event at last weekend’s Winter War convention, but was worried about my ability to wing an adventure for a group of strangers.

Happily, my initial session went very well. It helped that two of the players had prior experience with the game, and another had read the rules. All five were really into it, and everyone seemed to thoroughly enjoy themselves. I’m hoping to start up a semi-regular game in the not-too-distant future, and will encourage them to return.

If you’re interested in learning more about DW, there’s an active community on Google Plus…which represents the sole reason I have anything to do with Google Plus.

I hope to blog more about Dungeon World in the coming months. Until then, what do you do?

Dave Games Dungeon World

After a two-year hiatus, I’ve climbed back aboard the Warhammer 40,000 battle wagon. For too long, I allowed myself to be mocked by my unbuilt soldiers in their cardboard coffins. I sold off the Necron battleforce box I’d bought several years ago when I contemplated adding a third army to my existing Tyranids and Sisters of Battle. I even began to consider chucking my entire collection onto eBay.

Then my friend Kyle went on a summer vacation frenzy of buying and building a Space Wolves army. It turned out that all I needed to reignite my enthusiasm for painting little troops was someone who didn’t mind my lack of familiarity with the current Warhammer 40K rules.

As someone who grew up unskilled at model-building–I literally used to have my dad put together my Aurora monster kits–I’m proud that I not only have I successfully completed at least 125 soldiers and vehicles, but have engaged in customizing and even kitbashing my own creations.

Recently, I was inspired by another modeler’s kitbashed Zoanthrope. (A Zoanthrope is a Tyranid elite unit with a huge, exposed brain that floats around the battlefield unleashing deadly psychic blasts.) While I didn’t have enough of the plastic parts in my bits box to follow his design, I crafted something along similar lines.

Here’s the model prior to painting. Astute 40K modelers will recognize a Tyranid Warrior’s skull, a Genestealer torso–with Genestealer claws to serve as its stunted talons–and a Carnifex spike. The tail is a decorative piece from the old Battle for Macragge boxed set. The rest is sculpted Green Putty. (The rock piece was also from the Macragge set, but ultimately I had to go a different way for the base, as the model kept snapping off.)

Here’s the finished product on the left–with a piece of gravel from my driveway acting as ballast–and the official Games Workshop model on the right.

And here are two other views, so you can get a look at the brain. I’m never going to be much of a sculptor, but painted up it doesn’t look bad.

My other major project was a Mycetic Spore. It’s the Tyranid equivalent of the Space Marines’ drop pods, only as befits the techno-organic ‘Nids, it’s a big, fleshy sack that disgorges troops into battle. There’s no official model, so people have come up with all manner of kitbashed Spores.

Again, the Maximum Heresy blog provided the inspiration. Instead of a kids’ ball, I used a large craft egg from Hobby Lobby as the core. The tentacles were made from Green Putty wrapped around speaker wire, tipped with leftover Genestealer claws.

A couple of other decorative pieces from the dear old Battle of Macragge were used, one of which was meant to become a toothy maw/access point. Unfortunately, I became so enamored with the hot glue gun that I almost completely obscured the plastic piece, with the result being more of a blobby mound. I ultimately added some toothpick-tip teeth to sell it as a mouth.

An old CD became the base. It was decorated with more driveway rocks and some fine gravel typically used in model railroad layouts.

Here’s the side view, as well as a close-up of the mouth. There’s a Genestealer just beginning to emerge!

Honestly, I’m a little less enamored with the final product. It reminds me more of an angry avocado. Still it gets the job done; the job being dropping a load of bitey, shooty Tyranid troops behind Kyle’s Space Wolves lines.

I still have a couple of squads’ worth of Tyranids to paint, and at some point I intend to add a flying Hive Tyrant to command my forces. And somewhere further down the line, I have schemes for a kitbashed Carnifex. Watch this space.

Dave Games little men, Warhammer

One of the events I look forward to most each year is Gen Con Indy, when tens of thousands of board-, war-, card- and role-playing gaming enthusiasts descend on Indianapolis for four days of cardboard and plastic nirvana.

The original Gen Con (literally short for “Geneva Convention”) was held in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. I first attended in the late ’70s, soon after my introduction to Dungeons & Dragons and the cottage industries that game spawned. I went back sporadically over the years, but it wasn’t until the gathering moved to Indianapolis in 2003 that I made it an annual thing.

This year was the first time that I stayed for a second day. Previously, I’d been a Friday-only guest, taking advantage of the (relatively) smaller weekday crowd. The problem with that was that it meant that I rarely stepped outside the cavernous dealers’ hall, and had little opportunity to actually try out some of the new games on display.

I think two days was just about right. I was able to thoroughly cover the dealers’ hall and still have time for some demo games. Three days would’ve been too much; I was fried by Saturday evening.

Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro subsidiary that publishes the Magic: The Gathering card game as well as Dungeons & Dragons, made a good showing with its Drow*-themed booth, the centerpiece of which was a massive, life-sized statue of Lolth, the Demon Queen of Spiders. They also gave out some adorable papercraft models of Lolth.

There were Doctor Who fans galore this year. Nicholas Briggs, the uberfan-turned-radio drama producer who managed to get himself installed as the official voice of both the Daleks and the Cybermen, was on hand and using a modulating microphone to threaten passersby with extermination.

Cubicle 7 was demonstrating its new Doctor Who card game. It was, as friend Dave Lartigue and I feared, pretty much a numbers contest with a veneer of Who theming. The gal in the TARDIS dress was cute, though.**

When Gen Con Indy began, costumed geeks were thin on the ground. That’s changed. Nowadays, you can’t throw a 20-sided die without hitting an anime character. The parade of short-skirted, be-ribboned maids was challenged only by the ranks of the Steampunks. (“Steampunk” is an aesthetic based on a quasi-Victorian reality of steam-powered technology. Basically, it involves a lot of gears and corsets.***)

It occurred to me that Gen Con is now providing cover for fetishists. For the women, it seemed as if there’d been an open call for the sluttiest slut who ever slutted. Lots of flesh on display is what I’m saying. For the men, it was largely some combination of leather, top hats and creepy mustaches. (With the occasional cross-dressing superheroine.) When I left for dinner in downtown Indy, I passed a Steampunk couple with the man holding the woman on a leash.****

A couple of blocks away, there was a massive gathering of motorcyclists pointlessly roaring up and down Meridian Avenue. I think that they have more in common with the Gen Con crowd than might be assumed. Certainly, both parties demonstrate a love of leather and a need for exhibitionism.

Amongst the grown men dressed as Finn from Adventure Time, there were some impressive, creative costumes. The woman (or was it?) attired as one of Doctor Who‘s Clockwork Robots had its eerie, gliding movements down pat. And, of course, I was absolutely in love with this gal who came as Mothra.

Oh, I hear you saying, wasn’t this supposed to be about games? Sure, and I got to try out several of them. Dungeon Fighter was a highly-enjoyable dice fest in which the players cooperate to take down the usual assortment of subterranean monsters, except that they do it by attempting to bounce their dice into a large target. Some monsters and/or special attacks require one to toss a die underneath a leg or off the tip of one’s nose. Hilarity really did ensue.

X-Wing was basically the aerial combat miniatures game Wings of War with a Lucasfilm overlay, not that this is necessarily a bad thing. I could certainly see myself getting it, especially if I found it for cheap. The problem is that the core set comes with only two TIE Fighters and a single X-Wing. Remember that movie scene where one X-Wing got in a dogfight with a couple of TIE Fighters? Me neither. If you want a second X-Wing, or perhaps even a Y-Wing, be prepared to throw down 15 bucks per ship. That said, the miniatures are high quality, and the forthcoming Millennium Falcon is a thing of beauty.

Relic really is nothing more than a Warhammer 40,000 reskinning of Talisman, which is itself more-or-less D&D Monopoly. I enjoyed it well enough, and may consider it when it hits shelves later this year. I am concerned, however, that it will go the same route as Talisman and its million, billion add-ons. (Though, given that while at Gen Con I bought expansion sets for both Ascension and Quarriors, I can’t really complain too much.)

I got to play a full session of Dungeon World, a rules-lite role-playing game that straddles a line between old-school D&D and freewheeling storytelling games. I participated in DW’s recent Kickstarter, and was eager to play it with an experienced game master. It was a lot of fun, kinda like improvisational theater with just enough rules crunch to keep me satisfied. The GM used a nifty set of geomorphic dice to design the dungeon on the fly, and I wound up buying a set for myself.

In addition to a crapton of dice, I walked away with two painted squads of Sisters of Battle for my Warhammer 40K army. I recently got back into that game, and realized that I didn’t have a hope of being competitive without at least a couple more units of armor-plated nuns. As I was dreaded the possibility of painting up another twenty metal miniatures covered in fiddly details, I was grateful to find these. They need a bit of touch-up work, but in general they’re painted about as well as I would do on my own. I also picked up a bunch of bits and bobs for some Warhammer modeling projects I’ll be working on.

My other big purchase was a copy of Star Trek Catan, a lightly-reskinned version of the ever-popular Settlers of Catan. On one hand, it’s about as pointless as the multitude of themed Monopoly sets. Aside from some character cards which grant players limited special abilities, it really is just Catan with starships instead of roads. On the other hand–and this was the hand that reached for my wallet–it’s Catan with starships instead of roads! And Nichelle “Uhura” Nichols was there to autograph the box! Ka-ching!

All in all, I had a great time at Gen Con Indy, spent more money than I should’ve, and came away feeling satiated. It’s less than a year until Gen Con 2013. Can’t wait!

*The Drow are a race of dark-skinned elves who live underground and are uniformly evil, with the notable exception of a few tortured outsiders who have entirely too many books written about them. Unfortunately, the combination of dark-skinned goth fantasy characters and costumed conventioneers tends to result in public displays of blackface.

**There was also a second girl in a TARDIS dress, accessorized with a blue lamp perched atop her head. And on my way out of the hall on Saturday evening, I briefly spotted one in a bump-covered Dalek dress, complete with tiny dome hat.

***Slap a couple of cogs on your corset. Boom! You’re steampunk!

****Because, I guess, the importation of steam-powered computers into Victorian society loosened England’s long history of cultural repression and turned London into a haven for BDSM enthusiasts? I’m just spitballin’ here. 

Dave Games Doctor Who, Dungeons & Dragons, fetishes, Gen Con

Recently, I’ve been reading a lot about tabletop role-playing games. In addition to news and speculation about the upcoming 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, I’ve been following a number of gaming blogs for their tips on running a better campaign. That’s when I stumbled across the One Page Dungeon Contest, an annual challenge in which Dungeon Masters submit complete adventures formatted to fit a single sheet of paper–maps, descriptions and all. Many of the past winners were entertaining, clever and inspiring.

I decided to try my hand at it and enter this year’s competition. However, I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, so rather than starting from scratch, I revised an old scenario I wrote for the one and only time that I ran a 3rd Edition D&D session.

The original version was my unofficial sequel to a gaming community in-joke. Years ago, professional game designer Monte Cook (now leading the 5th Edition design team) wrote a humor piece entitled “The World’s Shortest (Yet Technically Complete) Adventure,” aka “The Orc and the Pie.” (Sample text: “Adventure Background: An orc has a pie.”) It ended with a suggestion for a follow-up: “Somewhere, there is a bakery making these good pies. Perhaps it’s guarded by more orcs.”

I took that as a challenge. And so it was that one day a band of stout-hearted heroes delved deep underground to find the source of those wondrous baked goods. Goblins were murdered, pies were thrown. Good times.

Anyhow, it struck me that this adventure would be relatively easy to recraft as a One Page Dungeon. I drew a new cavern map and condensed my overwritten descriptions to the bare essentials. The result just fits on one page, though I did have to resort to an 8 point font.

Click on the .jpg below for the actual .pdf of “The Ovens of Ar-Gar.”

Not everything from the original made the cut. I left out the unhelpful old woman obsessively prattling on about her potatoes. (Crazy old ladies are a role-playing fallback for me.) I also excised the bit in which the party stumbled across the site of Monte Cook’s own adventure, a literal 10′ stone cube containing a dead orc and an eaten pie.

However, most everything else is there, including some stuff I’d forgotten about. My favorite is the Angry Fish, inspired by what I imagined to be the resentment felt by a goldfish in a bowl. The Angry Fish swims back and forth in its underground grotto, fiercely guarding its single gold coin.

You’ll note that the descriptions are short and generic. That’s because the contest specifically requests that entries be game system-agnostic. I also left the number of monsters and the composition of treasure up to the Game Master so that the scenario can be scaled to fit his or her needs.

That’s about it. Enjoy!

Dave Games Angry Fish, Dungeons & Dragons

The guy in the center just rolled a “natural 20″ on the “Gender and Relative Attractiveness of Your Fellow Players” chart. (Also the “Unlikely Occurrences” chart.)

By the way, I used to have those dungeon tiles. I bought them at Gen Con. They were made of cheap particle wood, but did I ever love constructing labyrinths out of them.

Image from the late, lamented kids’ magazine Dynamite. The full article is surprisingly fair and well-written for what appears to have been 1980.

Dave Games Dungeons & Dragons, highly unlikely, smokin' hot geeks

Over the past week, I’ve continued to work on my DIY role-playing game project, Perils & Polyhedrals. I proofread the manuscript a few more times and created several sample characters to get a sense of how the math held up as heroes progressed from Level 1 to 10. The latter prompted me to adjust downward both the suggested hit points and damage values for monsters.

But there was something even more important to me than ensuring that the good guys can withstand a handful of kobolds without suffering a Total Party Kill. And that, my friends, was the artwork!

I’d originally intended to drop in some public domain medieval art, but the stuff I found didn’t set the tone I wanted. And so it was that I set about creating my own illustrations.

It is fair to say that I am not much of an artist…

Case in point, this violet-skinned Drow. Who, in hindsight, I realized I’d inadvertently modeled on Pete White from The Venture Bros.

This fireball ain’t so hot either:

I did, however, begin to play with layers. And that paid off when decided to back up this zombie with some ghostly skulls:

But the most fun I had was in creating my own monsters. In my previous post, you can see my take on Dungeons and Dragons‘ iconic Beholder, the many-eared Listener. To that I’ve now added a variant on the Gelatinous Cube.

Sometimes a cube just won’t do to clean your oddly-shaped dungeon corridors. That’s when you turn to…the Gelatinous Tetrahedron!

The .pdf of the Perils & Polyhedrals rulebook is now completely updated and illustrated. (And, thanks to my wife Vicky’s mad Adobe skillz, it no longer has those extraneous blank pages!) Download it here, and let me know if you like it!

Dave Games Perils & Polyhedrals

I was mildly perturbed last week when game publisher Wizards of the Coast confirmed a rumor that had been percolating in the role-playing community for some months: they are already working on a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons. (Yes, I know…the horror, the horror.)

While I’m not filled with nerd rage, it annoys me for several reasons, not the least of which is that I have really enjoyed playing 4th Edition. It was the first iteration of the game since the early days of the hobby–the late ’70s and early ’80s–that left me feeling confident enough to run my own campaign. (Two of them, in fact.)

Furthermore, I feel that it’s much too soon for a new edition. (See the link in the first paragraph above for a brief history of the game’s publishing history.) 4th Edition was issued less than four years ago, making it the shortest-lived version by far.

Whatever. I can deal with it. I understand the business reasons behind the decision. (Google “edition wars” if you want a taste of the internecine conflict between 4th Edition, 3rd Edition and even 0th Edition players.) And, with the announcement of open playtesting, it seems that Wizards is at least trying to respect the hobbyists and bring them all back together for a monster-slaying chorus of “Kumbaya.”

Entirely coincidentally, I’d been working on my own homebrew RPG project when the 5th Edition announcement hit. More about that in a few moments.

Over the last few years, a number of D&D-ish games have been published under something called the Open Game License. The OGL was an effort by Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro to bring the open-source concept to paper-and-pencil RPGs. Their notion was that in making the core rules of D&D free to everyone to use in their own compatible products, Wizards would become the unquestioned brand leader. It didn’t work out that way.

First, the hobby market was overrun with dump trucks’ worth of mediocre 3rd party supplements. Second–and most germane to this discussion–is that it allowed other companies to publish stand-alone D&D knockoffs. When Wizards dumped 3rd Edition in 2008, the community backlash was substantial enough that rival company Paizo issued an entire line of very successful D&D-except-in-name products called Pathfinder.

Others have used the OGL to reverse-engineer earlier editions of D&D. Games such as Labyrinth Lord and OSRIC are as-much-as-the-law-allows straight-up reprints of  the 1st Edition rules.

I looked at those latter games and thought, “If they can do that, what’s stopping me from creating the kind of D&D game that I would most want to play?”

And that’s why I haven’t been blogging recently.

I’m ready to present a first draft of the project that’s been taking up too much of my time these past few weeks, a rules-lite fantasy role-playing game I’m calling Perils & Polyhedrals. (“Polyhedrals” refers to the funky, many-sided dice widely used in the gaming hobby.)

It’s not all my own work. The beating heart of it is MicroLite 20, which boiled the rules of the s0-called Fantasy System Reference Document down to their bones. There’s even a dash of Pathfinder in there. That’s the beauty of the Open Game License; most of the rules published under it are themselves open to others to use and modify.

However, there’s a lot of me in there as well. Perils & Polyhedrals is my attempt to create a game that offers a basic structure for character creation and combat without a lot of rules to remember. It keeps the things that I like and jettisons much that I don’t.

It’s probably not ready for prime-time just yet. I haven’t playtested it at all. I think that the math should work; it’s at least consistent. Take a look, and let me know what you think!

Dave Games Dungeons & Dragons, Perils & Polyhedrals

Once again, I’m fudging the premise of this year’s Halloween countdown. The monster known as the Black Pudding isn’t itself a failure. In its day (the mid ’70s), it was a formidable addition to Dungeons & Dragons‘ roster of roving oozes. It was immune to cold-based attacks, and lightning bolts split it into two or more independent creatures. The Black Pudding quickly dissolved adventurers’ hard-won loot and generally made for a bad day in the labyrinth.

Not being familiar with British foodstuffs, I was puzzled by the Black Pudding’s odd name. And it wasn’t until this month–during my just-concluded trip to the U.K.–that I was at last confronted by the reality of the…

Black Pudding!

Two of the three hotels at which I stayed included black pudding in their breakfast buffets. A combination of curiosity and a desire to sample the local cuisine led me to sample the hockey puck-shaped item. To be honest, it didn’t taste like much of anything. It was just a hard, in-no-way-pudding-like object that was inexplicably deemed edible.

It wasn’t until a few days later at a butcher’s stand that I thought to inquire about the composition of the black pudding. Turns out that it’s really a quasi-sausage primarily made of congealed pig’s blood. I don’t know if this was one of those”we use every part of the buffalo” notions, or if someone was sitting around one day thinking “what am I going to do with all of this pig’s blood?,” but that anyone ever believed that this was a thing that people should eat boggles me. And that they would still do so in the 21st Century? Really, blood pucks for breakfast are best left behind with leeching and the other shitty ideas of our stupid, stupid ancestors.

Dave Games 31 Monstrous Failures, Dungeons & Dragons

The creators of Dungeons & Dragons soon ran out of “real” monsters like Chimeras and Manticores, and had to fill out the ranks with fiends from their own imaginations. Some were inspired, like the Beholder: a floating orb covered in magic-spewing eyestalks. But not all of them were as awesome as the Gelatinous Cube. Some were more like the…

Thought Eater!

From the original Monster Manual:

Thought eaters are dwellers in the ether. Their senses, however, extend into the physical plane, and any psionic or psionic-related energy use in either area will attract their attention (range of ability or magic equals attraction range). The thought eater appears to be something like a sickly gray, skeletal-bodied, enormous headed platypus to those who are able to observe it. Its webbed paws allow it to swim through the ether.

Somehow, I don’t see slayers of sickly, skeletal platypuses becoming heroes of legend.

Dave Games 31 Monstrous Failures, Dungeons & Dragons