Miniatures Monday (Two photos and some thoughts)

Evil Cleric: Front View

This week, Miniatures Monday goes way back to the very early 1980s and to one of the earliest sets of miniatures that I owned.  I'd been playing D&D for a good while at that point, but the only miniatures that I had gotten were the Grenadier Dwarves boxed set (#2003), so I was pretty excited to get the Grenadier Action Art Monsters set (#8002) for Christmas one year.  That set contained two of my all time favorite miniatures, the Assassin, and the Lawful Evil Cleric.  I loved the cleric because of his awesome demon shield.  That things is just fantastic.  Heck, I even made several magic items for some of my games from it.  In one game the shield acted as a bag of holding that was large enough for the PCs to crawl into.  In another, the shield could exhale wind from its mouth and knock enemies down.  I was fascinated with the miniature, but I just never got around to painting it.  For over 35 years it sat unpainted until recently I decided to finally give it the full color treatment.  To some extent, I guess 35 years of expectation was too much to ever live up to.  This clearly isn't among my best work.  I could claim that it's an old miniature, and the detail isn't that great, or that my eyes just aren't what they were, but the end result is that I just didn't do as good a job on this one as I'd hoped.  I don't think that it's bad, but rather just disappointing.  At least the shield turned out OK, and that was my favorite part of the figure anyway.  Man, I love that shield. :-)

Evil Cleric: Rear View (The Shield!)

And for those of you who may not remember the Grenadier Action Art sets, here is a box photo.

That Drider is probably still around here somewhere...

Appendix N: Three Hearts and Three Lions $1.99 in the Kindle Store

Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions is for sale for $1.99 in the Kindle Store.  There is a lot of old school goodness in this book, and it's clear how much of an influence it had on some aspects of early Dungeons & Dragons.  I don't want to spoil anything, but you can really see the origins of the Paladin class here, and the troll has a very D&D feel to it.  I remember needing to get this through inter-library loan in order to read it back when it was out of print.  I'm really glad to see more old titles getting new life as e-books.  At under 200 pages, it makes for a quick and worthwhile summer read, plus it's a pretty good deal for just $1.99 if you have a Kindle.

The Presents of Christmas Past

As I've grown older Christmas has become a lot less about the gifts to me and more of a winter version of Thanksgiving.  I enjoy sitting by the fire sipping a drink and talking with family and friends much more than I enjoy unwrapping gifts and certainly more than I enjoy going to the mall.  This doesn't mean that I don't like gifts, just that they have become a lot less important to me.  However I do hold on to very fond memories of gifts that I received at a time when Christmas was really a lot more about presents to me.  So I give you a photo of part of my Christmas haul from I believe 1982, which could more appropriately have been called a very D&D Christmas.

It was a great year for D&D and a great Christmas.  Garay Gygax was still with TSR, and my parents got me some of the very best that the game had to offer.  I finally had my very own copy of the Dungeon Master's guide with its vast array of arcane knowledge that I could use to bedevil my players.  I got a Dungeon Master's Screen so that I could shield my maps and notes from the prying eyes of players who wanted to try to get an advantage over my adventures.  There was a booklet of Hexagonal Mapping Paper so that I could draw my own wilderness maps like the one that was in the Isle of Dread.  Dungeon Module I1, Dwellers of the Forbidden City was under the tree and the evil frog men that dwelt within it did not disappoint.  Now these had all been on my Christmas list, but then there was a surprise.  My parents were always good at getting me things that I wanted but didn't know that I wanted yet, mostly because I didn't know that they existed.  Probably the best example of this of all time was the Dark Tower boardgame from Milton Bradley that I had received the Christmas before.  I'm sure that I'll be writing about that in the future, but that year the surprise was The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth.

Now I had never even heard of this adventure, but as I unwrapped it, I knew that it would be awesome!  just look at that great cover painting by Erol Otus.  Who cares if I could even pronounce the name?  Tsojcanth.  It just sounded awesome.  I'm guessing that while my parents were Christmas shopping, most likely at Walden Books, as that was the best place in our area to get D&D stuff, they must have come across this and been as enthralled by the picture as I was.  It turned out to be one of my favorite adventures ever.  It had it all: a great wilderness trek through the mountains, a vast labyrinth of caves, a foxy vampire queen, and yes, even an underground river.  It was the best D&D related surprise ever and a great Christmas like all of the Christmases in those days.  So this holiday season, as we gather to game, or to talk about gaming, or just to hang out, let's remember those people who first encouraged and indulged our love of gaming.

R.I.P. Dave Trampier

Dave Trampier, who was responsible for some of the most iconic artork of the early days of Dungeons & Dragons and creator of the comic strip Wormy has died at the age of 59.

Of Box Art and Imagination

When I was a kid, RPGs were king.  There was nothing quite so much fun as getting together with a bunch of friends, eating pizza, slaying orcs, and getting killed by terrible traps.  My first character was killed by a medusa in the second room of the first dungeon he ever went into.  But RPGs involved coordinating people and rides, so the next best thing was video games.

Back in the late 70s and early 1980s, when video gaming was still in its relative infancy, there was a wonderful dichotomy between the way video game box art represented the games and how those games looked in real life.  The ability to do computer graphics was extremely limited, and nowhere were those limitations felt more than on home systems.  As a kid, I was forever going to places like Sears or Montgomery Ward and staring at the fascinating images that graced the boxes of those games.  

Now some are probably thinking Sears?  Isn't that where people go to buy tools and tires and things?  More still are probably wondering who, or what a Montgomery Ward is.  Well, those were the places we went in those days, long before the Gamestops of the world came into being, but I digress.  

The boxes of those games contained wondrous images that transported my young imagination to lands of seemingly infinite possibilities.  Of course the art for those games had to be good for in many cases it was all that could attract someone to buy one of these games.  Now make no mistake, I loved many of the games of this era, and I still do.  In the end, the gameplay was what really made me love them and kept me playing, but something had to get me to even buy the darned game in the first place, and that thing was the box art.  No matter how crummy the actual game images on the back of the box might look those pictures on the front still gave hope that the game would be awesome.  Here are a few of my favorites, showing what the front of the box tempted me with and what the I actually got.

Let's start with probably my all time favorite game ever, Atari's Adventure.  Behold the mighty dragon in his maze!  look with awe upon the great castle high on the hill!  I played this thing to death.  Again and again, I would play the random setup version of this game.  I would even make up my own versions of the game where I had to kill all of the dragons then get as many of the items into the gold castle as possible before returning the chalice to end the game.  I was obsessed. 

Adventure: The box cover

Adventure: The reality. :-)

Next we have The Quest for the Rings for the Odyssey 2.  Now this game was not only a video game, but a board game too!  Just look at that box with the warrior deflecting the dragon's flames with his sword and the wizard killing, well whatever that thing is.  This game just looks magical.  Admittedly, I didn't play this one all that much because I didn't have an Odyssey and had to go to one of my friend's houses to play, but not being able to play it all the time may have made it seem even better to me.

The Quest for the Rings:  The box cover

The Quest for the Rings: The Reality

And finally, my holy grail from that time period.  Advanced Dungeons & Dragons:  Cloudy Mountain for the Intellivision.  I was a bit of a D&D nut and would buy just about anything with the D&D logo on it.  I only got to play this a handful of times at the home of one of the kids I was in Boy Scouts with, but I wanted this game more than anything.  Of course I would have needed an Intellivision as well, and those things were really expensive.  I never really got to play this game until much, much later, when I got it as part of the Intellivision Lives compilation for my Game Boy Advance.  In the end it remembered better that it played. :-)

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: The box cover

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: The reality

Now as I've said, I love each of these games in their own way.  And sometimes, even when I'm running around in the amazing landscapes of Skyrim, I still miss them.  I long for the days when my imagination was the Graphics Processing Unit and those box covers beckoned me with sights that the games themselves could never hope to deliver.

Does anyone have any favorite box covers that really inspired them?