Monstrous Mondays: Monstrous Maleficarum #2 - Return of the Orcs

 Today's Monstrous Monday is a special one, the return of my erstwhile series "Monstrous Maleficarum." In this new and revised version for "5th Era Fantasy RPGs" I am featuring the return of the Orc as a monster you can have as an antagonist. 

Just in time for tomorrow's new Monster Manual release. 

Volume #2 of Monstrous Maleficarum - Return of the Orcs

Orcs have been a staple of FRPGs since the dawn of the hobby. These creatures are as iconic as they are ubiquitous. 

With Monstrous Maleficarum #2 I present the return of the orcs to the latest edition of the World’s Greatest Roleplaying Game. Orcs for the new 5th Era.

Herein, you will find the classic Pig-nosed orc, the mighty green and gray orcs, the blood-thirsty Blood Orcs, the violent Ghost-Face orcs, the noble and good Desert Orcs who call elves “brother,” and the intelligent and equally dangerous High Orcs.

What is Monstrous Maleficarum?

Monstrous Maleficarum is a series of smaller publications to feature new monsters for the 5th Edition of the World's Greatest Role-Playing game. Sometimes these monsters are from previous editions, brought into the new era via the Open Gaming License. Sometimes they are new takes on classic creatures of myth and legend. And other times they will be brand new creatures.

Each “issue” will feature a theme of related monsters.
Every issue will feature 100% Open Gaming Content text.

I will have more to say on Orcs and other "missing monsters" as time goes on.

Monstrous Mondays: Mini Monsters

 I love HeroForge minis. I have made hundreds, but I can't afford to buy all the ones I want. Thankfully, I spent my Christmas break getting our resin 3D printer working. Once I got going, I went nuts.

That may not look like a lot, but it takes a while for them to print, and there are many casualties along the way. But I wanted to get all the Archdevils and Demon Lords from the AD&D Monster Manuals.

All of these demons and devils were made with HeroForge, and then I downloaded the STL files.

Geryon, Asmodeus, and Titivillus

Moloch, Mephistopheles, and Beelzebub 

Belial and Glasya (Fierna broke)

Lilith and a succubus.

Lilith is from the cover of Eldritch Witchery and the Succubus is my version of the Sutherland Succubus. 

Kelek on a Warg

Camazotz and Akelarre

Camazotz and Akelarre are two demons from my own games.

Archdevil Zariel. The only "newer" devil I use.

And I had to do a witch!

I bought this STL (3d printer file) online from Torrida Minis because I thought it looked like Larina. It is Tasha, from D&D, but she has been looking more and more like Larina over the last few years anyway. I still prefer her 3.x look. I kinda want his BloodRayne one too. My wife painted it for me. She also painted Belial and Akelarre above.  

I am going to try my hand at painting some of the demons and devils here but that is WAY outside my comfort zone. I am not very good at all. I still need to prime them all first. That at least I can do.

These are all resin prints, but Akelarre is from our FDM printer (which I still need to get fixed) and is a lot heavier than the others. 

Still have a few more to print out, but I am having a blast with this.

Monstrous Mondays: The Ravenloft Monstrous Compendiums

 I have been covering the AD&D 2nd Ed version of Ravenloft all this month. I have also been covering the the Forgotten Realms and currently in the AD&D 2nd Edition era. One thing they both have in common is that a few of the books feature new monsters in AD&D 2nd Monstrous Compendium format.

I reviewed the Ravenloft Monstrous Compendiums sometime back. Since I have been reviewing the various books I have been printing out the Monstrous Compendium pages and adding them to my three-ring binder for Ravenloft.

As I run across a monster page for these reviews OR from Dragon magazine in my This Old Dragon feature, I print them out (or cut them out as the case may merit) and add them to my binder.

It has taken 30+ years but I feel that the Monstrous Compendium concept is finally living up to its potential for me.

I have been doing the same thing with my Forgotten Realms monsters as I talked about a while back.

Again, I might start mining my other MCs to see what would fit here. I already have one filled with demons and devils, so I wont add those, but I am considering taking the Death Knight from Krynn and putting in this one.

The truth is I am not likely to play AD&D 2nd ed Ravenloft again. BUT my son is running his 5e group through Castle Amber using AD&D 1st ed. So it is possible I could run an AD&D 2nd Ed game again one day. I have mentioned that I am running an AD&D 2nd Ed Forgotten Realms game with my oldest, though we have not played in a while. So I guess never say never.

Despite my concerns with Ravenloft under AD&D 2nd ed, it was my game for the 90s. 

In any case I feel like an archivist in some dusty library, collecting tomes for my own pleasures. 

This is another entry for my RPG Blog Carnival for October!

Monstrous Mondays: The Monster Movie Marathon & RPG Blog Carnival

 It is that time of year again! Ok, that's lie, it is always that time of year for me. But it is that time of year when I start talking about it. And by "it" I mean my October Horror Movie Challenge. 

The goal is basically the same every year: Watch 31 Horror movies, with at least 20 of them as first-time views.  I often throw in a little twist to the theme. One year, it was all Vampire movies; another movie just before 1973 when The Exorcist came out.  This year, we will have a theme as well. 

The Monster Movie Marathon

To celebrate 50 Years of Dungeons & Dragons, I am going back to watch a bunch of classic (say pre-1977) movies featuring monsters from the AD&D 1st Edition Monster Manual.

This all works out great for me.

"Monster Movies," as my Dad and I used to call them, were a big influence on my childhood and primed me for when Dungeons & Dragons came into my life. 

So I am going to watch a bunch of horror movies, mostly from before the Monster Manual was printed in 1977, featuring monsters that would later appear in those pages. 

I am not making any claims that these movies inspired these monsters, but certainly, they would have been known by the authors and artists of D&D at the time. They WERE certainly an inspiration to me at the time. The challenge here will be finding 20 I have never seen.

I have been reviewing my lists of monsters and comparing them to the book "The Classics of the Horror Film" I mentioned about a month ago. Along with other books, that for me, were the pillars of my love of monsters and ultimately D&D.

I'll watch the movie and talk about their Monster Manual counterparts. 

Should be great! So join me all month long next month.

I am also hosting the The RPG Blog Carnival for October. My theme is "Horror and Fantasy." Many of the monsters I'll be talking about have a toe, or tentacle in both. Monsters like the vampire, Medusa, and the mummy are featured in both genres. Creatures like the ogre and goblin began as horror monsters (of the time) and became more fantasy. Greek Myth for example has a lot of fantasy creatures that would later appear in horror.

So I have my work cut out for me to be sure! So join me in talking about Horror and Fantasy in your games and I'll link to you in future posts.

Monstrous Mondays: Monsters in Miniature

 I picked up the new D&D 5.5 last week, I also picked up some of the new 50th Anniversary minis and the next two Monster Manual classic minis. 

The packs come with one large and three medium or small minis. We lucked out and got a Pit Fiend and Goblin in both 1st and 5th Edition versions. I will admit, I do like the 1st Edition versions more.

We also got the David Sutherland III Red Dragon from the Holmes Basic set. That one is sold separately.

I also picked up two sets of Monster Manual minis. Sets K-N and O-R.

Lizard Man

Lich

Merman and Mind Flayer

Minotaur

Naga (and photobombing Otyugh)

Mummy

Otyugh and old-school Owlbear

Pseudo-Dragon

Quasit

Remormaz

Rust Monster

Roper

Rakshasa

So pretty happy with those.

AND last night one of gamers my son's regular group brought me this!

LEGO Tasha! She comes with cauldron, hat and a spell book with what can only be Tasha's Hideous Uncontrollable Laughter.

I'll have to compare her to all my other Tasha/Iggwilv minis.

Monstrous Mondays: The Classics of the Horror Film

 Today's Monstrous Monday is a special treat for me. I scored what I consider to be one of the pivotable books of my childhood and one that led to my love of horror movies and my love of monsters in D&D and other RPGs.  William K. Everson's The Classics of the Horror Film.

My dad had a bunch of these classic film books by William K. Everson. They were all black with some gold lettering on the spine. They covered silent movies, westerns, there was one on "The Bad Guys" and think one on the movies about WWII. But this is the one I read over and over and over again.

I was not much more than 4 or 5 and I already knew who Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, and Boris Karloff were. I remember making mental lists of movies I wanted to see from this book. It is, among some other influences that lead to love horror movies and vampire movies in particular.

When I got older, and our access (well, everyone's access) to older movies went beyond the occasional re-run on Saturday afternoon classic movies or the Friday or Saturday night Creature Features, my dad and I would watch these movies. We talked about the differences between American, British, European and Japanese horror movies. How the Universal Classics differed from the Hammer Horror era, and how the Exorcist and later Jaws changed everything.

Flipping through this book now is like flipping through a high school yearbook. I am seeing picture of old, almost forgotten friends. 

Elsa Lancaster left a deep mark on my psyche from 1975 on.

Mary Pickford, an unlikely "Final Girl*," but was enough to make me remember her and use bits of her movies in my D&D games. 

Ok she is not a real "Final Girl" here, but if this movie was remade today she would be.

My dad and I used to rave about this scene in Dracula above. Not just how impressive it was to film and the set to build, but how it conveys Dracula's command over the scene. 

I always liked that photo of Pamela Franklin in "The Legend of Hell House." You know some scary shit is going on here, even if there is nothing in the photo that is scary on its own. Just her eyes and her bare feet just barely touching the ground. You get the feeling that she is safe, as long as she just doesn't get up and walk away. BTW, she is still alive today.

My fascination with horror movies, giant monster movies, monsters in general, and to no small degree, these posts for Monstrous Mondays, all come from this book.

I already added it to my Appendix O I am planning on using it for my October Horror Movie Marathon.

Monstrous Mondays: Nouveau Orcs

 Still busy this week so this is drive-by. 

Art previews of the new D&D 5R (D&D 2024) Player's Handbook were released including art for orcs as a playable species.  As expected the Grognard crowd is taking this with measured patience one should expect from the elder statesmen of our hobby.

No, they didn't. They predictably completely lost their shit. Again.

This seems especially true of the segments that claim never to play "WotC" versions of D&D and don't pay any attention to them.  So the ones that will be least likely to play this version are also bitching and moaning the loudest.

I mean the art is bit too cutesy for me, but a.) this is for a Player's book, not the monster book. and b.) I am not (nor should I be) the target audience.  That is something I am going to get back to, but let's address the prominent issue; that of non-evil orcs.

When it comes to orcs many like to point to their history as defined by the Professor. This great, IF (and only if) we are talking about Lord of the Rings or Middle-Earth. This is D&D and Gary did nothing else if not spend a lot of ink telling us that D&D is not Lord of the Rings. So all the talk of "Melkor can't create" is cute but has little bearing here. 

D&D and AD&D has had "good orcs" before, this is not a new concept. The Forgotten Realms boxed set had them. The AD&D 2nd Ed Monstrous Compendiums had them. Good Orcs are not a new thing. Even Half-orcs were a playable race as long as they were non-good.

One of the cardinal rules of D&D has always been to change what you want to work with your group. That means yes, people can have "good" orcs, and other groups can have "evil" orcs. This should counter any "one true wayism" that seems to clutter up the D&D-related YouTube channels.  

Besides no one is saying you can't have purely evil orcs as well. I have several sub-species of orc, some good, many very evil. Works great for me. Pathfinder 2 has orcs you can have as characters and still fight. 

I think what the older crowd, of which I am a member of that crowd, needs to realize is that we are no longer being catered to. We do not have the buying power we have enjoyed for so long. This group, or at least many members of it, have said "we are not buying any non-TSR D&D" and WotC has said "fine, we don't really need your money."  And they don't. The younger generations have shown they have buying power all on their own. 

Look, Wizards of the Coast is not without some serious flaws and a lot of blame. Their handling of the OGL, sending out Pinkertons, all the layoffs and firings. Not to mention some rather lack lustre adventures. But freaking out over good orcs? Yeah, that should not even be on the list.

So here are a couple of reminders.

1. Whatever appears in the D&D 5r books only maters to people playing D&D 5r.
2. Nothing posted in D&D 5r effects any other game. Same as nothing in Pathfinder effects any version of D&D.
3. Despite the Chicken Littling out there no past book has ever been changed.

Play how you want. Let others play how they want. Stop acting like it's the end of the damn world.

Better yet, adopt these new orcs into your old-school games to challenge your players.