Mad Gaming Madness

This week, I'm looking at the Man-Drake, an April Fools' monster by R. Derek Pattison from Dragon issue #156, "Not Necessarily the Monstrous Compendium." The Man-Drake is both a play on words , and a humorous variant of the swanmay  from the  Monster Manual II  (and later the Monstrous Manual ). The Man-Drake is a somewhat dim protector of nature, who pines for the beautiful swanmay but is forever rejected. This is the sort of thing that says more about the person writing the monster entry than it does about society or anything else. Going from a purely mechanical standpoint, all Man-Drakes are druids, and druids in AD&D are required to have a minimum 12 Wisdom and 15 Charisma; pining for an "unattainable" lover seems incongruous with the statistics. Of course, if I'm going to write up Man-Drakes, I have to write up ducks as well. And giant ducks! I'm imagining something like the conclave of the Giant Eagles in The Lord of the Rings , except the...

Part 2 in this series brought the overview through the d20 revolution to the Pathfinder end of the D&D spectrum. But the d20 "fork" is only one direction of contemporary D&D. In 2008, Wizards of the Coast went in a new direction with the 4th edition, which streamlined some aspects of the game while complicating others. Products moved to the digital realm, with the intention that the game would have a large amount of digital support and a subscription model. While the edition still has fans, Wizards appeared to lose market share to Pathfinder. Thus, in 2012, Wizards published the 5th edition, which simplified many aspects the game, and provided a framework that people could use to style the game closer to a version that they liked. Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 4  |  Addendum D&D 4th Edition In the 4th edition  Player's Handbook  (2008), the warlock class became one of the core classes of the game. The 4th edition redefined how character classes worked, and pla...

So, one of my favorite April Fools' Day articles from Dragon magazine back in the day was one from issue #156 (April 1990) entitled "Not Necessarily the Monstrous Compendium." It had a number of gag monsters that had been submitted by various readers of the magazine. While some of them were not very useful, others were interesting and found some use at my table. One of these is the tin golem by Scott Wile, basically a man-sized version of a child's tin soldier. I loved these guys, ever since seeing them in the Laurel & Hardy film Babes in Toyland (1934). Of course, those were made of wood, and these guys are supposed to be giant-sized animated versions of tin soldiers kids used to play with, solid metal. Anyway, I've been tinkering with conversions of the monsters from this article, and here are the tin golems. Appearing much like a man-sized version of a child’s toy, tin golems are dressed in what appears to be the military garb of a long-forgotten nation:...

Last post looked at witches in D&D up to about 1999, the first 23 years of fantasy RPGs. In this post, I continue the overview with 3nd edition Dungeons & Dragons  and its developments. Part 1 | Part 3 | Part 4  |  Addendum D&D 3rd/3.5th Edition In both the 3rd edition  Dungeon Master's Guide  (September 2001, page 26) and 3.5th edition  Dungeon Master's Guide  (July 2003, page 175), the witch is the example given to the DM as a guide for creating their own class by just modifying an existing class' spell list. Using the sorcerer class as a basis and with Charisma as her spellcasting stat, this witch was a pure caster class with no special powers but a spell list drawn from the cleric, druid, and wizard lists. The spell list was strong in charms and form-changing spells, and weak in anything overtly damaging or flashy. Mystic Eye games released  The Hunt: Rise of Evil  in 2001, the world book for their world of Gothos setting. A...

One of the magic items in D&D most associated with the high-level game is the IOUN stone. Invented by Jack Vance in his Dying Earth stories, the origin of these items is detailed in "Morreion," collected in Flashing Swords #1  (Dell, 1973). The magicians of Earth covet these items immensely. They are obtained from the hearts of stars that "bounce off" an impenetrable barrier at the edge of the Universe called "NOTHING." If the orbit for a star pulls it back from the edge, industrious creatures can get IOUN stones from pockets of dust revealed in the hearts of the stars. The titular character in "Morreion" is followed by a virtual cloud of such stones, which are shown in the story to absorb magic spells and (apparently) store his memories. The D&D implementation was a little different. E. Gary Gygax got permission from Jack Vance to include them in issue #4 of The Strategic Review  (1975) in an article entitled "Mighty Magic Miscellan...