Mad Gaming Madness

This one took a long time. I know it's not Monday, sue me. From Susan Lawson's article “There Can Never Be Too Many Dragons, Right?” in Dragon #96 (April 1985), it was never meant to be used in a regular campaign, just to end ones where the PCs had acquired several kingdoms' worth of magical items that made them otherwise untouchable -- by having the quazar dragon devour their home planet. Classic Old School methodology. Nevertheless, when I read SpectreCreations' Cosmic Dragon Breviary , the idea wouldn't let go of me, to convert the dragon and make it part of the Cosmic Dragon family. It fits really well with the rest of them, and would make a dangerous foe. So, here is the quazar dragon, in all his formidable glory.

There were two robes of blending that basically had the same shtick -- instead of the robe "blending" you into the background, it "blended" you like a kitchen blender. Ha ha! The first was Allen Hammack, who wrote one up in his article “The Lighter Side” in Dragon #35 (March 1980), about typos in the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide. The second was the prolific John M. Maxstadt who put the Waring 3-speed into his article “Still More [Gods Forbid] Outrages From the Mages” in Dragon #144 (April 1989). But I thought, you know, there's room for a robe that can shoot blades at opponents, and giving it a curse isn't the worst. So, here's the result.

There were actually two different sets of plush golem published for Old School D&D, both in April Fool's articles. The first was written by James MacDougall in the article “Not Found In Any Stores!” in Dragon #120 (April 1987). Written for AD&D 1st edition, it had Small-sized plush golems. The second was in Anne Brown's article “The Dragon’s Worstiary: Golems” in Dragon #228 (April 1996) for AD&D 2nd edition. This one was a Large-sized plush golem, and the description calls out Barney the Dinosaur and Hobbes (of Calvin & Hobbes fame). The following writeup combines some from both versions.

So, this one comes from the Arcane Lore column in Dragon #270 (April 2000). Authored by Robert S. Mullin, “Greyhawk Grimoires: Zagyg’s Comedicon” introduced a new spellbook by Gary Gygax’s in-game alter-ego, Zagig Yragerne, one-time mayor of Greyhawk city, then the demigod Zagyg the Mad. As Arcane Lore columns go, it was kind of disappointing. None of the spells were as broadly useful as the ones in The Crazed Book of Mog , and I felt the flavor was a little bland. But I like the idea of a spellbook which might have much more powerful magics, that no one has yet encountered because of the innate dweomer of chaos and confusion around the object.

For this installment, I’m going back to an early issue of Dragon . When they were editing the AD&D 1st edition Dungeon Master’s Guide , there were a number of typos. Allen Hammack did an article in issue #35 (March 1980) called “The Lighter Side,” where he came up with stats for magical items based on his favorite typos. Here are two of them.

So, I’ve been scanning old issues of Polyhedron (the RPGA's house magazine, put out by TSR) for humor content, and came across the module “The Camel’s Nose” is Polyhedron #29 (May 1986). The adventure follows a group of nomadic Valley Elves as they make a pilgrimage to a site holy to Camelopardus, the Camel Lord of the Desert. It’s exactly what you’d expect of a joke module from the mid-80s, but it has some charm for all its flaws. A werecamel plays a part, and I couldn’t resist converting it. I also include a camel stat block because I'm not happy with the several different ones I've found online. I didn't get to finishing this up until Tuesday, but “Monstrous Monday” only works one day a week, so I'm back-dating it.

 An article from the April 1994 issue of Dragon magazine (#204), this was by Matt Posner, “Arcane Lore: The Crazed Book of Mog.” Unlike a lot of articles of a similar type, the joke spells provided actually had real uses, and the book was an interesting object in and of itself. I've used different spell names that I found in The Incomplete Book of Books and Tomes IV on ENWorld. I'm not sure who the authors are, so I haven't credited them; if somebody knows, please post the information!

So, in Dragon #168 (April 1991), there appeared an article by Robin C. Ashmore and Michele Batter titled “Merty’s Manual of Magical Merchandise.” The article provided a number of items one might find in a magic shop, each with a useful effect (well, mostly useful) and a detriment, along with a price. The prices for these items were somewhat absurd, but it was meant in humor.  This article appeared after I stopped regularly reading the magazine so it passed me by, but when I got the Dragon Magazine CD Archive  and read through issues I missed, it drew my attention. While I don't think the items are as flavorful as others that appeared in previous April issues, they had more utility than most. Others seem to have thought so -- most of the items appeared (with prices unmodified) in the AD&D 2nd edition  Encyclopedia Magica series, Volume 2. Here, then, are some of the items. Prices have been removed, as we don't generally do those for 5th edition. If your campaign does...

So, when the blog went into hiatus, I had been wrestling with the Pink Dragon. I was trying to combine two different pink dragons from comedy articles: The pink (candy) dragon from Rick Reid's scenario “The Caves of Confection,” in Polyhedron issue #051 (January 1990). The pink dragon from Jeanne McGuire's entry in Not Necessarily the Monstrous Compendium in Dragon #156 (April 1990). Both of these had humor elements, but still had (I judged) some gameplay value and I felt it would be good to combine them into one fully-fleshed out creature. But making a full stat block for a new type of dragon in D&D 5E is hard . You can go simple for Lair and Legendary Actions, but that feels like a cheap copout. And I'm a huge fan of Spectre Creation's Cosmic Dragon Breviary , and in that one he statted out five full new species, with new Lair and Legendary Actions. So, when I came back to the blog, I felt I needed to finish this guy before moving on; he'd been waiting long e...

Continuing with the comedy items are these two, which are, again, of extremely limited use. I don't tend to use curses much, but the curses on these items feed into the humor. EDIT: Accidentally posted an earlier draft of this blog post. Oops! Fixed now (5/18/2023).

So, two more items from the backlog today, of questionable use, from two different articles in the 80s  —  one by John Maxstadt and one by James MacDougall, both prolific authors of several articles to Dragon . One of the tricks with these items is trying to find a use  —  maybe not a good use, but some sort of use  —  for each of them; otherwise, there's little point to doing a conversion. Fortunately, I feel like these authors in particular also tried to make the items have some edge-case uses beyond just a one-use joke.

So, since I'm picking up over a year after my last post, I decided a good first move would be to update the list of humor articles I posted last year . There were a few I missed the first time around, but I'm still pretty proud of it -- it's a comprehensive list.

So, I had a change in work shift, and recently I had a baby! Nevertheless, I have a backlog of stuff I should post, things I'd started to work up and then put on the back burner to focus on Real Life. So, two weapon items today.