Tuesday, January 27, 2009

O Frabjous Day!

Charles Dodgson, better known by the pseudonym of Lewis Carroll, was the author of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and its sequel "Through the Looking-Glass". Both books are full of wonderful nonsense, including the poem Jabberwocky, famous in gaming circles for giving us the head-cleaving vorpal sword.*

And, although there are 364 days when you could celebrate Lewis Carroll's un-birthday, today is the one day you can't. :-) So we'll have a look at some minis instead... three in fact, all from Ral Partha, all sculpted by Tom Meier, and all from the aforementioned poem. First is the Jabberwock itself, followed by the Jubjub bird, and the frumious Bandersnatch.





Somewhat surprisingly, even 27 years after it was first released, the Jabberwock is still available from Iron Wind Metals (and still number 01-095). The Jubjub bird and Bandersnatch, unfortunately, are not being produced.


(* Along with the vorpal sword, Gary Gygax created two AD&D modules based on Carroll's books: "Dungeonland" and "The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror". Both are available as free downloads from Wizards of the Coast.)

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Demo WHAT!?

From time to time a DM is required, by law, to absolutely scare the crap out of his players. My friend Thurston used this figure of "Demo-Holder" to do just that to us back during our college days.

I don't remember exactly how he came up with the idea, something about the fact that Demogorgon's heads actually competed against each other and already had "gaze" type powers leading to an escalation of horrifying proportions. :-)



The figure is a Minifigs Demogorgon with the heads replaced by Eleven-Eyed Floaters (*cough*beholder*cough*) from Archive.

And here's a "Family Album" shot of Demo-Holder with the Demogorgon figure from Grenadier (left) and the more recent plastic Demogorgon from WotC (right).