Nerd Watching: Horrible Monsters and the Mothers Who Love Them
Unbalanced Encounters
A lot of monster related stuff going on at the moment as we gear up for the upcoming Monster Manual 2. On the home front, we were involved in a large PR campaign for the MM2 where WotC split up information about several monsters across blogs, facebook and twitter. For our part, we displayed the illustration for the new Iron Dragon. You can find the stats to that monster, other monters and links to the rest of the information at the D&D facebook page.
On the subject of big scary monsters, I have to give a shout out to the Heroslayer Hydra from the MM2. The 4e solo monsters have a tendency to be a bit underwhelming unless they are a few levels above the party. The Heroslayer Hydra seems like what a solo monster should be, a huge beast that eats heroes. Besides, tapping into Greek myth is a surefire key to my heart.
Expy the dragon’s hot link of the week:
Dead Gentlemen Productions have created two very funny movies about tabletop games and the people who play them. Check out the trailer for the newest one on the site, you won’t be disappointed!
One Session Stand
DNAphil over at Gnome Stew wrote a great article about System Promiscuity. He talks about the full spectrum of gamers between those die-hards for one system to those who would play a different game every week if they could. I fall somewhere towards the promiscuous end. My top games are D&D, Mutants and Masterminds and Burning Wheel with some occasional 1 -3 month campaigns of other systems to thrown in. However, even when I’m not playing other systems I still like to buy them and read them just to see what tasty mechanics they have build in. I have a book on my shelf I bought entirely because it had an interesting targeting mechanism using playing cards. I have never played it and probably never will, but it was worth it to me for that. How system promiscuous are you guys?
Spanking the Heroes of Tomorrow
As I write this it is almost Mother’s Day in the US. That has got me thinking about the kind of person who births and raises the heroes who we play as in games. Was your character’s mother just a humble peasant or noblewoman or was she a bad ass hero of her own right? If the mothers’ of the party are heroes of their own it could be really fun to have a comic one-off playing as the mothers of your usual characters. What traits and personality do they share with your regular character. Did she cry when you decided to go off adventuring, try to stop you or give you a boot out the door and toss your first spellbook or weapon out after you? Of course many PCs start their careers as orphans and loners, but even they must have had a mother at some point. How old was the character when his mother died? What can he or she still remember about her? Is the character curious and wants to learn more about the mother he hardly knew?
Speaking of which, how many of you picking up D&D or just general geekiness from your mother? Let us know.
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I still have all the Judges Guild “books” and stuff, including 1st ed character sheets and miniatures… as well as dice, that I inherited from my mom. I’ve got boxes upon boxes of papers of stories that she wrote between games and all kinds of stuff… I really miss her.
The character I am playing right now, a half-elf cleric of Avandra, didn’t know his birth mother or his real father. But he was adopted by a priest of Avandra who cared for him for many years. He doesn’t have any particular person he considers his mother, though his “Aunt” is the closest he has since it was she that brought him up until he was old enough to go traveling with his “father” and learn the ways of Avandra. He has created a very large extended family for himself over the years and it is fun to play this out, especially since there is basically at least 1 person in every town that he considers a family member of some type, or at the very least, a close friend.
On a side note, my mother was dismayed when I started playing this game all those years ago, back in ’80. She’s fine with it now, though she still does not understand it nor has any interest in understanding it. Back when I started getting into d&d was when all the bad publicity about the game was going on. Once she realized it wasn’t as bad as people were making it out to be, that I wasn’t becoming a satanist, or going to kill myself if my favorite character died, or get into drugs, she fine with it. Though she did have to regulate how much time I spent playing/working on the game. My school work did suffer at first and that was definitely a reasonable response, though I didn’t think so at the time.
I play Destiny, a tiefling paladin of the Raven Queen. She has mommy issues. For one thing, she blamed her mother for getting herself killed at the hands of devils, thus dooming my character to the life of an impoverished orphan. Then, when she found out that her mother actually sacrificed herself to save Destiny, she felt really guilty about hating her mom all those years. Such is life.
I didn’t catch D&D from my mom, but I’m definitely passing it on to my kids! :)