Friday, February 16, 2007

link of the day

"Look, Becca, the Faire combines many ostensibly disparate eras, including the Renaissance, Medieval times, the days of yore, the days of Conan, the Dark Ages, the Pirates of the Caribbean, albums by Tool and the Insane Clown Posse, the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block of programming, World of Warcraft, Monty Python’s Holy Grail, the Legend of Zelda, shitty new age Celtic music, the bleachers at a NASCAR race and, finally, all those attention whores in your high school drama club. You can’t be all hung up on authenticity or classification. You just have to wander through the crowds, wide-eyed and innocent, enjoying the swirling, festive mélange of totally made-up cultures. And also you have to eat one of those giant turkey legs, so I can take a picture and use it to make jokes on the Internet."

DiscountHobby.com is the devil

Check out these great R-Kiiv brand minis from the 70's.

This guy would be perfect for my next Encounter Critical game.

Space Cowboy!


Is that a sweater tied around his neck?Alien Ninja!


This guy is hella cool.

Evil Wizard!


Death to all fleshy ones!

Attacking Robot!


Holy crap!

Space Lizard with light sword!!!



So why would I declare DiscountHobby.com, purveyors of these fine wares, to be Satan Incarnate? Because of their insane policy regarding selling these old figures. They list ten R-Kiiv figures for sale each month. After that month is over, they discontinue sales and sell the molds. I hate artificially created windows of opportunity like that. I feel like I'm being pushed into buying something.

Still, cool figures. They've got some other great lines as well, that do not have this crappy deadline built into them. They've got a Gloranthan line that includes the dreaded Walktapus as well as this awesome female fighter. No ducks though. Here's a great Cthulhu I hadn't seen before. And the leftmost of these three succubi would make an awesome female balrog. Also: cheap zombies and wicked cool zombies.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Random comics...

...found over my lunch hour at a used book store for a buck apiece.


Help!  I'm trapped in an Aquaman adventure!Every time I see Neptune in a DC comic he's going on about someone swiping his stuff. He's worse than that leprechaun with the cereal.


Sheesh.  Are you sure that's enough guest stars for one issue?  The Defenders aren't busy.  Aplha Flight's probably available too.Until today I had no idea that the X-Men had their own reprint title.

In this issue the Changeling fights Beast Boy and Robotman!

Everything I know about the Titans I learned from the cartoon. When I first glanced at this cover I thought the grey dude was the Changeling.

Demogorgon is awesome

Orcus gets a lot a play these days but my favorite canonical demon prince is definitely Demogorgon. Just look at this guy! A two-headed baboon with tentacles!

As part of their licensed AD&D line Minifigs, now long gone, did a figure very closely based upon this picture from the original Monster Manual.


Grenadier later produced this Demogorgon look-alike but called him Orcus for some unfathomable reason. The head is reptilian instead of baboonish, but it's still pretty neat-o. I have one of these I bought off the eBay, thinking I was getting the Minifig version. Here's a link to a nicely painted version of this figure.

The Aspect of Demogorgon from Wizard's plastic figure line. I like the concept of buying a prepainted Prince of Demons, but the sculpt is too thin and spindly, lacking the look of raw power in the earlier versions.

Reaper's Dark Heaven Legends line has a lot of great figures designed for D&D play. This fantastic fella is called the Demonic Lasher in their catalog. They like to file the serial numbers off, don't you know. On this page you can find a great painted version of this figure.

Rethinking the Favored Class

With all the zillions of new base classes floating around it seems to me that it would make sense to re-examine the core PC races and see if they a different base class would work better for them. My ideas off the top of my head are to reassign the dwarves to the Warmain class from Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved and use the Duskblade (PHB II) for elves to recapture that old school charm of casting spells in armor. The Artificer from Eberron could work for gnomes. Gnome bards leave me cold and illusionist spells never did anything for me. The halfling could be left as is, but I would seriously consider reassign them to rangers in my own campaign world. Half-orc barbarians have been a staple of the hobby for almost a decade now, but back in the day the half-orc was most associated with the assassin class. If halflings are re-imagined as rangers, I could see using the rogue for sneakier, back-stabbier orcs.

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

FYI: theRPGsite

TheRPGsite.com is down at the moment. This weekend the ownership of the site was completely transferred to RPGpundit and some technical issues arose from moving to a new server. No one has attacked the site or anything like that. Please be patient and everything will be back to normal soon.

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