Revisiting Iconic Monsters: Kobolds

Posted: March 12, 2011 | Author: Stefan | Filed under: monsters | 2 Comments

In his recent post, “Creating Another Bandwagon,” James of Grognardia has challenged us to compare our earlier impressions of classic D&D monsters before we saw the complete illustrations or descriptions with the ‘official’ images or descriptions we may have seen later. James talked about how his conception of what an ‘orc’ looked like was very different from what he eventually saw in the AD&D Monster Manual. I wanted to jump on that bandwagon by advancing the claim that I had a similar experience with kobolds.

The first D&D book I owned was the ‘Holmes’ edition of basic D&D which had very brief monster descriptions and fewer monster illustrations than the AD&D Monster Manual I bought later. In Holmes, kobolds were described as small and evil and ‘dwarf like,’ so I was surprised and a little put off when I later saw them illustrated as little lizard dog people. I just hadn’t imagined them like that.

Perhaps it was having spent part of my childhood in Germany, where there are popular folklore tales about little folks named “heinzelmännchen” (usually translated as ‘gnomes’) infesting the city of Cologne.* As a kid, I had a book about the legend of the Heinzelmännchen in which they were portrayed as somewhat creepy looking little beardless midgets dressed in dark green suits and droopy hats. My conception of kobolds were, I think, drawn from the imagery of that book, but I imagined them as being dirty and evil. For reasons I can’t remember, I remember also telling my players that the kobolds were made from earth; when they killed one, it disintegrated into a pile of dirt.

Now the heinzelmännchen of Cologne were supposed to be cute and helpful (not evil) and they are usually portrayed as looking much like the ceramic gnomes that people put in their gardens (with or without beards), but perhaps I found the idea of obsessive-compulsive little people who crept around doing all sorts of shit while we slept to be rather creepy. Perhaps that’s why I like the footage of a sinister-looking gnome that some kids in Mexico caught on video late at night a few years ago (still image at right) to be more ‘koboldish’ than the lizard-chihuahua I saw when I opened up the AD&D Monster Manual.

*The original tale is as follows: In the past, no one in the City of Cologne had to work because each night the work seemed to ‘do itself’ (actually the heinzelmännchen did all the work at night. Their only stipulation was that no one look at them. There might have also been a bribe in the form of fresh cream or something). The people were, naturally, happy with this arrangement and just lay around all day drinking beer and playing cards. However, one woman (it’s always a woman in these stories, isn’t it? Eve? Pandora? Why can’t women leave shit alone?) was consumed by curiosity and threw dried peas on the steps of her house. When the little heinzelmännchen arrived to work, they slipped on the peas and fell down the stairs, making a racket, and she awoke and grabbed a lamp and came running to see them. This pissed the little people off so much that they never came back and from then on the big people of Cologne had to work like everyone else. As a result, there are now references to these little gnomes on signs, statues, etc., all over Cologne. They were even in cartoons on TV in Germany when I was a kid. In Cologne there is also a statue of the woman with a lamp.

The Piasa Bird

Posted: February 22, 2011 | Author: Stefan | Filed under: misc, monsters | 4 Comments

I grew up in St. Louis, Mo, and my father’s family had owned farmland in the Alton, Illinois area in the 19th century. So it is not surprising that I grew up familiar with the legends of the ‘Piasa bird.’

In 1763, the Catholic priest (who went on to be creditied with the founding of Saint Louis) Father Jaques Marquette and his crew of explorers were travelling down the Mississippi River when they discovered a gigantic painting of a fantastic creature upon the river bluffs. It had a man-like face with giant teeth, a snake tail tipped with a fish-like flipper, wings, clawed feet and antlers (the image at right is a reproduction based on early settler’s drawings; the original was unfortunately destroyed because it was painted on stone that was subsequently discovered to be of value for lithography; the original painting (which might have dated back to the Cahokia civilization of ~1200 CE) was cut up and carried away). Father Marquette and his explorers noted the good quality of the painting and could not figure out how anyone could have painted the picture on a cliff of that height. They also worried that the painting might depict a real creature (they were among the first Europeans to visit this part of the world which was, at that time, a big white space on the map with a question mark). They called it ‘the bird that eats men.’

I grew up believing that the word ‘Piasa’ (which is pronounced “Pie-uh-saw”) was ‘bird that eats men’ in the native language. As it turns out, no one can agree on why the explorers called it a ‘Piasa.’ Some think is is a reference to the French word for river bluff and others think it is a native word. Most think the original was a symbol of The Cahokian Civilization. The Cahokian civilization dissapeared before any Europeans made it to the midwest, so no one knows much about them.

Strange Monsters

Posted: February 20, 2011 | Author: Stefan | Filed under: Dungeons and Dragons, history, monsters | 5 Comments

I was originally going to call this post ‘Weird Monsters’ but I have become afraid of using the word ‘weird’ in public because I always misspell it. That whole ‘i before e’ thing.

There are D&D monsters that are just fun to speculate on, especially on a Sunday morning when you are hung over. Like the ‘catoblepas‘ (which is apparently based on Pliny the Elder’s misconception of the wildebeest). How does a creature with a ‘gaze that kills or petrifies’ reproduce? I mean, I know that female spiders often eat the males after reproduction (which seems much worse than not returning a phone call), but the female spider waits until AFTER humpage to eat the male (which would probably result in a lot of gay spiders, but I digress). I imagine two catoblepases (catoblepi?) meeting at a watering hole in Ethiopia and one saying, “What is a nice catoblepas like yourself doing in a place like this? Ugh!” The catoblepas says ‘ugh’ because it dies. And the date is over because they gaze into each other’s eyes and kill each other. Does a catoblepas who is ‘ready to mate’ walk around with a bag over his or her head? If so, couldn’t even a tribe of ambitious kobolds wiped out the ‘bagged and desperate’ catoblepas? And where would the catoblepas get the bag, anyway? And since it doesn’t have hands, how would it put the bag on its own head?

And how could poor old ‘Pliny the Elder’ have been so wrong about the wildebeest? I don’t know much about the wildebeest (although, if I were a wildebeest, I would be thanking Pliny for his misconception since hungry readers of Pliny would run away in terror rather than trying to kill and eat me). I mean, he was wrong about just about everything except that the wildebeest/catoblepas had four legs (which is pretty much a given with large mammals that are not humans or monkeys/apes or whales/dolphins anyway, isn’t it?). It’s gaze kills? Where did he get that? If Pliny ever was in Ethiopia, I wonder if some lazy guide/local just fed him some misinformation. Perhaps Pliny sighted some wildebeests from a long way off and wanted to walk through the noonday sun to have a closer look, but a lazy and wily native guide who wanted to remain in the shade said, “We don’t want to do that, chief. If we, uh, get close enough to that animal that it can see us, it’s gaze will kill.”

“Really?” replied the incredulous Pliny. And then he went and wrote that down in his book.

Everyone loves to speculate on the how/when/why of ‘The Owlbear.’ Yet another creature where St. Gygax took the ass of one creature and the head of another and combined them. I can understand being afraid of bears. I once met a bear on a forest path and nearly shit my pants. The thing was the size of a Yugo (which is small for a car, but really big for an animal). Or maybe I was just frightened and it looked bigger. St. Gygax explained the owlbears origin away by saying, “A mad wizard did it.” OK. But it is pretty strange that the wizard, mad or otherwise, would combine an owl (which is smaller than a bread box), with a bear (which is usually about the size of 50 bread boxes). Wouldn’t the owlbear therefore have a (comparatively) tiny head and tiny claws? Maybe the ‘mad wizard’ started with a ‘giant’ owl. Fair enough. There is a giant version of everything in D&D land. And perhaps he didn’t call his creation a ‘giant owlbear’ as opposed to an ‘owlbear’ because he thought that would cause people to confuse his creation with a creature that was 50 stories tall and ate Tokyo every Saturday (speaking of which, I just noticed that I feel ‘an owlbear’ sounds more correct than ‘a owlbear.’ Why is that?). And were there other bird/mammal hybrids in addition to the owlbear? Turkeydogs? Pelicancows? Duckbeavers?

Because it has been discussed to death, I suppose I better give the owlbear a pass. Besides which, my experience in playing D&D is that the noobs always underestimate the owlbear based on it’s name alone. “Owlbear?” they say, chuckling at the silliness of the concept. One initiative roll later they need a new character.

The gelatinous cube has always inspired a lot of speculation. When I first started playing D&D, I don’t think we understood that ‘gelatinous’ meant ‘like jello.’ I don’t know what we thought ‘gelatinous’ meant. Therefore, if we were attacked by a “gelatinous” cube we would hammer a spike into the floor and retreat behind it. The cube (which I guess we supposed was solid, like a big meat brick) would slide up to the spike and, according to our DM, be unable to proceed any further. And we would kill it with arrows. I don’t know how we thought it attacked people. Maybe we thought it had a big-ass mouth on the front.

But most people puzzle over a creature that evolved to exactly fill a 10×10 corridor and just slides around the dungeon, like a big see-through Roomba, sucking up everything and anything in it’s path (does anyone else find it creepy that the company that makes the “roomba” is called “irobot”?). Perhaps the gelatinous cube did not ‘evolve’ to be 10x10x10, but some wizard bred it to be that way… like the way that the Chinese bred their little dogs to have pushed-in looking faces.

Scaling Wandering Monster encounters in the great outdoors

Posted: February 18, 2011 | Author: Stefan | Filed under: games, monsters, rules | 2 Comments

Crossposted to DF:

I prefer random generation for wandering monsters over simply ‘picking’ what the players will encounter when because I like the unexpected nature that a roll of the dice can introduce. Maybe the dice will call for an unexpected monster that I would have never picked myself and lead to an interesting encounter.
I also like the wandering monster tables that are either environment appropriate (i.e.: you are unlikely to encounter camels in the arctic or fish in the desert if you roll on the right chart) and the ones that are ‘scaled’ for dungeon level… especially the ones that make it likely that you will encounter 1 hit dice creatures on level 1, 2 hit dice on level 2, etc., but the players can also occassionally encounter a monster from a deeper level that has ‘wandered up’… but such ‘deeper level’ monster encounters are less likely.

Has anyone created tables that are keyed to both environment and average party level/power? Thus you level 1 group is more likely to encounter a band of orcs while wandering in the woods while the 4th level party will encounter ogres instead (or maybe just a great many more orcs?).

I suppose I could put such tables together myself, but it seems a real pain in the ass. Maybe someone has already done the work for me.

MONSTER BRAINS (and why I have monsters on the brain)

Posted: January 25, 2011 | Author: Stefan | Filed under: monsters, philosophy | 2 Comments

The image at right is from an old comic cover by L.B. Cole (circa 1940 or so) and comes to me courtesy of one of my favorite image blogs, “Monster Brains.” The Cole pictures are particularly wonderful, but Monster Brains always has something good. Do yourself a favor and subscribe today.

Earlier today I had an epiphany of sorts. I was looking at the Cole images on Monster Brains and just enjoying their lurid wonder. Later I went to my therapist (yes, I go to a therapist) and he and I spoke about how I take personal responsibility for the feelings of others (and how that’s not a good thing) and subconsciously seem to believe as though other people’s unhappiness is my fault.

Later, I thought back on a conversation with an ex-girlfriend where she was somewhat taken aback by the fact that I was always writing short stories in which one of the characters would transform into a ‘monster’ (not literally, like a werewolf, but they would transform in their behavior and their might be some outward sign of that transformation… like a story in which a guy had a big boil on his forehead — or another story where a man wakes up to find that someone has attached a dog’s head to his body right next to his human head). I was also always drawing weird shit and admiring pictures like the one at top right… or medieval art (particularly scenes of hell or mythological creatures)… or Indian art (like this image of Kali), etc., and she was saying, “What is it with you and the monsters?”

This is where the epiphany comes in. I think the fascination with monsters comes from identifying with the monsters. Now that it occurs to me, I am shocked that I never thought about it before. Weird, huh?

Moorlocks attack!

Posted: October 27, 2010 | Author: Stefan | Filed under: monsters, movies, music | Leave a comment

Roger the GS mentioned Grimlocks over at Roles, Rules and Rolls. I love the old circa 1960 movie of Well’s “Time Machine” with the blue morlocks and their too perfect hair… it really gave me the creeps when I saw it back in the 1970s (probably on the local network back in St. Louis which showed a lot of horror and sci-fi movies). I barely remember the 2002 version of the same story, although I love the way the moorlocks lope along the tunnels in the above clip.

Original movie clip is below:

CRAB ATTACK!

Posted: October 26, 2010 | Author: Stefan | Filed under: art, monsters | 5 Comments

Why are crabs so scary?

Gah! Legion (2010) Movie Review

Posted: October 24, 2010 | Author: Stefan | Filed under: monsters, movies | 1 Comment

Sometimes the best parts of a movie are all in the trailer. Such is the case with 2010’s film, Legion, directed by Scott Stewart. The premise of the film (God has grown sick of the humans, and so has decided to wipe them all out) is one I found appealing, and in the previews there was a shot of an ice-cream truck driver who turned into a gangly weird creature straight out of Oz (which delighted me)… and the creepy old lady who bit a man’s throat out was good for a laugh… but where do you go, narrative-wise, once you opened up the giant can of whoopass that is “the end times”?

Unfortunately, Legion takes itself a little too seriously. Archangel Michael (yes, he is a character in this film) is a good angel who has been cast out of the “angel corps” or whatever and falls to earth in LA where he cuts off his wings (why is not explained… if I had wings like FUCK ALL would I cut them off… wings are bound to be useful (as Gabriel later proves)). He raids a toy warehouse which is filled with SMGs and rocket launchers (OK, I guess the toy warehouse is supposed to be a front for gun smugglers) and steals a cop car after one of the cops gets ‘possessed’ and tells him that the rest of heaven is coming for him (Michael) — and they may have mentioned ‘the child’ who is mankind’s only hope. That child gets mentioned (a lot) later. It seems that angels (or spirits of some kind) can possess some of the “weaker willed” humans and use them to do bad things that our angry God wants done. After taking care of this situation, Archangel Michael takes off in the cop car with a trunk full of weapons.

Cut to a shithole diner/truckstop on the edge of nowhere in the desert. Here we meet the diner’s embittered owner (played by Dennis Quaid), his son ‘Jeep’ (who has a heart of gold), the cook, Percy, and a dysfunctional family consisting of a bitchy mother, a loudmouth father and emo/sexually promiscuous daughter. The family is passing through but their car has broken down. The young waitress, Charlie, is very pregnant but the father of the baby is out of the picture and it’s made painfully obvious that the son of the diner’s owner, “Jeep,” dotes on her. Why he is named after an off-road vehicle is not clear. A black guy/gang banger (who turns out to be a stand-up guy who wins the respect of others) comes in, wanting to use the phone. He’s lost and can’t get a signal on his cell.

Well, just when you think that this is going to become a film where loveable misfits are tossed together by circumstance in an out-of-the-way desert truckstop (like “Bagdad Cafe,”), things start getting weird. An old woman pulls up, enters the cafe, orders a steak and, after inquiring about the baby’s due date, starts calling Charlie the waitress nasty names and telling her the child will die.

The old woman goes berserk and bites the throat out of the loudmouth husband and then scuttles across the ceiling as Quaid shoots at her with his 20 gauge and Percy the cook hits her in the face with an impressively hurled frying pan. Black guy/gangbanger pulls out a Glock and drops the old lady. They are all still freaked about this when Archangel Michael pulls up and explains that Charlie is going to give birth to the savior of mankind, but God is sending his servants to kill the child so they better board up the diner and hunker down and try to save the child.

At this point the movie becomes more like a cross between “Assault on Precinct 13” and “Night of the Living Dead.” Led by Michael, the good guys fortify the diner. The angels send waves of weird possessed losers/cannon fodder whom the good guys mow down with all of the weapons Michael brought with him. Eventually Archangel Gabriel shows up. Unlike Michael, he still has his wings and has a neat trick where when someone shoots bullets at him he can brush the bullets away with his wings.

I don’t want to give any spoilers beyond this point other than to say that eventually the day is saved and even God doesn’t seem like such a bad guy after all. I don’t mind that the film is probably “theologically unsound.” But the degree to which it takes itself serious kind of busts it for me. If you saw the preview, you have the gist of what the movie is like. Unfortunately, there is not a lot more to it.

Two New Freaks and removeable heads

Posted: October 11, 2010 | Author: Stefan | Filed under: adventures, art, ideas, Mandeville, monsters, Oz, wierd stuff | 2 Comments

I’ve been sick as a dog for the past week with the worst head cold of my life, so I haven’t felt particularly inspired… but somehow managed to drag my sorry ass out of bed long enough to do a few things (including attending a 5 hour event at MOCAD — by the end of which I swear I was going to pass out).

First up is another creature in a possible series from Mandeville’s travels; a cynocephale (dog-headed man). Some of the period illustrations of the cynocephales showed them as having fur all over their bodies, others illustrations show them with fur only on their heads. I opted for the fur body — he isn’t wearing anything other than a bracelet. I had a hard time deciding whether or not to give him a tail, but none of the period illustrations I looked at had tails, so I left it off.

I’ve been using felt tipped markers on a sketch pad paper rather than my regular pen, brush and ink on Bristol and am still trying to get the feel for these new tools. One of the advantages is that I can work anywhere and traveling with a couple of felt tips and a pad is easier than needing a bottle of india ink, pens, brushes, cleaning supplies, etc. I’m less happy with this one than the picture of the Blemmye I did earlier — mostly because the legs look fucked up. But I like using a paper with a less smooth surface than the Bristol, although I miss the brush a lot.

Next up is a headless zombie, and she’s coming right down the sewer tunnel at you! This is from an adventure idea I had based on one of the characters from “The Oz” series of books. In one of the books, there was a character named Princess Langwidere who had a palace in which there were cabinets containing many ‘swappable’ heads. Langwidere could just take her head off and replace it whenever she wanted with another head from her collection. When Dorthy Gale wandered into the picture, Langwidere decided she wanted Dorthy’s head and offered her another from her collection in exchange. I don’t remember quite how it turned out (other than Dorthy retained her head), but I always liked the swappable heads idea.

The adventure idea might be a city/town location where all female visitors are carefully inspected when they arrive at the gate… and, if they have an attractive face or a nice head of hair (or are even interesting or exotic looking), they are summoned to the castle for a royal audience where the Princess/Duchess/Baroness/etc., will demand they swap heads with her because she wants their head for her collection. She wouldn’t be interested in bearded female dwarf heads or tiny hobbit heads, but human or elven heads would probably strike her fancy.

I haven’t worked out how the heads are removed — perhaps a magic axe that severs the head without all the blood and gore and death? Then the user can just put the head on the stump of the neck and it sticks like Velcro. Langwidere probably wears some sort of a choker to cover the seam. I might rule that if you ever put your own “original” head back on, it will immediately graft itself into place and the only way to get it off again (without getting killed in the process) is to use the magic axe. If, after having their head severed by this magic axe, the user does not place a head of some kind on the body, they will eventually turn into a ‘headless zombie.’

One of the possible adventures could be that the party might either have to return to the palace to either free their female companions (who might be trapped in a dungeon for having refused to give up their heads) or they might want to break into the palace to retrieve the original head of their female companion if they have been forced to relinquish their original head.

One of the ways into the castle is through the sewers… but the sewers are inhabited by the animate corpses of the Princess’ former enemies or women who made a nuisance of themselves by demanding their heads back.

I dare you to post this to your blog…; NSFW

Posted: October 1, 2010 | Author: Stefan | Filed under: art, douchebaggery, monsters, weird | 4 Comments

The other day I read this on Raggi’s LotFP blog:

So I’m contacting some artists and actually using the words, “Give me something that will get me arrested for publishing it.”

I am not one of the artists that Raggi contacted, but his challenge touched something in my base nature… and I wanted to see if I could draw something that would get Jim Raggi arrested for publishing it. Several ideas were considered and discarded. Zak S. (of Pornstars fame) submitted a link to a particularly good drawing that involved dildo-wielding midgets with T-pins in their eyes. I decided to consider the gauntlet thrown down and tried to combine things that would make Larry Flynt uncomfortable (for the record, I don’t think I managed to produce something that would make Larry Flynt squirm).

Cannibalism is pretty bad, so I had to put that in… but necrophilia is worse… so why not both? For some reason naked females don’t make most viewers uncomfortable, but seeing men with their dicks hanging out does… so I had to have several dicks in the drawing. But not just men who were naked with flaccid dicks — they had to be naked men sticking their dicks in places where most decent people would think they didn’t belong. Hence a goblin throat-fucking a decapitated human corpse. In retrospect, I should have included pedophilia, but one can’t think of everything. One of the goblins is eating a still living human baby while shitting in the mouth of a severed human head… that ought to count for something.

I finished the drawing and emailed a scan to Raggi, hoping to hear him say, “This will be the cover of my next adventure!” Unfortunately, all I got was:

I dare you to put that on your blog.

Maybe that’ll start one of these meme things I keep hearing about.

That Raggi is all talk.

Unfortunately, even the most casual perusal of art history reveals that all of this stuff has been done before (and usually done better — Goya’s “Saturn devours his Sons“* is so sick and cool). I’ve seen a shitload of medieval woodcuts illustrating “Der Kinderfresser” (The child eater). They even erected a statue of him in Switzerland. Torture and impaling has been well covered, especially in the illustrations of the Catholic Church going to work on the heretics and the Protestant denominations going to work on the witches. Images of rape are as old as pornography. About the only new idea I have is a goblin fucking the throat of a decapitated corpse… but surely I cannot be the first person to think of that?

*Goya apparently put this picture on the wall of his dining room where he and his family ate their meals… which must had lead to some interesting dinner conversations.

Update 12/29/2011: This picture apparently has a cult following now and is being cited as proof’ of my degeneracy and/or genius. I guess that means that as an artist I have finally “arrived.”

stefan poag

The Weird Fantasy Art of Stefan Poag