Outta my way Mr Peabody and Sherman. I am taking the way back machine on this post.

I recall doing this and I am sure you did this too. I went out and bought the Advanced D&D Monster manual. Cracking that book open and perusing those pages. Before long you had most if not all the monsters memorized. 

 

Then when the Fiend Folio came out we all did the same thing. Started reading the book over and over again, memorizing those monster's weaknesses and abilities. 

 

There are three Monster Manuals that were not as well known and I loved using them in my campaigns when I was running games in the 80s.

 These Monster Manuals were edited by Steve Perrin and Jeff Pimper. They are titled All The Worlds Monsters, Vol I, Vol II and Vol III respectively and were printed by Chaosium.

 

 

 

Most players did not own them and the meta gaming took place to a lesser degree. It also gave DM's so many more options in choosing creatures. These volumes have so many different monsters. Here are just a few creatures that are in these books

 Have you ever seen the movie The Deadly Mantis released in 1957? 

 

 Here is Giant Preying Mantis that would fill the bill to play the part in the movie.

 

I know that early printings of Deities & Demigods had creatures based on Melnibonéan Mythos created in the Elric series written by Michael Moorcock.

 

Not all the monsters were featured in the Fiend Folio. In the tale “To Rescue Tanelorn” a creature called the Olab was described. It is covered in these books.

 Are you a fan of  Lin Carter's "Warrior At World's End"? Here are stats for the Death Dwarf.

If you are a fan of the author Jack Vance as I am. My favorite Novel is “The Diridr” published in 1969 and by the way I highly recommend it. If you have read his novel “The Dragon Masters”?  The Fiend is in these books.

I could go on and on all the interesting creatures. There are stats for The Cockroach that Cincinnati based on the song by the same name. If you have never heard it, boy it is a real toe tapper.

How about creatures based on the Oz series by Frank L Baum? These books have them.  Have you ever wanted to use a Tarn ( A large Flying Mount) or maybe a Kaiila (A Carnivorous Mount) from the Gor series by John Norman.

 Even Rosemary's Baby from the movie by the same name is in these volumes.

  I could do on and on.  If you still play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons or any of the new games such as Dungeon Crawl Classics or Lamentations of the Flame Princess.  Rosemary's Baby would fit right in with latter rule set.  

 

A little heads up, I am going to do a quick review of Lamentations of the Flame Princess as my next blog post.

I owned all three volumes, but I let someone borrow them back in the day and of course I never got them back. I did repurchased them in PDF and they are still available on Chaosium's Website.

https://www.chaosium.com/search.php?search_query=monsters

These are $5.00 dollars a pop and worth every cent.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and take care.

Mike G

 

Hello all,

Allow me to introduce myself. Whoa, wait a second that first sentence reads like a lyric from a Rolling Stones song and I am certainly not Old Scratch.

Let me start over. I am starting to write a blog about RPG games that I play and run. I will also cover new RPGs and my take on them, I intend to write about products products that our group uses for our RPG games. I previously wrote a blog that was mainly about Military Tabletop Wargames. I will provide a link to that blog. I do not really write anything for it any longer.

https://mikesminiatures.blogspot.com/

I will have to be honest with you. I have painted a lot of miniatures over the years. However one person in our group has Cerebral Palsy and he has difficulty seeing a tabletop game. Our Game Masters wish to keep him involved in the games. Our solution is and thank goodness for them, a Virtual Table Top. I may cover some RPG miniatures in the future, but that certainly will not be the focus of this blog.

What the focus of this blog will be running commentary of gaming sessions I run and gaming sessions I play in. To a lesser extent this blog contents will feature Fantasy books, Sci Fi and Post Apocalyptic(some well know and others not known as well). I will also feature some of the software that we use, Foundry VTT, Dungeondraft, Arkenforge and Dungeon Alchemist to name a few.

I have been playing RPGs since 1976. I started playing D&D in about 1976 and quickly started to play AD&D shortly after. I still have all my AD&D books with some TSR and a few Judges Guild supplements I started playing Tabletop Miniature Wargaming since 1981. I discovered that at Gen Con XIV in 1981. Up until the last eight years I played mostly Tabletop Wargaming, but I did play a few RPGs too. I played a lot of computer games and I was a community contributor for a computer game for a short while as well. About six years ago I started playing RPGs again and have not looked back. Here are a few of the games that I have played over the years plus some that have rekindled my joy of playing Role Playing Games. These are not necessarily in chronological order or they may not be photos of the first edition as I do not own some of the editions that I first started playing the game.

-D&D

-AD&D

As I stated earlier I have all my old D&D books. The one I am happiest that I still have have is the 1st edition Deities and Demigods.

 

-Traveller  One has to love a game that one can die in character creation. 

 

 

 

-Call of Cthulhu     Don't go insane.

 

-Rolemaster Roll, Roll, Roll the dice and let me look up on those three tables

-Star Trek by FASA

Never cared for this game as playing the Prime Directive sucked

It became a much better game when they published the Klingon supplements. The Klingons suited our groups play style.

-D&D 3.5/OGL

Star Wars by West End Games Get ready to throw those six sided dice.

-BattleLords of the 23^rd Century This game has a great sense of humor. In the book the publishers wrote Famous Last words. A couple of them are as follows.

-Is napalm heat sensitive?

-Anyone know where the Phentari went? This one is funny if you had played the game

-What do mean every time we shoot it's eyes glow brighter and it gets bigger?

This is really one of my favorite RPGs. 

 

-Deadlands Hell on Earth

-Fallout: The Role Playing Game

-Pathfinder  I have not played nor ran, but plan on doing both.

 

-Starfinder  I was running a game and our first session was a week or so before everything shut down due to the pandemic. I was running The Dead Suns Adventure Pact published by Paizo. I am now in the process of preparing a home brew game using Foundry VTT. I have all the scenes made for this story arc, but now I have to populate them with creatures, aliens and things that go bump in the night.

-Dungeon Crawl Classic  I have not played nor ran it, but intend to in the future.

I do own both Star Trek Adventures and Achtung Cthulhu. I am not sure I am going to run games featuring these games. I won copies in a drawing.

That pretty much wraps my relationship with RPGs.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read and peruse what I have written. If you enjoyed this blog, please subscribe and tell some of your friends. It would be greatly appreciated and I always respond to comments or questions. Please take care and I want to thank you again for your time.

Mike G