Hrulgin Beefbone

I can't stop myself, this newly discovered photo tool is too much fun. Here is the next installment in the TSR Rogues Gallery (9380) series.

Here are the minis I use for Hrulgin Beefbone and his sidekick black wolf, Slaver.

"Hrulgin Beefbone is a tough-looking dwarf and his appearance is no deception. He wears leather armor with spikes jutting out at the elbows and knees and smaller spikes in the breastplate. He also has a well-made pair of boots which can project sharp blades when he clicks them together. He is always accompanied by Slaver, his black wolf. He has many scars. The most prominent is on his ear, part of which is missing. He has several other scars on his face, but Hrulgin is proud of them, rather than ashamed."

I think the dwarf is one of the Grenadier dwarves, and the wolf is an old Ral Partha.

I like this character a lot, and having a tough bounty hunter recurring NPC can be a lot of fun--sometimes he is chasing the PCs and sometimes he is helping them. Nothing personal, just business.

Staloungue

If you read my post from the other day, you know that I'd been trying to locate the TSR 2nd Edition Rouges Gallery sheet for a 9th Level Wizardess named Staloungue. I have been rearranging the D&D room and putting out all the figures I use for personalities in my campaign on a shelf in alphabetical order for easier finding. As I do so, I'm entering the character sheets and image of the mini into a Hall of Heroes I'm doing in Publisher 2000. Here is the mini I use for Staloungue. I think it is a good match from the description given on the sheet.

I don't want to violate any copyright laws, so I won't reprint the sheet here, but she is described as carrying around a wand of beguiling and having "huge volumes of cascading hair that sometimes seems to form a diaphanous cloud around her head."

The mini is from the Grenadier Dragon series where each dragon came with a human female. This one is from 9612 Spectral Dragon, Grenadier's wingless Tiamat. I don't actually have that Tiamat, but I wish I did. I think my friend Matt Clark bought the dragon and had no use for the female figure, so he either traded or sold it to me...or maybe just gave it outright. I don't think I stole it. So, that makes this figure at least a couple decades old. She used to have a pretty nice gold leotard painted on, like a magical Mandrell Sister, but it has chipped a bit over the years. I just hope that this isn't one of the many many minis that Matt melted down once he started working for Reaper. Kills me that he does that.

Here is an image of the actual set it came from:

I don't know where I got this image from, and if it is a violation of copyright to post it, none was intended, it was for illustrative purposes only. If you want credit or to have it removed, just post a comment and I'll take care of it right away. I think it was probably taken from Stuff of Legends.

Anyway, Staloungue is now where she belongs with a fully fledged character sheet scanned and saved.

I know a lot of people hate the Rogues Gallery 2E (TSR 9380), but I found it to be pretty useful. If I had people who were interested in playing with my campaign group I'd invite them to come to a sesson in progress and give them one of thes sheets from the set to play. It had stats and just enough character info to get them going. With a ready made character they could make an NPC come to life much better than I could while running all the monsters, and both my regular players and the potential new one got to find out if their playing styles were compatible without having invested an entire evening rolling up a character, outfitting it, and coming up with a detailed thematically appropriate backstory.

If it all worked out, then the new player was invited to create their own original character and join the fray. If it didn't, then I had a very nicely fleshed out NPC to help populate my world.

Hrulgin Beefbone was the best one of these experiments. Maybe I'll post him next time.

Shandar the Ashen One

This is the mini I'm using for Shandar. He's actually the Heritage Gandalf from the '70's.

I didn't realize that Blogger had an image upload feature. This is sort of a test of it. Seems to work very well.

And so, you can look forward to many more images to come of minis in my collection and those being used for characters in my campaign. Don't criticize my painting, though, I'm not laying any claim to being a master painter, just a collector of some interesting minis since around 1976.

Textfiles for D&D

Well, I'm crawling through the never ending re-organization of the D&D room and I can't find half the files I thought I had in different piles. The price of a disorganized mind is a disorganized environment. At any rate, as I'm entering in NPCs into my Publisher document I'm discovering that I can't find any of the paper NPC sheets I know I had here somewhere....so I did a google for Rogues Gallery to see if I could download the PDF of it from RPG Now or someplace because several of the characters I have figures for were from that supplement.

I couldn't find it, but I did find a great website with a collection of nearly 300 very useful text files for use with D&D and AD&D. I'll clue you in that at the bottom of the page is a link for downloading all the files in a zip file, so don't do what I did and spend an hour opening each file to see if you want to download it individually.

The site is: TEXTFILES.com

Enjoy!

Blood War likely to disappoint...

I found a really nice miniatures blog while trying to find images of the complete new Blood War line. I'm starting to see that there are not quite as many devils and demons as you might expect in a set called Blood War, but I will take what I can get. Storm Silverhand and the Green Slaad are going to be important additions to my collection. I'm sure I'll love most of the minis, but I was really hoping for denizens of the lower planes to dominate.

Anyway, the blog is http://fantasymini.blogspot.com/. It is entirely in French, but the images are great and he I think he is a retailer, maybe in Belgium? He seems to have images of a lot of promo items.

He also has good links to other accessory providers, like a European company that makes excellent resin buildings. See the links page, I've added them.

I have done a major revamping of my D&D area in the basement. Added another bookshelf for minis storage, added a bookshelf for all the books I got from my friend in Iowa City, and am busy continuing with my monstrous compendium in Publisher 2000 along with the Hall of Heroes NPC catalog in the same format. Something to keep me busy well into my nineties.

I've also added an FTP program to the laptop that I use in my D&D room for Dungeon Mastering, which means I don't have to run to the other office anymore to upload images from my figs or other items referred to in my posts....that means I can link to a lot more pictures in future.

Hopefully, I'll be making more posts so that this blog might be a little more interesting to other people besides myself.

Well, here's hoping.

Huge new pile of books

I went to a theatre convention a week ago, to Iowa City. While there I stayed with my old friend and veteran player in my IC campaign, Guido. It was a little sad that he told me he didn't think he'd be playing D&D again any time soon, as most of his regular players had either moved out of Iowa City, Iowa, and/or the Prime Material Plane for good. He sent me back to Virginia with two gigantic boxes of his 1st and 2nd Edition books. It will take a little while to find shelf space for them all...not least because I'm going to need more shelves.

With the almost upon us release of Blood War, I am also doing a new inventory of my current figures, moving them on the shelves to make room, and adjusting my ever growing not likely to stop expanding Monstrous Compendium I'm doing in Publisher 2000.

I'm going to post a few needs lists here, just so I don't forget. I'll also be organizing my surplus figures for another large lot on eBay soon to add funds and make room in the basement for the new Blood War minis. I'm really looking forward to these. I hope there are some good ones from the old FF and MM's. I have a particular love of devils and demons, even though I've never had a party survive long enough to face any.

Since I have a figure based campaign, I try to have the number of minis for each monster as are listed as the number appearing in the Compendium. 2-6 appearning means I need (or would like) 6 minis.

This is why I don't mind re-sculpts--but please, not on unique monsters or who only have 3 or fewer appearing. 80 Sahuagin all in the same pose suck just as much as 6 different poses of Lord Soth would.

NEEDS (I'm in the S's right now in the shelf shifting):
2 more Red Slaads
Giant Slug...probably will have to make my own
1-6 Green Slaads. When will WOTC make these?
1-6 Gray Slaads. Again with the when?
1-6 more Blue Slaads
6 more Sirines (I'm using Marrina from Marvel Heroclix)
5 more Shadow Mastiffs (I think these are Ral Partha Ravenloft figs)
2-12 Sha'az. Please, WOTC, make these.
2 more giant scorpions
2-16 Scathe. I have a fig I use for these, I think it is Grenadier.
3-4 Scaladar. I'm surprised that with Eberron, they haven't done these yet.
3 more Salamanders
75 more Sahuagin