Back in the day I was baffled by those bad guys. Who the hell are they? At one point I considered that they might be an NPC party from some parallel Prime Material Plane where they play a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle/Palladium Fantasy hybrid game. Eventually I settled on the idea that the tiger-headed guy was a rakshasa, the bird dude was a kenku and the boar-head guy was an orcish cleric. Together they formed a sort of dark mirror anti-PC party, a pro-active multi-racial group of badguys to oppose all those mixed parties of goody-goody dwarves, elves, and humans.
Friday, October 03, 2008
Speaking of Deities & Demigods...
The original DDG has tons of great illos. Here's one by David LaForce that totally blew my mind when I was a kid.
Back in the day I was baffled by those bad guys. Who the hell are they? At one point I considered that they might be an NPC party from some parallel Prime Material Plane where they play a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle/Palladium Fantasy hybrid game. Eventually I settled on the idea that the tiger-headed guy was a rakshasa, the bird dude was a kenku and the boar-head guy was an orcish cleric. Together they formed a sort of dark mirror anti-PC party, a pro-active multi-racial group of badguys to oppose all those mixed parties of goody-goody dwarves, elves, and humans.
Back in the day I was baffled by those bad guys. Who the hell are they? At one point I considered that they might be an NPC party from some parallel Prime Material Plane where they play a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle/Palladium Fantasy hybrid game. Eventually I settled on the idea that the tiger-headed guy was a rakshasa, the bird dude was a kenku and the boar-head guy was an orcish cleric. Together they formed a sort of dark mirror anti-PC party, a pro-active multi-racial group of badguys to oppose all those mixed parties of goody-goody dwarves, elves, and humans.
I was never really into running stuff on the outer planes.
ReplyDeleteBut that picture has always left me wanting to know more about what the hell was happening.
The odd foes, the weird background, just reeked of coolness.
Then years after, the Manual of the Planes came out. While OK, it just didn't live up to what that one drawing promised.
Don't forget page 120 of the Player's Handbooks appears to be done by the same artist using the same "campaign setting"
ReplyDeleteI agree with Rob that no treatment of the Planes has ever really done them justice. The closest anyone's ever come in my opinion was Roger E. Moore's treatment of the Astral Plane in Dragon, back in the day. He made the place seem weird and alien and more than a little inhospitable to adventurers, which is how it should be. Makes me regret all the more that Gygax never got around to publishing his Shadowland supplement; that would have rocked.
ReplyDeleteI always liked how the guy who's getting blasted looked. The dynamic pose, the billowing cape, those awesome boots...
ReplyDeleteI think I always just assumed the humans were fighting some vaguely Egyptian gods, but the whole "floating around" thing did strike me as odd.
I'm doubt any outer planes manual can really work. After all, it should be something beyond a mere mortal's ability to comprehend. Anything less than incomprehensible strangeness quickly becomes just the same as the material plane but with new monsters.
ReplyDeleteSurely I'm not going to first person to mention Bast...
ReplyDeleteTechnically, Rakshasa in Indian myth can have almost any sort of animal or insect head.
ReplyDelete