Real men can calculate Thac0

My first set of dice.  Any gamer will tell you picking out your dice is as important as picking your character class.

And now for something completely different. Instead of the usual action figure, I am going to talk about another sort of toy, the polyhedral dice. Specifically those used in the playing of Dungeons and Dragons and other RPGs.

The mighty d20

Now like most kids I was aware of D&D, but had never played it. I knew some kids in high school who played and my school even had a gamers club. Being a shy fellow, I never asked if I could play too. I secretly wanted to though. It wasn't until college, specifically my sophomore year, that I began hanging out with a group of like minded nerds and one proposed a gaming session.

d6s

We went through two sessions with a large group of people. Each had a different DM and a different setting. The first was Dark Sun, in which I played an elven thief, and the second was Ravenloft, in which I played a human cleric. The group eventually whittled down to four and a new game was begun, one that would last most of the year.

Do they even make percentile dice anymore?

The new game was set in just the generic D&D realm. I played a human ranger name Taruk. The co-other of this blog played Reefe, a halfling fight thief. (Yes D&D is how Kir and I became friends The 3rd player was a Minotaur mage. Finally there was our DM, who  to this day is still one of the best DMs I have played with. He was good and both planing things out and playing off the cuff.

So in honor of the good times I had and the friendships I have made, I am kicking off D&D month. I'll be posting pictures of the various characters I've played and the various groups I played in. I may even see if I can scrounge up old drawings from when the characters were first made.

d4 friend of daggers and lower mage spells

M.A.S.K. Condor

Battle of the Helmets

Okay this challenge will delve deep into my childhood and pull out two of my most favorite things: Battle of the Planets and helmets.

Long before the lame Mighty Morphing Power Rangers and even before the well liked Voltron there was Battle of the Planets. G-Force was the original 5 person team with all the familiar archetypes : Leader Guy, Jerk Guy, Fat Guy, Hot Chick and Little Kid. I was really young when the show was on, but loved every minute of it. The best part was the fact they they dressed as bird people with... you guessed it Helmets!!!

I loved loved helmets as a kid. They were the ultimate accessory for any character to go from being okay to truly awesome. I'm fairly certain my love of helmets stems from G-Force. I wanted so bad to have a bird shaped visor. The closest I came was a C.H.I.P.S. motorcycle helmet.

The other problem with BotP was they didn't have any toys when I was young. My stand ins were a couple of Tonka Play People who were motorcycle guys. The other issue is that their helmets didn't come off. This was true of most toys at the time. It wasn't until GI Joe came along that toys finally got removable helmets.

So your probably asking yourself about now, if they didn't have toys for them when you were a kid, what is this weeks challenge going to be? Or you might just be saying to yourself, "Get to the point man!"

As I said the show was on when I was really young and as I grew up few people I encountered in Grade School or High School had ever heard of the show. Then the 90's came along and I went to art school and met tons of my fellow nerds. One such friend told me to look up Gatchaman on the new fangled world wide webs. Boom, all the memories came flooding back, plus I learned a great deal more about the show and it's popularity in it's home, Japan.

Then a mutual friend of both myself and Kir mentioned he was going to Japan for vacation and would we like him to pick anything up. Hells yeah! I told him anything Gatchaman that he could find. I had no idea what was available, but he certainly came through.

With Bird Boomerang

So Heroic

After years of pinning I finally had a Ken action figure. The little child in me beamed in happiness. Sadly the figures helmet doesn't come off, which I learned the hard way. He has a weird square shaped half head underneath. Other toy companies later came out with Battle of the Planets figures in the early 2000s, but the thrill of the hunt was over for me so I never purchased any of them.

So for this weeks challenge I'll expand it to include any of the characters because I know Kir's got a real soft spot for Keyop and 7 Zark 7.

Get Your Freak On

Boss Moss and most of the Freakies

Now for something a little different. So far we focused on very standard action figure type toys. This time around we will be going with some cereal premiums and more specifically the Freakies. These strange assortment of monsters were the spokes people/mascots of Freakies cereal.

The cereal was only on shelves from '72 to '76, so I probably never got to taste the stuff being only one when the disappeared from the grocery stores. On the other hand my mother tended to be a sales shopper and buy things in bulk. There's probably a good chance we still had boxes of the stuff long after it was pulled. I can just see her grabbing up a ton on clearance.

Even though I don't remember the product they were shilling, I do remember the characters and the toys. The above pictured pieces of plastic are all from my childhood and not something I tracked down on eBay as part of the collector rebirth the Freakies seem to be having. There were also magnets a few of which still hang on my folks refrigerator. I also clearly remember singing a song about Boss Moss. It was the sort of kid song that consisted of the lyrics "Boss-a-Moss -EH!" repeated ad nauseum.

Your probably also asking yourself where these guys fit into my playtime. Easy, they were aliens hanging round in the Mos Eisley Cantina.  Often times they were pets of the Star Wars folk. Boss Moss and Cowmumble were also know to hang with Yoda. And finally when the Ghostbusters Movie came along they were a natural fit for various spooks and specters.

Aside from Boss Moss the only other name I remembered until I looked them up was Snorkledorf, who is the blue fellow with the snout. It's hard to forget a name like that. As I said the rest I had to look up and found all you could ever want to know about the characters and their story here: http://www.freakies.com/

Boss Moss

Goody Goody

Snorkledorf

Cowmumble

Grumble

Sadly there are two other characters which I don't have. I know they were around during my childhood, but they have long since vanished into the ether of memory.

Check Out This Mother....Box

Mister Miracle Concept Drawing From the Jack Kirby Museum

When I was child I loved super heroes. Okay, I'm not fooling anyone, I still love them. The problem was that there weren't many action figures depicting them. Then in 1984 Kenner released it's Super Powers line. To this day the Super Powers figures are some of the best representations ever molded into plastic. They had good likenesses and excellent playability.


I had quite a few growing up but one day I realized that none of the characters I owned had capes. It just seemed wrong to me. A super hero should have a cape. When my birthday rolled around with dollars in hand I went to the store on a quest for a caped hero. Lo and behold the only one they had was Mister Miracle.

Mister who? I had never heard of this guy, but he had a cape and that was important to me at the time. Little did I realize that I had stumbled on something beyond awesome. The figure also came with neato keen hand shackles and from the card backing I learned he was an escape artist with a somewhat punny alter ego of Scott Free.

If Apokolips can't hold Mister Miracle what chance to handcuffs have?

It wasn't until years later when at art school, I became obsessed with all things Jack Kirby. During that period I learned about the Fourth World stories and Mister Miracle's place in them. (As a child I thought Darkseid was just some stone guy with an unhealthy obsession for Wonder Woman.  Something many of us can probably relate to. ) I won't go into the details of the New Gods as there are plenty of places on the internet which do a better job than me. Needless to say I find them to be some of the most inventive stories of the time. Seriously Orion is Darkseid's son? What a revelation to have a hero be the son of the villain. I wonder if anyone else has used that as a plot device?

So there you have it. You never know when those childhood impulses lead to amazing discoveries. It also turns out that the figure is rather rare with all his accessories and can fetch top dollar on eBay. Not that I would ever sell him.

His Name Was Zuckuss

For our first challenge, it seemed fitting to go back to that great childhood inspiration, Star Wars. Most of my early playing years were spent with the Kenner Action Figure line and I thought I pick out one of my personal favorites, Zuckuss.

By Zuckuss, I mean the droid fellow from the Kenner line. These days they have renamed him 4-LOM following the standard droid naming schemes. I originally knew him as Zuckuss and he will be so forever in my mind. If we are going to follow every little update/change in the Star Wars universe, we'd have to go along with the force being caused by some microscopic parasite.

Zuckuss may seem to be a strange choice considering he's in the lower half on the coolness scale for bounty hunters. (Official order: Boba Fett, IG-88, Bossk, Zuckuss, 4-LOM, everybody else, Dengar) The reason being goes back to my 7th birthday. I was having kind of a bummer of a day. Birthday's weren't really a big deal in my family. We never had those big pig parties with tons of neighborhood kids and a clown. The average event consisted of the birthday child getting to pick what they wanted for dinner and what kind of cake they would like for dessert. I had numerous siblings who were all much older and living elsewhere, so those gathered consisted of my folks, one sister and me.

So the day of I was sitting in the living room drawing and feeling kind of blue, when my eldest brother pops in for a visit. This brother also happened to be my godfather and much to my excitement he happened to bring me presents. He casually handed me a shopping bag (K-mart if memory serves) and inside was Zuckuss and a Mini-Rig. An action figure and a vehicle?!?! Well this totally turned the day around.

Back in the day we didn't have a lot of information on the characters. The Expanded Universe for better or worse didn't exist yet. All I knew about him was that he was a bounty hunger, had a body like C3PO and came with a big gun. The biggest gun to date in the toy line. If droids were cool an evil droid with a big gun was the coolest. He was immediately put in charge of my stormtroopers and set about causing mayhem for Luke and Han.

Of course I didn't just play Star Wars with my figures and his design let well for cross play. I would do pretend fantasy stuff where Zuckuss would be the Black Knight or superhero adventures where he was a stand in for Brainiac or other evil robots. All this cemented his place as one my favorite toys. During my older collector years I've picked a few more versions of the character, but the original Kenner figure will always be my favorite.

So there we have it. The first challenge posted, soon to be followed hopefully some art. I know this will be a difficult character for me at least because I am better with organic type characters, but as I mentioned the point is to become a better artist.