Built into the wall is a huge iron statue of a man’s torso. The man’s pot-belly starts at the floor, and the man’s head meets the ceiling at eye level. His massive hands grip tightly to the floor, which is indented and twisted to fit around his clasping fingers.

There is a large opening in the belly of the statue, with a fireplace inside of it. Preferably this statue would be used in an inhabited area, so that the players can first encounter it with a fire blazing. This isn’t necessary, however the puzzle will probably be more difficult to figure out if there’s not an active fire.

At the base of the iron statue is an engraving, apparently an epitaph for whomever the statue depicts.

May the world never forget the name of Elric Warmaker. So skilled in war that he came to be called the man of the iron skin, for no wound would scar his body. He fought with a fire in his belly, and united all the peoples of the Uklik.

The gods had given him more than a warriors gifts, for in peace he spoke with a silver tongue. He won twice as many wars with his words as he ever did with stone and steel.

Though the mouth of the statue does not appear unusual upon viewing, it in fact is on very discrete hinges. Having been undisturbed for centuries, though, these hinges are quite stuck. The only way to open the mouth would be with a crowbar, or other lever instrument. Within the mouth is a silver tongue the size of a grown man’s torso. The value is not high as a piece of art, but such a large amount of silver is worth plenty on its own!

Lifting it might be difficult though.

The best monsters are fresh monsters. Not only because familiarity breeds contempt (which is true), but also because the GM is forced to describe the monster without the crutch of shared understanding. If I tell my players they encounter orcs, then they will understand what I’m telling them, but the inherent “otherness” of orcs won’t impact them. They probably won’t even take the time to imagine what the orcs look like. But if the monster the players encounter is one they’ve never heard of before, the GM is forced to do a little more descriptive work, which ultimately makes the game better I think.

There will always be room for the classics, though. In my mind, the natural progression of monsters is to start out as terrifying creatures. As we become more used to seeing those monsters, they become a little less scary and a little more relatable. The minotaur is a good example of this, I think.

While still able to pull its weight as a monster (and they are one of my favorite classic monsters), I more often use minotaurs as exotic NPCs these days. This painting by Paul Reid gives the viewer a look at the minotaur when it’s not menacing Athenians. It looks almost normal.

I’d absolutely recommend looking at Paul Reid’s gallery, linked above. He works in a classical style which I think is significantly underrated by modern artists. And he’s done a lot of work with classical mythology, including several different takes on the piece above.

A shirt design from Woot!

This evening I attended a social gathering. My sister has just turned 14, and I had dinner with her and the rest of our family. It proceeded as family gatherings often do, which is to say that it wasn’t an experience I’d share on a gaming blog. Late in the evening, though, my sister commented that she’d like to join me in playing D&D someday.

“Want to play now?” I asked.

By happenstance, I had a set of 7 dice with me, and I always try to keep pens and paper handy regardless of where I am. I had everything I needed to run a game, and it was a perfect opportunity to try out an experiment I’ve been wanting to attempt for awhile. The experiment is simple: using whatever tools are on hand at the time, introduce a group of new players to gaming by making up a game on the spot.

The three siblings sitting nearest to me were all interested, so I wrote out the six basic stats on three pieces of paper. I told them all to roll 3d6 for their stats, in order, to roll 2d8 for their HP, and to write down one thing their character was good at. From there I figured everything could be handled by d20 checks against their stats, until I encountered a situation where they needed something deeper.

The process proved to be a little awkward. Not because any of my players had difficulty understanding my instructions, but because we only had a single six sider to share, and three people each needed to roll it 18 times. It wasn’t a quick process, and unfortunately the players weren’t even able to explore the first room of the dungeon before the rest of the dinner party agreed that it was time to leave.

I was disappointed. I could see their eyes lighting up as they just barely started to engage with the game world. My experiment was succeeding, I was creating fun out of nothing but experience-tempered improvisation. I didn’t have much to ruminate on, but I was at least encouraged that it was worth trying this again.

It wasn’t until the drive home that I realized I had wasted a lot of the game’s time. I asked the players to roll stats, and it took a good 8 minutes to get everybody’s rolling taken care of. And in the small amount we played, we never actually used those stats. It’s not hard to imagine that we could have gone 15 minutes or an hour, or even several hours without actually needing every single character to use every single one of their ability scores.

Instead, what I could have done is simply given each of them a piece of paper, and told them to write down one thing they were good at. Once that was done, I could have just started the damn game.

If in the first room there was a large rock, and one of the players wanted to lift it, then I could have told them to roll 3d6, record that as their strength, then roll a d20 against that strength score. The stats still exist, they just exist in a state of quantum flux until they are actualized by rolling a check.

Something I’ll try next time for sure.