#David A. Trampier

[sandmandaddy69]

David A. Trampier

[chronivore]

David A Trampier

[thecreaturecodex]

If I Ran the Zoo: Monster Manual Minis, pt. 1

As you may be aware, WizKids is releasing a set of miniatures called Dungeons & Dragons Classic Collection: Monsters A-C, that contains eight minis based on creature designs from the original AD&D Monster Manual. A-C is an odd place to divide, and that suggests that they’re planning a lot more of these, assuming that the first set sells well enough (and at $100 a box, it’s clearly a bit of a gamble). So, because I have Thoughts about what monsters they should make (and love talking about old monster art in general), I have compiled some ideas for what WizKids should include in future sets.

Monsters D-F

Sort of cheating with the title, because F is a very empty letter in the original AD&D Monster Manual. They could do a Frog, Giant. Or a Fungus, Violet. But that’s about it.

Demogorgon, Prince of Demons

Type III Demon (Glabrezu)

Bone Devil

Devil, Geryon I am limiting myself with demons and devils here; you could theoretically do a set with just these. Demogorgon is an obvious shoo-in; with Stranger Things, Demogorgon is more high profile than ever. Geryon I picked because he actually has stats in D&D 5e, unlike the other MMI arch-devils, and his design has changed a little, but remains basically the same. The Type III Demon and Bone Devil are the most striking of the non-unique demon and devil images, respectively.

Displacer Beast Another shoo-in. The presence of the beholder and carrion crawler in the A-C set suggest to me that they’re going to make a mini for each “product identity” monster from the MMI.

Doppelganger A bit of a weird pull, but look at his stride! Look at his panache! Look at his oddly shaped skull!

Dragon, Red The name of the game is Dungeons & Dragons, so they gotta include one. The Red Dragon is the most iconic of the colored dragon designs, and has often been used as a sort of “mascot” for D&D in general. The problem is, the MMI illustration is kind of doofy. I suspect that they’re going to use the design from the MMI cover instead:

Efreet Another case where there’s a more memorable image in the same edition to pull from. The cover of the Dungeon Master’s Guide has a great efreet on it, and that’s what I think will be the basis for the miniature:

Monsters G-L

Stone Giant There has to be a giant, especially since WoTC is planning a giant-themed book to come out soon. Of the MMI giants, the stone giant has the best look.

Stone Golem Same as the stone giant; a classic category of monsters with this as the coolest looking one. Alternatively, if having so many “stone” themed monsters seems redundant, an iron golem would be my runner up choice.

Gorgon A surprisingly iconic D&D monster; gorgons show up everywhere in AD&D 1st and 2nd edition. Like the basilisk and cockatrice, they’re based on a bestiary monster (in this case, Topsell’s History of Four-Footed Beasts).

Griffon This one is really for the compare and contrast. The 5e griffon looks like a more naturalistic hybrid of lion and eagle; the AD&D griffon is straight out of heraldry. Plus it’s another classical bestiary monster.

Intellect Devourer The spookiest piece of art in the Monster Manual. Plus, WizKids would save some plastic by making a Small mini.

Ki-Rin The art is striking, and the ki-rin is the cover model of Mordenkainen’s Monsters of the Multiverse. This is another one where the compare/contrast aspect might be fun; WizKids already has a miniature of the 5e ki-rin design.

Lamia Of the “sexy lady who is also a monster” monsters in the MMI (and there’s a lot of them), this is the one I think has the best shot of being turned into a miniature. Unlike the dryad, nymph or sylph, she actually looks monstrous. Unlike the succubus and the gynosphinx, her hair in the original pose can easily cover nipples. The hind legs, with their scales and hooves, are different enough from the 5e design to make a miniature interesting

Lich Of all of the undead, this is the one that’s the most specifically D&D, the one least likely to be encountered in groups, and has some of the coolest art. Skeletons, zombies and ghouls can be found en masse from a dozen different companies. David A Trampier’s lich is distinct.

[astoriachef]

[postcardaday]

Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Module T1: The Village of Hommlet David A. Trampier, 1979

[forlath]

Wormy tribute. David A. Trampier, gone too soon...

[chronotsr]

No. 2 - G2, The Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl (July 1978)

Author(s): Gary Gygax Artist(s): Erol Otus, Dave C. Sutherland III, David A. Trampier (cover) Level range: Average of 9, preferably 5+ players Theme: Standard Swords and Sorcery Major re-releases: G1-3 Against the Giants, GDQ1-7 Queen of the Spiders, Against the Giants: The Liberation of Geoff, Dungeon #199, Tales from the Yawning Portal

On the heels of being more impressed with G1 than I expected, will G2 be similarly impressing? Time to find out!

The intro blurb is mostly a repeat of the text of G1, including admonitions that running stock is for villains. Our motivation remains: figure out why the hill giants did that, no matter how fucking dangerous it is. Interestingly, the other main objective of G1 (give 'em a bloody nose) is not relevant here, because that teleport means that the frost giants aren't a threat to the villagers themselves. In fact, the room teleportation schtick kind of means G2 is filler? Like, the big reveal that the G series leads to the D series is not really impacted by the events of G2. So, oops!

Conveniently, the magical chain teleports out outside the rift so you can once again have a secret cave HQ. I feel like you have a responsibility as a GM to have a giant counterattack to at least one of these caves.

I really like the imagery of the descent into the rift here. I mean, I don't think this illustration really does it justice, imagining the deep blue color of light barely passing through the ice and how that gives the area beneath the surface an eerie oceanic glow at all times other than noon -- that's some good vibes. Gary opts for green, which is a fair enough choice. Unfortunately, Gary is more interested in simulating the mounting climbing than vibes, which means that at least one of your party members is going to fall face first into the snow drift below. Gary "generously" caps the damage at 10d6 (avg 35 dmg) -- a level 9 fighter, to be clear, has 9d10 hp (avg 45 hp) and a level 9 magic user has 9d4 hp (avg 23), so that's not ideal. Also recall that you recover 1hp per full day of rest normally, so if you fall and survive you're probably still fucked unless your cleric has a lot of spells left. I'm also pretty sure your cave HQ is above the cliff face, so, risking the descent seems like suicide to me. You're going to lose people and even leaving to heal them back up is simply taking another chance at oblivion. Take the stairs.

If you have the audacity to slow fall down, you will be blown 75ft off course in a random direction. Very cool Gary!

Another interesting detail: monsters in classic DND have a pretty short attention span and will lose you fairly quickly if you flee around a corner. This is particularly amped up here to a breezy 4 in 6 odds of success, due to blizzards blocking chase.

Anyway, we're into the room by room, so let's do some room by room shit.

There is a kind "spiked heads of our enemies at the gates" situation, with corpses mutilated and frozen in transparent ice as a warning to not intrude. Honestly that's badass. What's not badass is if the players have the wherewithal to try and free the corpses (for loot or kindness), most routes lead to the treasure being destroyed and the roof collapsing -- probably instantly killing your squishies.

The hill giants from G1 are lolling about waiting for an audience, so points for continuity. I have to imagine they're freezing their asses off, though.

There are yetis here? Which, going on the graphic and the listed intelligence score in the MonMan, I have to conclude are sentient bipedial apes but like, NOT like the Frost Giants. Actually apparently the average yeti is smarter than the average frost giant, so I guess it's a Diogenes situation where they choose to live in a shitty cave when everyone else has a nice cave?

The 5 hill giants visiting the Jarl have 1k to 6k gold fur cloaks, which like. Imagine a 6,000 gold cloak. Not only is it got to be huge (Hill Giants are 10.5ft tall), for it to be worth 6k to a vendor that's got to be a one-piece fabric cloak off a particularly rare and good condition animal. I guess the players could use it as the world's fanciest comforter?

The official appearance of a Remoraz! These are awful creatures. They swallow you whole and then superheat their insides to cook you. Nasty side effect: its outsides become furnace-hot and destroy nonmagical items and burn people to death. Look at this horrible thing! And of course it's guarding the swankiest loot to date -- a +2 Giantslaying Sword and a 3 Wishes Ring. It's been a weird trend lately that the best loot is, not owned by the leader of the Giants? The best hoard seems to always belong to Some Guy. Naturally this awesome loot "sinks into the ice" if you use a fireball, because this adventure has an addiction to telling the wizard to fuck off. Note that the sword being lost punishes the fighter for the magic users' decision. Note also that the Remoraz going into superheat mode doesn't do the same thing? It sucks. This clause sucks. Cut it. The actual room itself is kind of neat, the implication is that the Remorhaz melted a spherical hole into the ice to make a den, which is awesome.

Another iconic Garyism: ". They have had audience with the Jarl, and after a special wassail to be held on the morrow they will depart for home with a treaty scroll." Translation: They're goin to have a drinking party tomorrow to celebrate a treaty signing.

And like, one room later, we get "leman", which means lover, and "durance vile", which means long imprisonment. The text implies that basically, she's a hot butch storm giantess being held in chains until she agrees to fuck the Jarl. Gary, simply ask a tall woman out. You don't have to be weird about it.

Rather than torches, the feast hall is lit with jarred fire beetles, which is kinda cute

There is a thick iron bar that "transports whosoever is standing on the floor to the entrance of Snurre's Hall [G3]". The iron bar is a lever, obviously, but is this a lever-operated teleporter? An elevator that goes straight down? G3 eliminates the elevator theory, since apparently you can arrive here via pegasus and there are caves one can access overhead. So it's a literal teleporter, and at least how I'm reading it makes it sound more science fiction than magic. Weird.

On the whole, G2 is a massive step down from G1. G2 lacks the factionalism of G1, punishes players for damn near anything attempted, and is broadly less imaginative than G1. It's a pity, really, because it's a far more interesting locale on paper, but the reality is that you could generate a cave like this by scribbling randomly. Meh. Next time we poke G3, and hope hope hope that it's more like G1 than G2.

[deepdreamnights]

Tessellating Beautiful Decay

Each tiles infinitely, for use in wallpapers and the like.

The images above in this post were made using an autogenerated prompt and/or have not been modified/iterated extensively. As such, they do not meet the minimum expression threshold, and are in the public domain.

Prompt: colorful splashes of color in an image, in the style of photorealistic pastiche, wlop, bio-art, majestic composition, high speed sync, poured, gutai :: an illustration of Cookie Monster, full body, pen-and-ink illustration, etching, by Russ Nicholson, DAvid A Trampier, larry elmore, 1981, HQ scan, intricate details --ar 3:4 --s 50 --v 5.2 --tile

[dndhistory]

42. Gary Gygax - Monster Manual (1977)

The first of what would become a DnD institution with every edition and also the first publication by TSR tagged as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the First Edition Monster Manual is as would be expected a list of monster that can appear during D&D games and that you can use to populate your dungeons, now handily contained in a single volume, instead of spread around several magazines, brochures and supplements as was the case in Original D&D.

This is a lot heavier on the mechanics and general description of the monsters than on lore. There was actually little lore at the time, most of the unique creatures would come from the Greyhawk or Blackmoor settings that were the home games of Gygax and Arneson, that where the Demogorgon or Orcus are coming from, for example. So there's a general description as well as attack stats and so on.

By far the best thing about this edition, however, are the 350 illustrations included, which would have a life far longer than the edition itself. By the early 90s, the SSI D&D Gold Box video games would still be basing their graphics off many of the images that started out here, and this also gives us some of the first truly great D&D art. Other than the famously funny looking Beholder here you get a lot of art signed DAT, meaning David A. Trampier, and his stuff is amazing, his line drawings with thick black outlines would make for some great tattoos if anyone's interested. DAT also had a fascinating life, eventually disappearing without a trace for years. Really worth taking a look at.

[therobotmonster]

How big of a threat do you think AI Art is to the employment of concept artists? Given how artists like RJ Palmer and Bogleech are panicked about it, you've worked in fields adjacent to that, and you've worked extensively with AI art, I'd presume you'd have some perspective on that.

AI art is going to shake up the art field, any new art tool worth its salt can and will.

I was training as a graphic designer when InDesign was finally starting to hit its stride in the late 90s, but I learned on QuarkExpress and learned old-school techniques in high school Newspaper club. I'd been dealing with dot-matrix printers and photocopier work since I was 8 at my dad's office.

So I got to see the graphic design industry in a state of panic through my professors and our various industry guests. All the EM-dashes and the declaration that the " on the keyboard is the inches mark and not the quote were protective measures for the industry so that talented amateurs wouldn't know the secret handshakes and couldn't "fake" their way into being seen as real graphic designers. And they were PISSED that Adobe InDesign was easy to use and automatically converted the measure-marks into "proper" punctuation.

Yet there's still a graphic design industry.

That said, I'd be curious if the ones that are actually freaked out have ever actually used the products. Because I"ve been in a down slump and I'm prone to stim, I have done pretty much nothing but dig into Midjourney and Stable Diffusion's brains and my experience doesn't match the observations of the terrified.

I think part of it is because people only see the results and they don't see the work. And there is work involved.

Iteration and Curation: I've posted a couple hundred pics from Midjourney so far. What do you don't see is this:

Now, in Midjourney parlance "image" also includes 4-grid previews used while developing final images.

For each panel of "Glitch"/"The Bethesda Epoch", for instance, I generated at least eight options (usually more) and evolved several of them across many generations to get what I wound up with. The Bethesda Epoch took me days to put together and garners me feedback and response roughly equal to a 3d modeled piece I'd put together in the same time frame.

Truth of the matter is, you rarely get anything perfect first try, everything needs modification or massive amounts of reiteration to pass for final work.

Promptcraft: Spend even a little time on the discords and you can tell who is playing and who is trying to make art. Play is an entirely viable application of this technology (more on that later) but while this levels the technical skill barrier for a lot of people, it does not cover for a lack of vision or ideas, and it requires its own skill.

There's a big difference between "in the style of D&D art" and "as a D&D monster, full body, pen-and-ink illustration, etching, by Russ Nicholson, David A Trampier, larry elmore, 1981, HQ scan, intricate details, inside stylized border" in terms of what you get.

Play: Most people are just having fun. It's real easy for artists to take the ability to express the ideas in our heads for granted. Most of what you're seeing is people playing with ideas they've been unable to express before. A lot of what I do with it is play, too.

Accessibility: My hands cramp when I draw these days, depression and other problems frequently knock my motivation and energy out of me, but I can use AI to put my ideas out there when the other parts of me aren't cooperating.

Limitations: The tech looks miraculous, but it can't do everything. In fact, it can't do a lot of things. The artist is still needed for the vision, for the ideas, to work the outputs into something meaningful, to supplement the outputs with human intention so a copyright can be involved, the list goes on.

Even Rembrandt used a camera obscura.;

[redacted-metallum]

Image description: two scans from the 1980 edition of the TSR Advanced Dungeons and Dragons sourcebook Deities and Demigods.  The first is of the text accompanying the entry for Hastur, a full transcript of which is under a readmore link.  The second is a close-up of the illustration and depicts a lizard like creature covered in tentacles behind a castle.  It is considerably larger than the castle and there is a bolt of lightning in the background.  The upper right corner has a stylized signature of the letters E and O, indicating that Erol Otus is the illustrator of this particular image.

End image description.

My dad owns a copy of the Deities and Demigods book from before the copyright strike, and I haven’t seen any scans of Hastur from it around tumblr so.  Here it is!  The whole thing is very influenced by August Derleth’s interpretation of the Cthulhu Mythos, and I have Opinions about that, but this is specifically where the “don’t say Hastur’s name more than four times or he’ll come Get You” thing comes from, which I think is a very neat bit of history and trivia!

One other thing I find interesting is that there is no mention of The King in Yellow (the play) in this section.  There is also no mention of the Yellow Sign, Cassilda, or Camilla, though Lake Hali and Carcosa are mentioned as part of an “alien planet”.

The book is credited to James M. Ward and Robert J. Kuntz, and edited by Lawrence Schick.

The illustrations are credited to the following: Jeff Dee, Erol Otus, Eymoth, Darlene Pekul, Paul Jaquays, Jim Roslof, David S. LaForce, David C. Sutherland III, Jeff Lanners, and D. A. Trampier.

Text transcript is as follows:

HASTUR THE UNSPEAKABLE (He Who Must Not Be Named) “Master of the Air” Greater God

ARMOR CLASS: -2 MOVE: 36″/36″ HIT POINTS: 400 NO. OF ATTACKS: 2 DAMAGE/ATTACK: 20-200/20-200 SPECIAL ATTACKS: See below SPECIAL DEFENSES: See below MAGIC RESISTANCE: 50% SIZE: L (600′ TALL) ALIGNMENT: Chaotic evil WORSHIPER’S ALIGN: Chaotic evil SYMBOL: Image of the god PLANE: Prime Material Plane (distant planet) CLERIC/DRUID: Nil FIGHTER: As 16+ HD monster MAGIC-USER/ILLUSIONIST: 23rd level in each THIEF/ASSASSIN: Nil MONK/BARD: Nil PSIONIC ABILITY: I S: 25 (+7. +14)  I: 22  W: 23  D: 21  C: 23  CH: -4

This god has a scaled, elongated body, a lizard’s head and maw, and taloned lizard claws.  It also has 200 tentacles projecting from its body that give it the ability to sense all things around it.  It is able to strike twice per round and also attack magically.

At will, it can teleport anywhere in the Prime Material Plane.  Hastur regenerates 5 hit points per melee round, and can summon 2-20 Byakhee to aid it in battle.  It cannot be magically controlled.  Creatures that are able to fly naturally will never attack Hastur, even if controlled.  Any being trying to attack the god must make a saving throw against fear.

Hastur is half-brother to Cthulhu, and like him Hastur has been imprisoned by the star-shaped Elder Sign.  He lies in a crypt at the bottom of Lake Hali near the alien city of Carcosa.  Hastur exists partly on the Prime Material Plane (and this part is imprisoned in the crypt) and partly on the Elemental Plane of Air (thus he is immune to cold and the vacuum of space).  Hastur is never more than partially on the Prime Material Plane and is therefore not completely solid.  This accounts for much of his great size.

Any time the name “Hastur” is spoken, there is a 25% chance that Hastur will here and send 1-4 Byakhee to slay the speaker.  If the Byakhee are defeated, there is a 25% chance that Hastur himself will appear to destroy the blasphemer.

[wormycomic]

The End :(

So that was the last page of Wormy ever published before David Trampier's disappearance, reappearance, and eventual death in 2014. I hope everyone enjoys Wormy and remembers Tramp fondly.

[chronivore]

David A Trampier

[jdmcdonnell]

A pic I drew for my upcoming TTRPG Dragonhead.

It's a take on the classic treasure check pic by David Trampier from the AD&D players handbook

[steamedtangerine]

Ral Partha lead D&D miniature of a winged panther

1982

From David Trampier’s comic Wormy (from Dragon Magazine #69-70)

1983

[lilithsaintcrow]

"When you look at the numbers presented in the report, they add up to a game that doesn’t take lives, but saves them."