The Origin of D&D's Greatest Monsters
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Ever wondered about the more abstract or obscure monster designs? Turns out most of them came from cheap plastic! This video was incredibly fun to make. The owlbear being a kappa took me for a loop, I love that history works like that.
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Here's a Greamer: www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/4378385-greamer
Yay
As an avid homebrewer myself, it was really fun watching someone go about it with a completely different thought process. The way I go about it is "Okay, so I've got this mad scientist fleshcrafter demon lord who was inspired by artificers from Ebberson to take up robotics and turn himself into a cyborg... he'd probably be very interested in the process of building Warforged.
So he's stolen the info needed to build a warforged creation forge, but there's no lore on how a thinking soul is infused into the warforged body. He already owns a section of the afterlife though, he could probably just stuff them with would-be demon souls, which I guess would make them demons and robots at the same time.
So he's bolstered his forces with robo demons... the other demon lords will probably think that's cool as Baator and want some of their own. He could probably make quite a profit selling these things to other demon lords as mercenaries or slaves or whatever.
His customers probably won't pay money for robo demons that do things their regular forces can already do, so he'd probably have to design them to fill combat roles that don't exist within the typical demon lineup... I don't see a long-range demon here, I design a scoripon robot with a naval cannon on it's tail. I don't see a wizard demon, I'll design a wizard robot that can fly and cast magic missile at-will. The demons don't seem to have an answer to the devils' Hellfire engine, I'll design my own. I'll make it a minotaur-centaur-warforged-thing that's a steamroller from the waist down"
(btw if anyone wants the stats for any of the monsters I've described here, here's my google doc: docs.google.com/document/d/1YitD0F1LYGr1iE46CxyUABE-3D0fjQElaMcsGJ1O4Vk/edit?pli=1 )
for some reason this reminded me of something from Mordenkainens Fiendish Folio, which i'd love to see a take on, since it has some of the most interesting creatures I've ever seen in it
Yeah, about the Ultraman thing. th-cam.com/video/tCZmyy8UMUo/w-d-xo.htmlsi=oNxJeBKNvPkMG4oF
I've never needed anything more in my life than this greamer stat block. Thank you.
Ran a little long? I could watch an hour long video of you taking janky ass toys and turning them into D&D monsters, I loved this video.
Genuinely a fantastic exercise in game design and worldbuilding
Why did
You stop posting
This
@@changingpeopleslivesmoon2993 who?
@@dragontrainerzero you
I assumed the size of the toys compared to minis would be the size of the monsters. Following this logic I was horrified seeing the rubber chicken. 70 foot tall screeching horror who could eat your barbarian.
It's amazing that the mental image of a giant one was so horrific, but as soon as he said 1 ft tall, it became cute.
@@bskec2177 went straight back to horror for me when he said the pack size was 15-30
@@samuelcacnio9548 I went straight to wondering if they were edible.
@@bskec2177 I've played a character that actively found out whether dungeon monsters were edible, had to make a lot of Con saves but the dice seemed to like me for that campaign.
@@giladpellaeon1691 I once played a dwarf that would mumble things like "hmmm kobolds. Serve with beer, tastes like chicken...."
That "lavaback lizard" is 100% dimetrodon.
An extinct stem mammal.
And the monster is scientifically accurate, in a way
to translate from nerdspeak, "steam mammal" basically means it's a proto-mammal, the same way dinosaurs like T Rex are proto-birds. It's honestly quite shocking Runesmith's never seen one before, this thing is one of the most famous extinct animals of all time.
i thought dimetradon was a theraspid, or theyre the same thing and im slowly losing my dino knowledge
Dimetrodons were not mammals, though they were closer related to Mammals than they were to Dinosaurs.
@@benthomason3307 I'm sorry but T. Rex were not proto-Birds, proto-Birds where certain Dinosaurs that looked incredibly similar to Birds and were closely related to them but were not Birds, T. Rexes as well as not looking much like Birds, were also only distant relatives of them, by the time the first T. Rex was born the branch of the evolutionary tree that that would produce them had split from the one that would produce Birds tens of millions of years ago (If I remember correctly over 100 million years ago but it could be much more, or as little as 60.) To be clear it is not your fault for not knowing this, the amount of knowledge you showed in that comment puts you well above the level of most people.
The Greamers are the best part of the video
I need a stat block for them yesterday lmao
Genius. I've already stolen them for my next session.
Okay I love this idea where you go buy cheap toy and make a creature out of it, that should totally be a D&D challenge maybe it should work with cheap action figures too like weapons or something
Do I smell a new creature book? Wait, that could possibly be the Stinkspark.... *looks around nervously and grabs fire extinguisher*
th-cam.com/video/HdRrvn6G4Bs/w-d-xo.htmlsi=boFgKtlKgWWN_Sxv
This guy made a video kind of similar to your idea
The chickens got me thinking big things.
Chicken Rider?
The Owlbear proto "mini" absolutely looks like a Japanese Kappa, so knockoff Ultraman figures sounds plausible. And the spiny reptile is a dimetrodon, one of us mammals' ancestors!
Yeah, about that... th-cam.com/video/tCZmyy8UMUo/w-d-xo.htmlsi=oNxJeBKNvPkMG4oF
And fun fact dimetrodon isnt a reptile
@@countclackula7390 it's a synapsid a precursors to both reptiles and mammals
In the late nineties, I bought my daughter a bag of plastic dinosaurs from a 98 cents store, and it included a rust monster.
I had one of those growing up!
Now I need to find a video essay on the history of cheap plastic dinosaurs. I had a drawer full of em in the early 2000s and never considered that previous generations were buying similar but slightly different dinos
One of my favorite similar stories is that when Bioware were making Knights of the Old Republic, they were coming off of making Neverwinter Nights, and working in the same engine, so they had a bunch of d&d monster models just *available* but this was a Star Wars game, so they sort of weren't supposed to use them. They clearly ignored that, and when they wanted to make an evil sith Rancor monster called a Tarentatek, apparently they based the model on the Umber Hulk, which is really funny to me, because in-lore, those things are supposed to be *utterly horrifying* and the script works pretty hard to sell that, but then you lean that their model is based on a silly, dinky old monster that was originally a dime plastic toy Gary Gygax bought on a lark.
As fun as that sounds I can’t unsee that now, it’s just an umber hulk with a different face.
At a dollar-ish store, I found a "tube of insects" and it included two giant centipedes that were only a paint touch-up away from carrion crawlers.
The butterflies in the tube were given to a friend's kid.
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If you are not a slave to perfect scale, you can get a lot of 'set dressing' animals at a dollar-ish store for very cheap compared to buying gaming minis.
Our table now has something like 30 horses, two oxen, three sheep, dogs/wolves and a giraffe we'll likely never use, for less than $8 and a few hours of repainting.
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Oh, priming them is CRUCIAL! I used rattle-can primer, spraying outdoors.
I have one of the bulette toys from the hand-me-down dinosaurs I got as a kid. It's great to see one of my favorite d&d creators talking about this part of d&d's history.
I had one when I was younger. Now I wish I’d kept it!
Same! The bulette, the owlbear and the grey-ish standing dino with abs and ear-frills!
Still have my bulette also, not sure why but I held onto it as a childhood momento.
The bulette Chinasaur is one of the most common and still being produced in HK. You'll see in included in cheap playsets there even today.
Getting inspiration from your personal life is always fun. For example, I have a pet black rat snake and I collect its shed skin. And because the shed skin is partly transparent like a ghost, I have the idea of having spirits in my setting look like gentle, floating, halfway transparent snakes.
That's amazing. I'll be sure to add that to my Luigi's Mansion campaign.
@@thelakeguardian8188 go right ahead. I don’t own the copyright to shed snake skin.
@@dank_smirk2ndchannel200 As a fellow snake enthusiast, I thank you.
@@thelakeguardian8188 Not a problem.
I have one of my corn snakes shed sitting on top of her enclosure right now and this is a good idea :0
I honestly love what you came up with the Greamers. I wanna try to fit them into my game now
Especially the dump truck part
Lol the Bonbonne is an ankylosaurus. A very janky one, in keeping with the other dinosaurs, but it IS a real dino. Still very fun to learn that some of D&D's most classic monsters got their start as super cheap, janky plastic amalgams passing as toys, thank you for teaching me this important fact about the game's history.
They're not actually Dinosaurs. Its labelled that to avoid copyright infringement. They're all offbrand bootleg kaijus.
I HAD THAT PLASTIC RUST MONSTER as a kid, I loved that little thing.
I don't know where or how I learned that it was a rust monster as a 6 year old in a rural canadian town, but at some point I did.
I wonder if I still have it, I feel like I would have kept it in a box somewhere, now I have to go dig through some closets.
"it ran a little long" not even 10 minutes. The history lesson at the beginning was really interesting.
The Geyserspine/Lavastack Lizard thing is someone's attempt to make a dimetrodon toy.
They're more closely related to mammals modern lizards, but they did run like an iguana. They predate dinosaurs and the largest were apex predators as big and heavy as a rhino with a skull as large as a human's torso lined with large serrated teeth. They just also happened to look really funny running with their entire body undulating side-to-side like a big lizard.
The spine was probably used to help regulate their body temperature and also maybe attracting mates.
Came to the comments looking to see if anyone was talking about dimetrodon--not disappointed
* The dimetradon/edaphosaurus (the one with the sail) is actually a synapsid and not a dinosaur at all, and more related to you and me than actual dinosaurs.
Probably Dimetrodon, I don’t see edaphosaurids being made into toys anymore than caseids or captorhinids.
Came here to say this
Runesmith: Sees a figure of one of the most dangerous herbivorous Dinosaurs ever.
Runesmith: Hmm.... Pathetic. Yes.
OMG I’m a big Ultraman fan boy and after seeing some of my favorite pastime in a D&D video made me squeal with joy. Fun fact; I actually met the original suit actor for GOJIRA at G-fest.
I actually used to have the exact kinds of toys they used to inspire DnD. That's so rad especially considering I was born several decades after they made it.
The assimilator is such a fun concept. Eats things, then goes and regurgitates soldier bois to kill things to feed their Father Factory.
Picking random stuff and using it to create new things for games is a lot of fun. I love filing 'filing the numbers off' and having something that the players are familiar with come as a complete surprise.
I always assumed the Purple Worm was a Dune ripoff.
Could've been both, like they saw something that reminded them of the sandworms
Always love hearing people talk about this, wonderful bit of history.
I am going to do a video talking about the Toho monster that was the inspiration for the Owlbear toy! It's so great that all these monsters had humble origins.
As a spanish speaker, I never thought Laputa would be pronounced different than how I pronounce. I'm sorry but the spanish pronunciation is unbeatable here
"It's LaPuta!"
"Damn bro, I know it's a monster but chill."
Gary and crew also used various Marx Fort Apache Indian figures (with some trimming of parts) as trolls. They were 54mm and were the correct proportion against the 40mm Elastolin medieval figures they used for human sized troops. 1/72 Airfix Robin Hood figures became Hobbits. A 70mm Elastolin miniature was used as a giant.
star assimilator sounds pretty dope. I got a bit of inspiration from your army of dead video & pokemon where monsters that don't need to breath can be stored in extra dimensional boxes that look like old school cigarette cases.
Now I have the urge to get these toys but kitbashing and convert them up to make new monsters.
The greamer is by far the coolest idea for a monster I’ve head in a long time. I love it!
This is my favorite video by you yet! The segment at the end of designing monsters based off of the toys you found is so fun. I’d watch hours of just that!
Hey, So, this was like one of your best videos ever. I would love for this to be a regular thing on the channel. Cheers man and thank you for making videos that always put a smile on my face and make me feel a little better.
I know some people call it a bullet but in one of the EARLY Monster Manuals it has a pronunciation guide in its description and they literally say to pronounce it boo-lay!
I've always pronounced it "boo LET leh" I'm going to have to look at my old Monster Manual. ( I just love those illustrations in that book!).
That Wandering Village clip made me so happy to see.
The greamer is super cute and so is the weird dopey pseudochicken lol
There is a YT channel called Blandco which revolves around dollar store items and restoring them for DnD etc. so for anyone on a budget that might be for them.
Back in the 80s, I actually had a few of these, including the carrion crawler. No idea where it came from, but it was maybe 6 inches long, rubber with a wire running through it so it could kinda be posed. I can't say for sure if it was the toy that inspired the monster, or if the thing I had was made by TSR licensing their monsters.
TSR did license LJN to make a line of bendables which included a carrion crawler.
That was bizarre as all hell - we had that set of dinos when I was a kid! Never made the connection to the bulette before, but this was cooler than I'd ever thought.
Thanks!
One thing to remember when appropriating dollar store toys for your games is that you aren't obligated to use them as-is. You can chop off pieces of one toy and glue them to another. Maybe soak some toilet paper in watered down PVA glue (also found at the dollar store) for use as little robes. So you turn it into some kind of monster wizard or druid.
I actually had the Rust Monster one as a kid and never knew what the hell it was supposed to be, and then like 15 years later when I first got my 3.5 Monster Manual I found the Rust Monster page and it unlocked my memory of that weird bug toy I had and I wondered if I had somehow been given an original 1e Rust Mini.
Greamers are now my spirit animal. I'm kinda sad that you'll never talk about these monsters ever again.
Would have loved some stat blocks for them, as well
I actually brought the "rust monster" home from my grandparent's house a few months ago specifically because I saw it and thought it looked like a rust monster. Crazy stuff.
I absolutely do this, except I use random Wikipedia articles. My favorite creation is the Great Depression, an obese Fey Lord that feeds on melancholy and runs a goth nightclub.
Terry Kuntz was a friend of the Gygax family since teenhood. He and his brother, Robert, became regular members of Gary and Dave's play group along with Gary's son, Ernie.
I once bought a pack of cheap dinosaurs from a dollar store. I needed them cause I was making a cookie recipie that said to use toy dinos to make footprints. My DnD group uses them as placeholders for various animals, like giant eagles and panthers.
Oh i kinda want to run into the €2 shop and pick up what ever Shrek abominations they have in the toy section now
In the first session of a D&D campaign I was running for work friends, I had a bunch of rust monsters attacking the party and because I had a token of the same enemy logos except this one had a crown unlike the others that were just horned skulls, I decided to make one rust monster the “King Rust monster” and described it as golden with three pronged horned on its head forming a crown and I gave it the ability to cast lightening bolt from the crown, and gave it a health increase. I made the choice on the fly but figured if I couldn’t back and prep more I’d have given it the ability to regain health when it eats metal. Would love more ideas though.
The toy with the red sail boat on its back is not actually a dinosaur it’s s a dimetrodon, which is a non-mammalian synapsids
This was awesome and I hope you do more videos making monsters with this gimmick.
I really like the idea of the Star Assimilator being some sort of like, sentient construct (like a Nautiloid in that they're aberrations that have to be... built? Grown? Idk)
It could basically be the crux of an entire aberrant invasion. And rather than necessarily having to feed on various creatures and metabolize them the way we do, their "feeding" might actually be consuming the non-aberrant nature of their prey, then spitting them back out as aberrations.
That brings into question whether or not flumphs are canonically Star Assimilator shit, but you know... that's D&D for you
I am always down for more monster lore and ideas presented in an infotaining way.
I like to think a Thagomizer is an upgrade to any TTRPG Creature.
My first bbeg that has transcended past one shot's and is now in at least 3 different campaigns started as a failed 3d printed mindflayer. The guy who made it stuck a chaos helmet on it. With the 3d stuff still clinging to it I told him to leave it as is and paint over it with black and purple. The Archon of Tharizdun was born and this guy has surpassed all of my hopes.
Liked the turtle dragon video too
Oh man I used to have a crapton of those as a kid. Like entire boxes full of them. I may still have a few, but most are lost. And yes, I too use to make up stories about what they were
Love this! Definitely had the rust monster and bulette toys as a kid
I like that you picked the one with a big pink hole in the middle and called it an "ass-emulator". It's exactly that kind of creativity that I'm looking for on youtube
I don't know if you'll get to it in this videoi (I paused to type this) but there are a LOT of our modern "famous monsters" taken from fan submitted creations in ye olde White Dwarf articles from Games Workshop, that were later "borrowed" for that first AD&D Fiend Folio with the gith on the cover.
Edit: check out the Snipe and Wib video called "That One Time White Dwarf Published D&D Monsters - Codex Compliant" for more info.
Well, The Greamers. Who knew I needed these in our game?
I had one of those rust monster toys as a kid and remember being mindblown while reading the monster manual that it was in there. Thought I had some licensed D&D toy
I’ve always wanted a rust monster as a pet, but I know no party would let me have one unless it was only Druids and monks. Even the serious version in 5e and 3.5 still looks durpy and cuddleable
Geyser Spine is my favourite of these new creatures. it reminds me of Dodogama, just chilling in lakes until adventurers try to evict it for killing the lake fauna.
On a related note, I love / hate that the paladin (in both name and class attributes) comes from a mid-20th century French isekai novel about someone getting teleported from WW2 Germany to a fantasy world.
Also one of the first high fantasy novels as the "magic" in the universe is just nuclear physics, which the protagonist then brings back to the real world and flees to the US to help start up the Manhattan Project.
Medieval France did have paladin knights, but that title just meant they worked for the monarch and didn't really do anything different from regular knights.
So they're closer to DnD's Fighter or Ranger than DnD's Paladin.
The Star Assimilator is a really cool idea!
I have to share this video with my group, and see what things we can come up with!
Woah, hey, this is awesome! Thank you for this. I loves this
I had that bag of dinosaurs when I was a kid. Later on after discovering DND I always wondered why a few of them looked like DnD monsters.
I got a bunch of my dad's toys from when he was a child because my grandmother kept them and I literally had that exact orange and red feather covered pterodactyl thing. There was a bullette as well, but it was a different color. I think I had what became the purple worm too, it was a yellow sort of cone thing made of four slightly smaller in sequence empty spheres with a few tooth looking flaps around an opening at the big end. Like one of those dog toys, except about the size a kid's thumb (don't remember the specific size, do remember 'wearing' it as a fake claw but not fitting all the way, like I had an extra knuckle or something). Despite the shape it was really soft and flexible plastic. No idea where they are now, moved three times since back then.
Can't say anything about the rest. Never saw one that looked anything like them.
Edit: Phone typing errors needed correction.
Oh wow, I absolutely had those plastic toys!
I actually had one of those Prehistoric Animals pack of monsters growing up, bought in Arizona where my dad's from. There were some Bullete looking thing and rust monster looking thingie
That "iguana spinosaurus thing" is a dimetrodon and is more closely related to us than it is to dinosaurs. It's from a group of what's been called "mammal-like reptiles" and was an early synapsid (dinosaurs and other archosaurs are diapsids). So it might not be our direct ancestor (but maybe it is, who knows?) but it's closely related to the ancestors of early mammals
4:29 As a kid, I owned a white and green version of that pteranodon/phoenix thing in the back. I used to pretend it was a Pokémon. Don't know where my parents got it.
Gonna throw the Greamers at my party this Sunday cause they are a level 2 party of three that are about to investigate an abandon tavern.
I could watch this kind of video all day!
Funnily enough. The "Thembler" is what I call my NB friend.
this is a really cool backstory and method for making creatures tbh
For the Ultraman Connections some safe bets would be The Umber Hulk might be based on Antlar. Carrion Crawler looks like it COULD be based on Twintail with a bit of artistic license. Bulette is almost assuredly Telesdon made using a weird mold that squashes him down to the dimensions of one of the "baragon" kaiju.
I would love more of these. A series of monster creations from obscure objects
Those monsters you came up with sound fantastic, they'd fit right in to Dungeon Crawl Classics!
Well that was pretty intreasting.
5:42 One of those is actually a synapsid or proto-mammal, which were around long before the dinosaurs even existed.
I used to have the original bulette toy. Came with a set of other dinosaurs and dragons back in the day. I wish I could find them again.
Big Ultraman (or really just daikaiju in general) nerd here. I think I can identify a good chunk of those, starting off with the first one named in this video: the bulette. It’s Telesdon. The back spike is an easy giveaway.
As for the owlbear, I can definitely see the kappa resemblance but as far as I’m aware, yokai and Japanese mythology in general didn’t become popular over here until at least the 90s. In all likelihood, that figure is probably of Gokinezura from Return of Ultraman. Sure, the owlbear doesn’t have as long a neck (if at all) as Gokinezura but I reckon they just made it a stump to save plastic.
The umber hulk is maybe a bit more of a stretch given we don’t actually have any pictures of the figure it was based on but just looking at the 1e artwork, it’s most definitely a grossly-simplified version of Antlar. The exaggerated mandibles, flat overall head structure, hunched posture. It all matches up.
And finally, the rust monster. This one is definitely the most complicated. For starters, while I don’t subscribe the Kemular comparison, I don’t find it TOO hard to see where it comes from. Sure, head-on, it’s easy to say it isn’t but the similarities become a lot clearer if you look at the rear view. The antennae could be a flanderized version of Kemular’s tail fork and its curved back plates could be re-interpreted into the rust monster’s rounded body. However, my verdict is honestly that it isn’t from Ultraman at all but rather one of the “dinosaurs” that toy packet would’ve also contained. Maybe, some sort of shrimp… thing? Sea scorpion? Yeah, I’m not sure on this one.
Hope that helps!
I know it's hard I love your voice and we need a longer video thank you very much rune
TINY GORDON RAMSEY! :D
I love the Darkmakers from Jak 3. Great antagonists and even cooler designs.
Metalheads and Lurkers as well.
If you wanted a comparable haul, I'd recommend a dollar general, or equatable store
5:57 ive never seen something as beautiful as that in my entire life
Okay, but on the lavastack lizard... why DON'T we have more stem mammal monsters??
Only one I can think of in recent memory would be Odogaron from Monster Hunter World, which vaguely resembles a large Gorgonopsid (i.e. Inostrancevia).
Everyone just refers to it as a dog, though, which is fair, it's pretty much in the name. But yeah, more of those!!!
Probably because most folks who aren't into archeology don't know what a stem animal is like me
Dinocephalians are an untapped goldmine of monster designs. I want to fight a dire Jonkeria in my D&D game.
I have a couple OG monsters cast in lead from the old days. One of them looks exactly like that rust monster!
I think that's a pretty medium sized creamer
Ok, totally stealing the Greamer. I think you nailed the unsettling-ness of those uncomfortable rubber chicken toys and using them as almost like paychic shocker lizards feels correct.
It's fantastic where you can find inspiration. I came up with a spell for an encounter based on a dumb video I saw online.
FISH STORM
Same! Except mine awaited the heroes on the beach of an island they were sailing to - Sand Guardian, Guardian Of The Sand. Poseidon trembled before him!
Rune-ey has never heard of the Dimetrodon. That oddly makes me like him more.
The Jak 3 reference is giving me /LIFE/
I dunno why, but this was great. I love the basically series. Are you going to do a basically Harengon? It needs humiliation as well as explanation. An maybe explain trolls and bugbears, since, for some weird reason they confuse players I meet, like constantly? No one knows their lore. I don't get it.
From what I understand the Umber Hulk was made by the brits in White Dwarf's Fiend Factory column back when Games Workshop (the warhammer guys) primarily made content for DnD. They endedup continuing to make the thing as a monster for Warhammer, and they still have an Umberhulk mini for their Necromunda game
I love your type of humor 😊
The Star Assimilator is similar in concept to the titular creature Zeiram from a series of movies and an anime ova. It's a hat shaped alien with a smug face that consumes and assimilates basically everything it encounters. It's "body" below the hat is basically just an amalgamation of meat and guns it's sucked up as it goes about it's interstellar rampaging. But it can also vomit out monstrous clones of whatever it's eaten prior. In the ova series it uses that to turn a major metropolitan city into a monster filled warzone in just a couple days.