Player's Handbook Statue
A trip to adventure down memory lane.
The Project
In 7th grade a friend of mine introduced me to Dungeons and Dragons. For a kid like me, who was a bit awkward and nerdy at school, it was an opportunity to explore fantastic, far away magical places full of adventure, danger and treasure.
Like so many other kids my age, I quickly found other people at school to play with, and started designing dungeons of my own. We adventured together almost every weekend - me behind my DM screen, flanked by candles, and my friends peering at me as we wove tales of adventure and daring together. We discovered flooded passageways deep underground, ancient ruins, rode dragons, and fought monsters in remote parts of long forgotten dungeons. It was glorious.
Being a DM taught me to design, draw, write and plan. It taught me to lead my friends in shared experiences. It let me hold on to my imagination and provided me with an outlet at a time of my life that was confusing and difficult.
For many of us who played, we can easily recall the elements of the game that ignited our imaginations... I can recall looking at the 1st Edition Player's Handbook and trying to piece together a story of the adventure that led the thieves to plunder the statue with the jewel eyes.
Where were they? Were they deep underground? Were they in a forbidden temple? What kinds of monsters had they slayed? What was the story of the statue? Would it come alive as the pried the gems from it's eyes?
More than any book of that time, the Player's Handbook holds a ton of nostalgia for me. It takes me back to my childhood moments decades ago, and every time I look at it I feel those same questions surface again. I wanted to bring a bit of this nostalgia back to Dungeon Alchemist so others like me could surprise and delight other GenX adventurers too.
Player's Handbook
The player's handbook (1st edition) was released in 1978 and featured a painting depicting adventurers looting a giant statue after a battle with Lizard-like creatures.
The now iconic cover featured, a massive demon-like figure with large ruby eyes and a pair of thieves attempting to pry them loose from their sockets.
The artwork was created by David Trampier (1954-2014) who illustrated much of the D&D manuals in the 1st Edition.
The Model
I'll do a separate post on the battle system we pulled from warhammer and where it worked / didn't work for D&D - but for now, here's are some quick learnings from building the flumph minis. First of all, this was a really fun project. It allowed me to explore sculpting for the first time, and how to use basic shapes like a sphere and cylinders as the foundation for the flumph, and then manipulate them via splines into the shapes I wanted. It also gave me some experience with the sculpting tools, remeshing, and using brushes to add additional detail and realism to the model.
There were four flumphs in total that got modeled:
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Regular flumph - just a regular, basic flumph happily floating away.
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Attack flumph - An aggressive flumph all coiled up and angry wielding a sword.
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Battle flumph - A flying flumph with a mace, two swords and some scars.
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Sneaky flumph - who kind of looks like he's trying to deny the fact that he stole your pouch.
Printing
Of course the fun thing about these models is that they're printable. :) I wanted to use them in a warhammer-style combat, so I designed bases and supports for them as well.
Once printed, I painted them up, and voila - a flumph army!
Conclusion
I just saved the STL files with supports and Zipped them - but the file is about 1TB in size, which is a bit silly for printed models. I need to go back at some point and simplify the STLs so they're downloadable and sharable. Until then - enjoy the pics above! :)