Throwing those Erol Otus -esque figures a bone

My son really digs his Plasma Kreaps. And since we recently added those cheapo rubber/plastic Erol Otus -ish figs to our arsenal of cool crap to dork around with, he frequently creates some pretty fun scenes with them.

The other day he got all into tidying them up and packing them back into their original plasma, then stuffing that into their crate/egg, and finally stacking up the crates. I'm not sure where he gets this rare "must...clean...up" notion from, but when he does, he runs with it.

At any rate, it kinda seemed like he was done playing with them, and was on to something else, when I made a trip from the den/office to the kitchen for a beverage. He saw me coming and exclaimed,

"Daddy! Watch out for the crazy guys! They're all killin' the skeleton! Look!!!"

Now, although I did feel a slight urge to explain that the skeleton wasn't truly alive to begin with, but the time just didn't seem right to go into a whole dissertation on what it meant to be "undead." There's also that lesson on using bludgeoning weapons...then again, that depends on which edition you're playing...so I let that one slide too.

Anyway, I stopped in my tracks and stared open-jawed at the hideous sight of all four of these monstrosities muching away at our poor old boney friend.

Tonight's meal features...

Torso'd Salad:

Honey-glazed Hand:

Skulloped Potatoes:

and a slice of Coconut Cream Thigh:

So, anyone for seconds?

Erol Otus -ish plastic/rubber figures

For whatever reason when I saw these things in a local Toy/Hobby/Pools store (pools? you say?...yeah, me too...dunno but they sell outdoor pool supplies there too), the first word that popped into my head was Otus.


They aren't really that close to these incredible Erol Otus illustrations referenced in this post, but at least to me, they remind me of his organic style...one which I absolutely love. IMO, he's one of the reasons that so many young kids were able to let loose the binds of reality while playing D&D, and allow their minds to so easily conjure up such vivid imagery.

Some people (as wrong as they may be) don't care very much for Otus' art. I (displaying a much improved opinion...hehe) disagree with them. Erol Otus plain rocks! Always has - always will. Obviously I jest on the opinion labeling, as everyone is entitled to their own. Heck I dig Erol Otus and Jeff Dee. It seems a lot of folks like one but not the other. To me, they are both amazing different stylists, each with his own flavor and strengths. I just like it all, I guess.

At any rate, here are few more shots of these kooky looking beasts, doing battle with a couple of my Reaper figs, and some Erol Otus art that I think they imitate to some degree. BTW, I posed them and snapped the pics without any particular drawing/painting in mind. With a little better forethought on my part, I might have tried to mimic the actual artwork for better comparisons. Ah well, maybe next time.

Anyway, as a wise little old dude once said...
"Fear not, Ranger..."



"...Cavalier..."



It may seem kinda silly (in fact it may actually *be* kinda silly) for a grown man to buy, yet alone pose, some crazy looking, distorted, almost mutated plastic and rubber dinosaur-ish toys, not to mention the fact that I ... err... *he* would then take pictures of these scenes. However, I think they're pretty sweet, and they definitely remind me of some of Mr. Otus' amazing work. I actually hope to put these things into play someday soon, populating some old-school flavored dungeon crawl with them.

Oh, and they were less than a buck a piece...how could I say no?

And I almost forgot this one, from Target's $1 bins in the front of the store. Not necessarily Erol Otus inspired, but a nice huge spider for our hero to smite:

"Taste my holy steel, fowl arachnid!"

Dinosaurs vs Undead: The Battle on the Greatroom Floor

So, my son and I decided to bust out some other minis for some good ol' front room carpet battles. See I've had the "Fuzzy Heroes" and an expansion? to it called "The Lost Toys" sitting on my desk in the "office" (err... geekroom) for a while now, and have yet to actually sit down and play them. My son is 5 y.o. and the idea of taking his pile of stuffed animals and action figures and playing a cool game with them, rules and all, seems like it would be a blast. Add in the cool review I've seen of it on GeekDad, for example, and one of these days, we will play it....darn-it all!

But...on this past weekend (extended for the Easter holiday), he and I only got so far as gathering some dinosaurs from some clearance special ($1.12) at Target, a bag of 28 count dinosaurs & accessories in the "Party like Crazy!" line, which I can't seem to find online any more for a nice pic...ah well. Best I can find is this: they are basically these figs, but in a 28 count pack.
Anyway, then a different idea struck. Let's just play simple army-men type stuff, but with dinosaurs and ...hhmnn ....something else. What shall we use?

It was then that I noticed the bag o' ZOMBIES!!! (100 of those freakin' freaks! for use in the Twilight Creations game "ZOMBIES!!!") sitting there all lonely, and thought yeah, that'll do.
Dinos vs Zombies....cool!

Before I forget, during my search for a cool pic to throw in at the top of this post, I found a near perfect image: this awesome t-shirt design, by a guy called Smacktastic, at threadless.com:
That's one coolass t-shirt, and I may just have to buy a couple - an XL and a 6T....ha! Anyway, awesome shirt design Smacktastic!

Ok, back to the party...

Well, once ya start thinking about these things, of course the geek (especially a recently 4e playing geek) comes shining through and the concepts of a boss, brute, artillery, skirmishers, artillery, etc and of course minions, take shape and now your simple army-guys game turns into a whole new animal.

But that's fun too. So we ran with it. My son has a few of the MEGA Bloks plasma minis that you can assemble, disassemble, mix&match, etc... the ones with the ball-joints at the neck, shoulders, hips, etc. So far, IIRC, he has the T-Rex, the Mummy, and the Ghoul (which is really just a winged skeleton, and just so happens to look completely badass). Well, the Ghoul fell victim to a Sword of Sharpness, or so it would seem, as his wings keep breaking off...errr ....keep getting severed at the joint, so he's still in sick-bay getting super-glued yet again. That stuff doesn't seem to be so "super" these days, that is except for when I botch the job and get some on my fingers... "skin-be-gone" is a better product name for it.


Sssshhhhhhhh..... don't tell anyone, ok? "What they don't know, won't hurt them."

Anyway, so our choices of cool bosses for our game really sorted themselves out, and we decided on the T-Rex for him and the Mummy for me. I did let him pick, and he hilariously changed his pick 3 or 4 times, as I kept describing what types of things a T-Rex could do, and what cool powers a Mummy has, none of which we actually put into our rules...ha! But I would have loved a little Mummy Rot, Mummy's Curse, or even just some good ol' fashioned Fear....boo!

So we had out bosses and our minions: 6 zombies for me and 6 various dino for him, including the pterodactyl he chose first. I decided to give that bad boy "flight"... well as a power to use in the game, that is. But this left me at a disadvantage that we noticed in our first few minutes of play, so I took a Shadow mini from the WotC group and just called him a "Ghost" for simplicity's sake. So now I had a "flyer" too.
Ok, so we started out on the carpet of our greatroom/frontroom/family-room (whatever you like to call it) but those piddly little zombies kept falling over - a premonition?

So I got out a Chessex BattleMat. I recenlty snagged a backup mat, mainly because it was so cheap. It's one of their "irregular" ones, which you would really have to be pretty hardcore to really care about the irregularity of this mat. It was something like a quarter or less the "regular" price for this thing, so I figured it would be a good backup, additional, or "kids' copy" of my main BattleMat. It made sense to just grab it here and not roll with it.

So we flattened it out, as much as possible, utilizing dice cups and crates (props) from our boss minis (they come disassembled in those crates...a kinda cool concept), and started drawing our landscape battlefield. We threw on some trees that came in the bag of dinosaurs for some quick flavor and some obstacles to avoid, and made a cheesy river running thru the middle of the field with a single bridge to cross it. That looked a little weak on the choices of where to move our figs, so I made some dorky little spring-board/teleporter device to use to cross the river too. We also decided that our "flyers" could just fly over the darn thing. Makes sense.


After that, we made up some pretty cool (albeit seemingly simple) rules for movement, attacks, defenses, health, etc. I will spare you those details here, as I am blabbering waaaaaay too long about a simple fighting miniatures game already. I must say though, that by the end of the game, with some modifications to the rules based on play-testing and such, I think it was a pretty cool little game we created. Don't get me wrong, it's not like we totally reengineered miniatures gaming or anything, it's just that sitting down to play army men and finishing up how we did felt like a nice little accomplishment of creativity in some manner or another.

I took some pix of the thing as it progressed, capturing our rules and changes along the way. My son said he wants me to write it all down on paper for us to use again, and I put him in charge of the artwork. I have a feeling it's gonna be freakin hilariously cool if he takes the gig....ha!

Anyway, here's a few more pics of the game as it progressed. The photo quality kinda sucks, due to the fact that I had only the camera in my phone, and it isn't very good for taking closeups...or really even far-a-ways....ha! Anyway, please bear with the pix quality.

Starting out: "Hey there T-bone! What're you lookin' at?!?!?"

Bobby's Dinos:

Daddy's Undead:

Ghost vs T-rex (not my smartest move of the day):

Bobby's not diggin' that "1" he just rolled:

"Every Mummy say 'HEY' (hey!)...say 'HO' (ho!)...say 'HEY-HEY'..."

Dino Graveyard:

I lost to this freakin' pipsqueak?

Bobby wanted a wii-styled final scoreboard:

That Mummy looks sad. Boo-hoo!