When I think back nostalgically on my early adventures in D&D in the early 80s a lot of the real fun came from blending different elements into 'classic' fantasy backgrounds to give players a truly different experience. Expedition To The Barrier Peaks (sci-fi) and Ravenloft (horror) are fondly remembered by most players of that era in spite of (or perhaps because of) their break from traditional western Tolkien-esque fantasy. I got immediately excited when it seemed like WoTC was going to do something truly thematically different, and I can't wait for September to get here.
So I won't.
Watching the four main table streams from the event gave me some ideas for miniatures I'm going to need for the adventures and I decided to start working on them right away.
Before the first adventure of the event had even concluded I'd pulled out 2 Reaper Bones Vrock models I'd purchased with the intent of using for Curse Of Strahd and based them up and started painting. The Vrocks are a pretty good starting point because although they are a classic D&D fiend, they don't look like most classically devilish or demonic fiends. Vrocks are basically hellish vulture monsters that depending on party level can be either a real nuisance or a huge threat.
The Reaper Bones Vrock has a great pose that emphasises both it's large size and bestial ferocity.
I've got a pair of them because when I initially got them two was how many I needed for my initial intended purpose.
I also wanted to show them next to a traditional man-sized figure to again make note of their size.
I've got a few more fiends to paint up to get the ball rolling and then I think I might dig into my Games Workshop bitz to start creating some infernal warmachines. In a perfect world I'd wait to start scratch building until I saw some rules but the world isn't perfect and I'm not the most patient modeller :)
-Jay
