[Faceman]

funny as hell...

Beholder

The biggest disappointment in the D&D movie (a phrase equivalent to "the dustiest end table in Pompeii") was the five seconds of CGI beholder action in which this eleven hit-die aberration is fooled by the old "throw a pebble" trick. Ooh, I'm angry. Beholders are much cooler than that. Their array of eyes is a veritable snack machine of doom, provided said snack machine was stocked with deadly magic rays. And Funyuns. Gotta have Funyuns. Add to that skin that made "chitinous plates" a household name, the ability to fly, and a standard-issue toothy maw and you've got experience points that you've got to earn the ■■■■ out of. A+

Githyanki

I complain about the boring descriptive names of D&D monsters, but if this is the alternative, it's just as well. "Githyanki" sounds like one of those midwestern lake names that means "the place those white people keep asking about" in Pawnee. The githyanki (plural, "whole bunch of githyanki") live on the Astral Plane, which is a place adventurers can go when they've completely wrecked the economy of their home world by flooding it with gold and portable holes. They often have silver swords that can cut the magical cord binding astrally projected creatures to their home dimensions, which I'm led to understand is badass. This is entirely mitigated by the fact that they look like angry, emaciated Smurfs. D+

Umber Hulk

It's amazing what you can come up with using a thesaurus and a box of 128 Crayolas. I'm just sorry the Burnt Sienna Leviathan didn't make the cut. The umber hulk looks like a cross between a stag beetle and Jesse Ventura (or, in more recent incarnations, a cross between an African harvester termite and Crispin Glover): a big bipedal insect with those weird insect clampy jaws and claws and fingers and bleh. It has the power to confuse onlookers, which is a power more D&D monsters should have. "So this is, what? A perfectly round bird with five legs? I don't get it. What kind of monster is OW MY HIT POINTS!" B

Mimic

One reason that D&D is better than video games based on D&D is that in the tabletop version mimics sometimes disguise themselves as something other than chests. Computer roleplaying games often have mimics--imitation mimics, if you can wrap your head around that--which are always disguised as chests. Chest chest chest. It makes you wish that digital orcs would stick their electrum pieces in a foot locker or some variety of credenza, just to break the ennui of another piratey-looking wooden chest suddenly sprouting limbs and beating you to within an inch of your save file. It would be refreshing like the breezes of summer to be able to say "Hey! I just had my clavicle shattered by an aluminum tool shed!" B-