New Icons!

[Uatu]

Put up two new icons - an umber hulk and a mind flayer. The umber hulk is, hmm, well, I dunno. It basically is plagued by the same problem as my sahuagin - 1st, 2nd (and even 3rd) edition designs have changed a great deal, so I am not really sure how to make them, and take a middle road in general.

The umber hulk looks hulky, at least... I don't like the bug-like-ness of 2nd and 3rd edition designs (3rd is the worst!), but the 1st edition design was a bit cartoony, too, so... Not quite sure how to do the eyes, though (right now they are pupiless as in 2e).

Mind flayers are much easier to do

[manikus]

Here I am, minding my own business, eating some dinner and getting ready to watch a little telly before wrapping up some homework, and you pull these two on me.
These are great icons. I am a big fan of umber hulks and illithid. They are great enemies. And, it just so happens I have this design I'm working on (and have been for years) that needs some umber hulks and illithids. Now, I won't be getting any t.v. watching done (and who knows if I'll do the homework tonight or just get up really, really early tomorrow) b/c I have to bust out DC and "work" for a while.

BTW, I hope you've kept your weekend open, as I've heard a rumor that the next release could be coming out then...

[Uatu]

Ha ha - well, good to hear that those icons were just what you needed! Umber hulk size was another problem, but as you can see I just stuck them in the middle of a larger space.

Next release so soon?! Cool - I had imagined it to be months or years from now Maybe we will be able to implement nasty psionic blasts for the mind flayers, too, then - wondering what to do about graphics for that (just nothing? Psionics should probably be invisible, but then again, a pinkish blast-type thing would be cool, too).

Er... Sorry if you don't get your homework done, after all

By the way, I wonder who coined the term "illithid?" Maybe it was Ed Greenwood - in 1st edition, they were just mind flayers, I think.

[Uatu]

Reuploaded the umber hulk (recolored the shadow black (all my shadows are pure black) - I thought I did that already, but I guess I had used a non-pure black by accident...).

Anyway, a few new icons: vodyanoi, electric eel, giant slug (witha accompanying spittle). What? The vodyanoi looks like a recolor of the umber hulk? Er, uh, it most certainly is NOT! (Easy, quick icons are happy icons.)

One problem with the spittle is that it shoots out of the giant slug's middle - but oh well, what can we do...

[manikus]

These are very nice. I've never played using a vodyanoi. I know that the monster manual says they are relatives of umber hulks and look similar, I just have a hard time buying that- I want the description to be different and for them to look more aquatic.

[Uatu]

To be fair, the vodyanoi did have its own entry in the old 1e Fiend Folio - but as 2e tried to condense things somewhat, quite a few monsters became just a paragraph or so, while others were just sacrificed (like fire bats). The Field Folio picture of them has the little fins on the sides of the head and eyes in the middle, so that's how I drew mine. (Until I took at look, I left the two outside eyes instead - was quite a different creature.)

[manikus]

I got curious and went out researching 'illithids'. It turns out that Gary Gygax came up with the idea of mind flayers, and the term illithid was first used in a TSR newsletter in 1975.
Voyadnoi is the name of a Russian water sprite, first used in "What's That In the Water?" by Mark S. Harcourt in Dragon #68 in 1982. (Anything to keep from doing my Trig homework .)

[Uatu]

Hmm, cool!

(And trigonometry sucks, but at least we don't have to do it the old way (without calculators, using tables instead)! Get to it! )

[manikus]

Doing it without the calculator is the only thing that makes it tolerable.

I took a ton of math years ago...back when I was thinking of being something engineery or sciency. Now, I've got to take some of it over again b/c I forgot so much of it.

[Uatu]

Hmm - any math that you have learned before about the age of 12 seems to disappear if you stop doing it for just a year or two

Super-high-level math is really cool stuff (well, people who can do that stuff are cool), but it's just so difficult that I will avoid math for now...