Also, I came here for rot grubs. The photo from the old school Monster Manual had me on edge for years. That and the piercer. Both of those were terrifying.

You are correct. I once found that pack at a Portland toy store. The TSR founders turned them into a writing project. The Bulette was also a play on SNLs’ “land shark.”

Owlbear: A creature that is both owl and bear.

Okay, I am going to take this too seriously. But I do have an answer for why encountering carnivorous ape is more common than regular ape. Regular apes will likely try to avoid humans, where carnivorous apes actively seek out humans to hunt them. And there you go.

Yep. Salamanders, as in the animal, were named after the mythical salamanders, not vice versa. 

The Throat Leech first appeared in the Fiend Folio. Not the Monster Manual. ;)

There’s a lot of history in the Bulette. Pronounced byew-lett, because someone made a joke once to annoy French-speakers. Created originally because Gygax got a pack of plastic toys depicting ‘prehistoric monsters’ and basically none of them looked like real prehistoric animals. That’s where the owlbear came from as…

The new nostalgia for 1st edition and even white-box 1974 D&D must be like finding out that Motley Crue is now Classic Rock.

If I remember, aren’t the intellect devourers still a thing?

“Salamanders” as mythical fantastical beasts dates back at least to the medieval times. They often were associated with fire and depicted with wings, claws, and sometimes even human-like heads.

If there’s only one person who has been waiting more than two decades for this, I’m that guy. I was so obsessed with Mad’s character design (okay, Red Monika is a bit much, but she’s also rad) and world-building, that a decade after issue 9 dropped, I would daydream about being rich enough to approach him just to try…

All they really need to do is have an end credits scene at the end with all the actors sitting at a table and have Chris Pine say, “So, same time next week?” and then everyone comes up with an excuse not being able to do next week.

Already done.

It’s not like they have to go meta in narrative since, when they want a laugh, they can just have the characters and world *act* like a gaming table does.

See the recent ‘Speak with Dead’ spot. 

I certainly enjoyed the writeup :)

Are there any other matriarchies in Faerun? Because if this is the only one then yeah, it being evil is a problem.

It’s not a societal critique, it is 100% just an assumption. Just like Dark Skinned=Evil.

I’ve been re-reading the Legend of Drizzt this year, and the difference between the Icewind Dale Trilogy and the Dark Elf Trilogy is insane. I’d be hard pressed to even call the Icewind Dale books decent, but DET is legitimately good in many places.  Salvatore really grows a writer as the series goes on. 

Elaine Cunningham, Troy Denning and James Lowder in the early-ish period, then Paul Kemp in the middle period. Erin Evans was easily the best “late find” of the Realms, but unfortunately she only really got going just as WotC geared up to end the book line.

I’ll always comment on the D&D retro-book reviews. Maybe one of the top one reasons to read io9.com