Grr! A pack of Bugbears make ready to guard their treasure against marauding adventurers...
As much as I like some of the D&D models that have come out over the last decade or so, I prefer, for the most part, to stick to the models I collected in my youth. Now that I'm old, I have the funds to build that collection I could only wistfully dream of owning when I was a boy. Besides, it is my considered opinion that like so many other things; Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, Marvel and DC comics, etc... D&D has come to be unbearably stupid under its latter day proprieters. Stupid, polluted, prostituted and abused. My wife said she had a conversation with someone at her work in which the subject of D&D came up and she said "Oh, my husband does that stuff! He was playing D&D when he was a little kid in the 80s, when the game was brand new!" "Wow! Those must have been the days!" her co-worker mused. Yeah. They really were. Things were wide open and free. The books seemed very adult, esoteric and weird, and were charged with a little of that delightfully grown-up sleazyness that characterized the old pulps. Nothing was on your phone. Everything was in a book or in your head. The emphasis was on imagination and fun. When I go to a game store and glance through the newest additions of the rules, it all seems rather empty to me. Debased, sanitized and dull. I really wonder who they make it for now. Hasbro probably doesn't even know. They probably don't know or care. Corporate thinking kills creativity and discourages fun. But enough grumbling about things I can't change. On the rare occasions that I do still play D&D, I use me olde books from the 70s and 80s. And I frequently take them down and browse through them for enjoyment. TSR made their books so well back then that despite 40+ years of hard handling I still have all my old hardback books from that era, all completely intact. They have never fallen apart. And the game was better then too. Why do anything else? As old as I am, and with all the time that's past, a whisp of that old magic still clings to a lot of these classic bugbears.
Andrew Chernak sculpted these menacing looking lads for the original AD&D miniatures line that Grenadier produced in the late 70s and early 80s. He did a terriffic job in capturing the characteristics of the Bugbears in the MM's illustrations...
Whang! Tough customers, them Bugbears...
Tough. Cruel. Cunning. Ruthless.
Tough. Cruel. Cunning. Ruthless.
Egads! The thieves have been discovered! Now they must fight for their lives!
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