Dragon 184
D&D Alumni: Monster Quiz
by Bart Carroll
We put your old school knowledge to the test. Can you recognize these monsters?
Tell us how you scored on this Quiz here.
D&D Alumni: Monster Quiz
by Bart Carroll
We put your old school knowledge to the test. Can you recognize these monsters?
Tell us how you scored on this Quiz here.
Wait... am I supposed to be proud or embarassed by that fact?
14/20 second set.
That dragon one was unfair... B&W pic asking us what color it is. Evil.
I confused a Hobgoblin for an Orc.
Thought a Balor was a Pit Fiend.
Alot of the other ones I missed were older/obscure monsters with odd names.
11/20 first set of monsters.
14/20 second set.
That dragon one was unfair... B&W pic asking us what color it is. Evil.
I confused a Hobgoblin for an Orc.
Thought a Balor was a Pit Fiend.
Alot of the other ones I missed were older/obscure monsters with odd names.
I got 18/20 every time until I had finally seen all 50 monsters...
My mess ups made me feel robbed though, like picking Shadow Devil instead of Shadow Demon, or Living Floor instead of Trapper. (one is easy to confuse, the other is two different monsters that look nearly identical... and then there were the "easy mode," ones like Hook Horror that made it too easy.)
It was nice to get a bit of a laugh and some nostalgia of the previous times I've gotten a laugh out of the art from back in the day... it has a special place in my heart... but man... it just cracks me up.
As for the dragon... each breed of dragon has distinct features that set them apart from one another above and beyond color. That particular picture shoulds a cloudy looking breathe issuing forth, and shows the ridge on the dragons back and it's head shape, which all point to it being a Green Dragon.
That's why gold dragons tend to have moustaches, red dragons have spines pointing back, blue dragons have that rhino-like nose horn, black dragons have the curved horns, white dragons look birdlike, silver dragons have mohawks... and so on - so that a reader of the original monster manual could tell the difference between colors.
I guess it's just that I'm familiar with the way monsters are presented, and I've read all the alumni columns, and that I've read this and this.
16/20, not bad considering I only really got into DnD properly with 4E
We'll have to make the next quiz a bit more challenging...
The lesson that can be taken from this little exercise is to never underestimate the knowledge of a true nerd.
Perfect scores!?! Well, congrats -- I thought the quiz would have been impossible, frankly. The berbalang (I believe) didn't even come from its Fiend Folio entry, but from the interior cover art.
We'll have to make the next quiz a bit more challenging...
Heh, the Berbalang was one of the easier ones, in my personal opinion. A lot of the art was very evocative of a particular monster, it was just names names names that were tripping. The multiple choice had a false difficulty by forcing the quiz-taker to know the exact spelling, which is especially egregrious when the same monster design has undergone name changes.
But yeah. Pit Fiend VS Balor are pretty distinguishable in my mind. That one's definitely an Imp. etc. The problem is when you give us Githzeloi or something and I read the first five letters and think, "of course this is Githzerai, not Githyanki" and press the wrong button.
Perfect scores!?! Well, congrats -- I thought the quiz would have been impossible, frankly. The berbalang (I believe) didn't even come from its Fiend Folio entry, but from the interior cover art.
We'll have to make the next quiz a bit more challenging...
...and now here is where the 'true nerd' comes shining through... It is actually the Forlarren that you mean, not the Berbalang, that was from the First Edition Fiend Folio interior art.
I still have that book that I bought the day it hit stores in 1981.