Bring on the Vragoths!

 Check out all the Vragoths here: Page: Edit (blogger.com)

Here are more pictures of them, including some drafts of Rhorghast.

           

                     

Molgroths - Xezarog

Pictures of the Molgroth are up. Check out the Vragoth shock troops. Page: Edit (blogger.com)

Artwork

I dabble with art but am not very good at it. Thankfully, I've been blessed with knowing many very talented artists who can help me bring the visions of my characters to life. One such artist is Darran Hight. He does fantastic work. You can follow-him and check out his work here: Doctor Multiverse (doctor-multiverse.com)

Here is a picture he did for me as a tie-in to a short story I wrote about a Werewolf fighting a Samurai. I'll eventually post the story, but for now please enjoy the picture, and by all means please check out his website. He takes custom artwork requests. Please keep an eye on this page of my blog where I'll be revealing more pictures by Darran of the Vragoths!  Relentless Blades - Russell Carroll: Vragoths (rcarroll-relentlessblades.blogspot.com)

Deities and Demigods and Ravenloft

I'm continuing the theme of D&D because it's so integral to the foundation and history of Relentless Blades, as well as being a huge part of my life. I originally remembered Grim and Vig were created in 1984, but that's not possible, because we played them in my favorite stand-alone module of all-time, Ravenloft, which was released in 1983.

Ravenloft is an iconic module created by Tracy and Laura Hickman. Tracy Hickman is part of the duo, along with Margaret Weis, who created Dragonlance, which is also a seminal foundation of my childhood and a huge inspiration for me to want to write. The Dragonlance saga is so iconic, it will have its own post.

Ravenloft introduces Strahd von Zarovich, easily my second favorite vampire ever, right behind Dracula. My friends and I played countless hours of D&D so I can't remember most individual play sessions, except for our times playing through this module. Those I remember. Jace was our Dungeon Master and did a great job setting the right eerie and creepy mood. I still remember one of the sessions, we started early on a Saturday afternoon and played late into the night, going so far as to set up candles at the table to set the vibe. The session was intense, and we were all creeped out by the end, but it was very memorable and fun!

I'm skipping ahead in the timeline to talk about Deities and Demigods because my friend Randy reminded me of this book.

Deities and Demigods were released in 1980 but I didn't get a copy until around 1982 or 1983. As the name implies it was a source book with statistics and backgrounds for most of the major gods of the various religions. This book is very personal for me. My mother worked in downtown Sacramento for the State of California. As I mentioned in a previous post, she was a very practical person, so didn't really "get" my love of D&D, but she did love me. 

I remember being home sick from school and she knew I was feeling bad and wanted to cheer me up. She went out on her lunch break and walked the six blocks to a comic-book store downtown called Comics and Comix. She came home from work that day with this book and gave it to me. It did wonders to cheer me up. I love you, Mom!  💓

Fast forward to the late 80's/early 90's and my D&D career was coming to an end. By this point we no longer had regular D&D sessions, but every once and awhile Charlie and I would get out the dice and play for a bit. Grim and Vig were something like level 25 by then and had become basically godlike. 

Like I assume many D&D groups, we initially started by trying to stick as close to the rules as we could and played things pretty straight, but as time went by we morphed into power-gamers. It became all about defeating the toughest creatures and getting the "phatest" loot. Back in those days we were known as "Monty Haul" gamers. I think the term now might be "munchkins" but am not sure.

We were not satisfied just having run of the mill magic items, nope, we took several top items and smashed them together to make them even more powerful. I think by the end Vig had a silent, vorpal sword that instantly decapitated opponents on a natural roll of 17 or above, as well as making him permanently stealthy. Grim was permanently enchanted with a girdle of storm giant strength and his two-hand sword was a +8 defender (granting him that bonus to his armor class) and was +8 against dragons and did double or triple damage. 

In those last sessions Charlie and I played, we no longer bothered with full campaigns. We'd just grab the dice and the Deities and Demigods book, open a random page and have some god appear to fight our characters. Of course, we won virtually every fight and if by some miracle we lost, well we had high level clerics on standby to resurrect our characters. By that point death was only an inconvenience.  It's no way I'd ever want to play now, but as late teens/early 20-somethings it was the ONLY way that was fun for us. I remember those times fondly. 

Stranger Things - D&D

My friends and I were the Stranger Things kids long before the hit Netflix show. I was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) somewhere around the fourth or fifth grade. It was about 1979 and I was roughly nine-years old. This would have been 1st addition D&D.

I've always been a monster fan and was initially drawn to the Monster Manual.  

I first saw the Monster Manual in Walden Books around 1979. Sadly, I don't believe Walden Books is around any longer. It was about the coolest book I'd ever seen. A whole book devoted to monsters with detailed descriptions and statistics. What did all these stats mean? I simply had to find out and that led to falling in love with D&D.

I was joined by my friends, Jace, Gene, Robert and Charlie. We played D&D constantly from 1980 until about 1987 and then off and on after that. On Friday or Saturday nights we were either watching some horror movie like Alien, Dawn of the Dead or American Werewolf in London, or we were gathered around my parent's big dining table, drinking Mt. Dew, eating pizza and playing D&D.

I've had to update this section as the timeline has been bothering me. I originally thought Grimlock and Vigilante were born in 1984. I thought that because I still have a D&D character sheet of Grimlock with the date of 1984, but they were originally created in late 1983.

Grimlock was my barbarian ranger and Vigilante was Charlie's thief/acrobat. It's easy to assume Grimlock was inspired by the Transformer's Dinobot, and he is my favorite Transformer, but that's not actually where his name came from. I was looking for name ideas and thumbed through the Fiend Folio, sequel to the Monster Manual, when I came upon creatures called 'Grimlocks.' I thought the name was awesome and it fit with a big barbarian warrior. The Fiend Folio was published in 1981 and I think I got my copy around 1982. The Transformers came out in 1984 and it was all the better to have a T-Rex robot dinosaur with the same name. 

Charlie named his character Vigilante based on the DC character which first appeared in The New Teen Titans Annual in August 1983.

Vigilante wasn't a super popular comic, but Charlie loved the character. He has since become more well known with appearances in the HBOMax series, Peacemaker.

Fast forward to September of 2022 when I began seriously outlining Relentless Blades and of course these were the two main characters. Grimlock morphed slightly from a human barbarian into a half-orc, but his personality and size remained constant.

Vigilante didn't seem right for an actual character's name, so I changed it slightly to Vigilanton. Over all these years Charlie and I have always referred to them as 'Grim' and 'Vig' so that is how they are mostly referred to in the novel anyway. 

 

The Origins of Relentless Blades

The origins of Relentless Blades starts all the way back at the beginning. For as long as I can remember, I've loved monsters. My love of monsters really has no logical explanation. Both my parents were practical people. My mother loved musicals and my father enjoyed westerns. Neither one of them liked monsters. They can't explain what got me hooked, and I'm not positive myself. 

I just know that some of my earliest memories, around the age of three or four, were of watching Godzilla movies, the old Universal monster movies and King Kong. I loved them all. Long before cable television and streaming services, you had to look in the tv guide each week to see what shows would be on. My mom bought the tv guide every week when she went grocery shopping. As a kid, I'd grab that thing right away and scan every day for possible showings of monster movies. Usually if a monster movie was on, it would be a Saturday or Sunday afternoon at 2pm on a local channel. If at all possible, I made sure to tune in.

My favorite monster of all time is Godzilla. There is something about that giant lizard that I just love. I'll probably devote a whole post to him eventually. My other favorite monster is the werewolf. I find something cool about transforming into another creature and you can bet I worked that theme into Relentless Blades. Aside from those, I like all the different Greek mythological monsters like the minotaur, the chimera, the griffon, cyclops and more.

It's my love of monsters that led me to Dungeons and Dragons. To be continued in my next post...Stranger Things.

 My father painted this for me in 1980, when I was ten-years old. Love you Pop!

Here I am as the Wolfman for Halloween in 1980. Make-up courtesy of my friend, Jace.