vorpal horrors

blog // 2023 April 01 // with thanks to d. r.

redding sucks real bad

One of the first D&D games I played in was with an ex I had remained on good terms with, her brother, and his friends. I was 16 or 17 or something like that, and we played 3.5e, though already people were starting to look backwards. We played some of the Savage Coast campaign setting for a bit, with the red steel and the weird magic disease, and that was originally written for BECMI. My ex’s brother was usually the DM, and while I don’t think he taught me anything on purpose, I learned a lot from him and his friends nonetheless, mostly about the kind of person I didn’t want to be. For example, he and his friends were very fond of using the word “Jew” as a verb, a habit which they explained to me sheepishly within five minutes of me showing up to the first session I played with them (after roasting me for taking the Rapid Reload feat).

Today, with over a decade of additional life experience—or three Traveller career terms, if you prefer—I would have probably left and joined some other game. Life’s too short for people like that, an adage which I did not understand at the time, being so young. But so desperate was I, trapped in a youth I resented, in a body I hated, in a town I despised—so desperate was I to play the game which had captured my imagination despite its many apparent flaws that I grit my teeth and resolved to put up with these people and their many apparent flaws. At the time it was an easy decision, because I didn’t have a car and the guy’s house was close enough to walk to after the sun had gone down, which in my rural northern Californian town was nothing short of a geographic miracle.

The moral of this story is that public transportation and dense walkable urbanism are good and we should do more of them, rather than making ownership of an expensive depreciating asset a precondition to personal mobility.

totally decapitated

My ex’s brother, who I will call Lawrence in lieu of his real name, carried himself with the confidence that only an alpha neckbeard can wield. I only ever saw him flustered once, and it was such an unusual and dramatic departure from his normal attitude that it has remained burned in my memory ever since. Unlike the rest of us, Lawrence had attended a few convention games, one of which had been run by a member of Gary Gygax’s inner circle. At some point this fact had come up during a break while he was checking something or other away from the table, and upon his return I asked him about it, in complete awe. I was now, after all, just two people removed from Gygax himself, who I had already elevated to lejendary esteem in my mind despite having yet to actually play OD&D or 1e.

The response was not at all what I expected: “Which one of these assholes told you about that? Shut the fuck up.”

One of the other guys laughed. “Still mad after all these years? You got J*wed real good Lawrence. You got Rizzle-Razzled biiiiitch!”

“Shut the fuck up, Jared. That dude was a total asshole.” Someone grunted a half-hearted assent.

“Lawrence is just mad his guy got totally decapitated.” Jared drew his hand across his neck, rolled his head to one side, and flopped his tongue out of the corner of his mouth. “FUCK! I’m totally dead! Like that.”

Lawrence called Jared something very rude I don’t want to write down here. Everything was silent for a moment, then Lawrence cleared his throat and with a petulant “ANYWAY…” and we were back in the dungeon. Within five minutes, Josh would pay for his insolence with a lightning bolt trap to the face after we resumed. He complained for a few minutes, then shrugged and said it was “totally worth it.”

After the game I pulled Jared aside and quietly asked him about the whole affair. All I learned is that our unassailable DM, who always had the perfect build when he played and an ace up his sleeve when he ran, had gotten totally punked by some guy called Dinky Rizzle at a little convention game in Chico.

“I don’t think Dinky’s his real name. But you never know man. He’s from back east or something. You’d have to be, right? To run with Gygax and all them. But yeah… Dinky and Gygax, dude. And I thought Californians were fruity.” I think I had made a disapproving face at this last utterance, because he shrugged his shoulders and poured himself another vodka and coke.

From that point onward, I decided I would try and hunt this “Dinky” Rizzle down, and hear the whole story from his side of the screen: how he totally owned a guy who had owned me, but more importantly, was kind of unpleasant to be around.

horror unearthed

I have yet to meet the legendary David “Dinky” Rizzle, but my quest has been anything but a failure. I might never have become involved in the OSR were it not for my search for the man, who maintains a frustratingly barren online presence—likely a prudent move, given the direction the Web is moving in these days. It took me years of digging, dozens of emails to mostly dead addresses, a few Greyhound rides, and a FOIA, but I at last was able to uncover a few details about the game that Saturday afternoon in Chico. I’ll spare you most of the details, because to be frank they’re pretty boring unless you have a personal interest in them as I do. One fact, however stands out: namely, the method by which Lawrence’s character got “totally decapitated.”

As is somewhat well-known these days, a number of monsters in the 1977 Monster Manual—namely, the rust monster, owlbear, and were bullette—were inspired by plastic monster figurines sold as “Prehistoric Animals” in American dime stores. Less well-known is that all the figurines in this set were turned into monsters by Gygax, though for a variety of reasons they languished unreleased until Gygax’s ouster from TSR in 1986. For the most part remain unknown to this day, save by those who played games with Gygax back in the TSR days, like Rizzle.

I am almost completely convinced that one of these monsters, called the “vorpal horror”, was the cause of Lawrence’s demise that day. It is my dubious honor to present to you both the stat block, which I was able to transcribe by hand into a notebook; and a paraphrased description of the creature’s behavior, and ask that you be the judge. For now at least, I’m satisfied that my quest has reached its conclusion.

I am aware that some people believe this figure was the inspiration for the umber hulk, but I have it on extremely good authority that it was not.

VORPAL HORROR

Vorpal horrors are predatory creatures which collect the decapitated heads of their enemies, piling them into pyramidal structures in their subterranean lairs. Vorpal horrors only hunt creatures with some degree of intelligence, preferring humans most of all. They attack with their claws and the pair of razor-sharp mandibles extending from either side of their head. A character that is slain by a vorpal horror, or who is successfully struck by all of its attacks and fails a save versus death is decapitated. Vorpal horrors are known to occasionally wear the heads of their enemies on crude belts, and hurl them to terrify their enemies before entering melee. Hurled heads deal 1d6 damage.