Unrepentant Halflings, Eyes Too Many & Arduin Grimoire's Kill Kittens

It is hard for me to explain to you why I love the gibbering mouther. I just do. It is the perfect monster. Pointless chaos with no direction other than to feed. Sort of like the Zombie. I have used the gibbering mouther countless times. Countless. I have been playing RPGs (starting with the little brown books) since 1976 and started running my own regular game in ’79 or ’80 with AD&D. I fell in love with that monster when it first devoured one of my characters in the woebegone days and have used it ever since.

Aside: my favorite gibbering mouther encounter involved a shopkeeper. We were playing Castles & Crusades and while the characters were shopping for the gear, he explained that most of what they needed was in the 2^nd-floor basement but he couldn’t fetch it as he was too old. They went downstairs. He slammed and locked the door. A huge gibbering mouther promptly attacked them. The mouther was his pet and he fed customers to it. It didn’t end how he hoped of course, as the players killed the mouther, broke out, killed him, took what gear they needed, and torched the place! (Trick Todd’s character at your hazard! Especially with shop or innkeepers as he is forever befriending them, so it hurts even more when they betray him.) 

I love the mouther. Some I make larger than the book calls for, others smaller. Whatever my campaign or scenario needs.

It is just chaos. The perfect monster.

I also love barbarian halflings. I love the idea of non-Frodoesque halflings tearing things up, as a force of unrepentant nature. I do not know why. I think it has something to do with something I read in the old Arduin Grimoire Skull Tower book I think) from those woebegone days. Didn’t they have a barbarian halfling in them? They had Kill Kittens. I remember that. Those were the wild west days of the RPG industry!

At any rate, when I asked Zoe DeVos to draw me a male and female barbarian for the new Players Handbook, but not human, she suggested halflings.

I jumped at the offer. “Hell yeah!!!”

She asked what I wanted them to do. I told her fighting. She asked me to pick a monster

Of course, I picked the mouther!

So here it is, from the Players Handbook, 8^th printing, coming this December! Art by Zoe DeVos and the sister biting that mouther’s flesh takes the cake! And look at the eyes! The eyes I tell you!