WizKids Drops More Classic Monsters With ‘Classic Collection: Monsters S-T’
by Anton Kromoff
Welcome to the table,
It’s a rare experience these days for me to get freaked out by something that happens in an encounter at the TTRPG table. Mostly that’s because unless I am helping others playtest, I am running the games. I already know, long in advance, what the encounters are going to look like and what terrors lay waiting for my players. When I was younger, though, there were for sure a few key moments that caught me off guard and one of them involved a creature in the newest volume of WizKids‘ Dungeons & Dragons Classic Collection: Monsters S-T.
As you will recall from past volumes, these beautiful shelf-ready boxes contain pre-painted miniatures of some of Dungeon & Dragons‘ most iconic monsters as they appeared in their classic forms.
The S-T volume contains the iconic Salamander, Satyr, Shambling Mound, Stirge, Treant, Troglodyte, and Troll. These are so cool looking. If the renders are any indication, this set may be the best of the lot that has come out to date.
The Shambling Mound is such a cool memory for me. There was an occasion when our characters had had Staffs of Lightning stolen off Grell warriors we had encountered after hopping through portal after portal trying to find a safe waypoint to stay in for the night. We came upon a massive Shambling Mound and unleashed all the charges from the Lightning Staff on this thing and it would not stop coming.
It took our party cleric, who eventually had to build a new character and rejoin the game. That moment really nailed it home for that party that we were out of our depths. Each new monster could present some fresh horror that would be a game of trial and error, becoming impossible for us to defeat it without luck and a solid escape strategy.
The troll from this set is also so charming. It instantly conjures the old gnarly horrifying troll from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Everything on this sculpt looks like it is going to be spectacular; the knobby bits on the back, the fang filled jaw, and the strange knobby muscles with tons of scarification patches. Then it all caps off with a big bit of rotted tree that the creature is hefting up.
I love these sets, because of the warm memories they conjure and the fact they work so well on the shelf with my collection of AD&D books. These are just a fun bit of nostalgia and you can grab them to add a level of retro cool to your collection or to add a bit of classic flair to your TTRPG table… or both!
If you want to pre-order this set, check out this link.
Until next time, I really hope we see some more of the classic variants as we go. The 50th anniversary set is amazing because it has the 1st edition models alongside the 5e versions, and I for one am in full support of this kind of thing so we can have a little bit of the old along side the new.
