Scanning Project: Another Stormbringer Location

...now with even more Saturday-morning cartoon content!

I mentioned before that my Stormbringer campaign was less like Moorcock's works and more like Pirates of Dark Water. (Throw in liberal amounts of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts for good measure.) Turns out, Dark Water wasn't the only Saturday-morning cartoon to play a feature role in the game: so too did Aaahh! Real Monsters.

I wasn't personally a big fan of the show; being a true horror afficionado, I only saw wasted potential amidst a silly pastiche of weird characters and gross-out humor. (For a horror-related cartoon fix, my go-to show was usually Real Ghostbusters, which may have been goofy more often than not, but was generally watchable and at least occasionally tripped over some really good ideas.) Regardless of this, several of the Mattel toys for the show had made their way into my household. For the most part, these toys served only to sit on a shelf and collect dust.

However, when looking for inspiration for games - especially Stormbringer games, which I ran in a very off-the-cuff manner - my eye tended to wander around my study. Thus, when in dire need of a key monster for an upcoming game session, the little guy to the right ignited the creative spark. Minus the secondary monster-in-the-mouth, this creature made an appearance in The Horned Tower of Pan Tang as the guardian of an imprisoned "scribe of law" (read as: know-it-all mad scientist).

In his quest to recover a lost item of power, Drovis Longstem (my friend Terry's character) was led to the nation of Pan Tang, in search of said scribe. After making his way through the ground-floor maze of catwalks over bubbling pools of acid, Drovis ascended to the second floor, where he came face-to-whatever with this four-armed abomination (which wasn't a cute little creature, but a 12' tall nightmare).

In the ensuing battle, the beastie proved to be too much even for the mighty Drovis - who was swallowed whole. Of course, Drovis - not one to give up so easily - handled things in true heroic fashion: he sliced his way through the rear of the beast's maw and exited via its backside. (In other words, Terry's dice, as usual, contributed to the story and saw to it that he ended up in a very dire situation; then, as usual, his dice became smoking hot and saved Drovis' rosy cheeks. As I recall, those dice never failed to make things interesting in our games.)

Anyway, that's the story behind The Horned Tower and its four-armed guardian. Here's the map of the tower (I have yet to scan the beast's sheet, but after I have I'll be sure to post it here):

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