May 3, 2012

Hind Legs of the Displacer Beast

Dave Trampier is my favorite of the early D&D artists. I always loved this illustration, but the hind legs confused me.

9 comments:

  1. The Displacer Beast has six legs. You can see two of the hind legs on one side; the other two are hidden by the body.

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  2. And the 5 claw / 4 claw thing is explained by...???

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  3. They normally have four claws per foot, but this one is a Hemingway Displacer Beast.

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  4. Dogs have 5 claws (?) at the front paws and 4 at the hind paws. Displacer beasts are canides, not cats!

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  5. Naw. Displacers are certainly felidae. Just look at the irises of those eyes...

    In the Monster Manual description, where this illo is from, there was no mention made of it being six-legged, so if you hadn't played an earlier edition, you'd have been blissfully ignorant of the lack of an additional pair of limbs.

    Re: The 5/4 claw thing,

    I hadn't noticed that much more thumb-like digit on it's left front paw before. I thought it part of the tentacle. It always looked like it had one right 5 clawed foot and three 4 clawed feet to me. (The larger illustration in Dragon #109 revealed that isn't the case very obviously!)

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  6. Knowing that the Displacer Beast is based on the Coeurl from "The Black Destroyer", I plugged the name into Google to see if I could get a description from the story. I couldn't remember how many legs it had in the book.

    What I got back was pages and pages of Final Fantasy hits. New-Geek has trumped my Old-Geek.

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  7. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  8. What we need is some Displacer Chickens. That way you get six drumsticks per bird.

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