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Re: Minotaur

Posted by MortiS-the-Lost on Jun 20, 2010; 4:59pm
URL: http://the-lost-and-the-damned.71.s1.nabble.com/Minotaur-tp5122341p5201523.html

Thanks guys

Billiam Babble wrote
I'm always interested to see what colour skin or hide minotaurs are given.  I like the idea that the skin is part of the "human" aspect of the minotaur.  The hair is more barbaric that beastial.
Yea I think it's important to have an over all constancy between the bovine and humanoid features of a Minotaur, it's not just a bull's head on a man's body nor is it an anthropomorphic bull. All of a Minotaur's anatomy is a mixture of the bovine and humanoid with it's own anatomical logic I think my colour scheme reflects this.

Billiam Babble wrote
You mention that you'd prefer hooves to feet, I think in Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Russ Nicholson depicts the minotaur with hooves.  
Actually I couldn't remember so I went to my book case and looked. The illustration in WoFTM seems to depict something in between humanoid feet and cloven-hooves. (sorry no picture at the moment the computer that works with my scanner had it's hard-drive die in the week and I couldn't find a copy on the illustration online) the 4 smaller toes are fused together while the 'big toe' remains separate forming a sort of hoof shape while still remaining distinctly human. (Citadel recently did something similar with their new plastic Minotaur's feet, it's a shame the rest of the sculpting was terrible)
Personally I think hooves just look cooler and more bestial, it seems most models or illustrations of Minotaurs depict them with either feet or hooves and there is no majority either way, most written descriptions of Minotaurs don't mention whether they have humanoid feet or hooves and it seems to be left up to the artist or sculptor whether they want to do hooves or feet (interestingly there is an old Blood Bowl Minotaur character from around the same time as WHQ called 'Grashnak Blackhoof', the model for which has humanoid feet despite having the word 'hoof' in it's name!) I think that as creatures of chaos Minotaur's can have feet or hooves and a mixture of the 2 is a very interesting take on the subject. Broo (Beastmen) should always have hooves though!

Billiam Babble wrote
In Basic D&D, a single minotaur can be significant, semi-intelligent and brutish adversary which can hold its own with a first level party.  So as a beginning player, the Minotaur, along with its mythological links and natural associations with mazes meant that it was the perfect dungeon monster archetype (along with the fact that they weren't very magical and I used to stumble with magic rules!).
Totally agreed! The Minotaur is a dungeoneering classic and all good GM/DMs should have at least one at their disposal. For the first game I used this model in once I had it painted, I generated a dungeon mostly consisting of  poorly lit corridors and a few small chambers and had the Minotaur turn up as a wandering monster in the corridors, I also wrote in a random encounter with a Snotling carrying a pair of scissors in case the players thought to try the old trick of using a ball of string, but the encounter never got used. Any encounter with a Minotaur in an enclosed space is always going to be brutal, the sheer size of the creature plus it's habit of charging horns first into battle makes it the perfect boss creature vs lower level characters and when you reach the objective room in a game of WHQ and you find 3 of them are guarding the quest item you know your in for an epic battle!
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~The ravings of a single mad Goblin is bad enough, but such a power-hungry, malice-filled creature as Mortis can never hope to be understood~