"These brown and yellowish creatures are as intelligent as normal humans and have a fairly complex language consisting of barks, yaps, whines, and growls. They are also able to use a limited form of teleportation (the blink)."
– Advanced D&D Monster Manual
The Blink Dog has often been described as a monster that is unique to D&D, but I know I'm not the only one who has observed the high degree of similarity between the Blink Dog and the Jeep.
The Jeep (despite its odd appearance), is described as a magical dog with the ability to disappear from one place and appear in another. Jeeps were yellowish with brown spots, intelligent, and spoke in a language consisting of "jeeps". Both the Blink Dog and the Jeep have been described as "African dogs".
I always pictured Blink Dogs as the terrier-like dogs from the Trampier illustration in the Dungeon Masters Guide, rather than the badger-headed Tom Wham Blink Dog from the Monster Manual, or the lynx-eared versions from D&D 3.5.
There have been a few Blink Dog miniatures, typically described as Wink Dogs (I'm guessing due to legal reasons), but the only ones that I have are Grenadier Blinc Dogs (Monster Manuscript Vol.I 1501, MM6).
Of the various miniatures, these are the ones that I think look closest to how I envision a Blink Dog, but even so, I saw Blink Dogs as being rather small, like Jeeps, rather than 3' at the shoulder.
Because of this, I decided to use 15mm dogs from Peter Pig as Blink Dogs. The first two dogs come from their PBI line (Range 8 #526), while the dog with handler is from The Men of Company B line (Range 1 #55).
I modified the tails, and made some other alterations so that the dogs would all be a little different from each other. I used Kneadatite to make the small tuft at the end of the tail for one of the dogs, but it was rather time consuming to get it to stick to the tail and look right, so on other dogs I just put a blob of CA glue on the end of the tail.
Here are some of the dogs painted up. They look a bit like dog-headed lion cubs because of the spots and the tail, but I think they turned out pretty nicely.
2 comments:
They look good! I know the feeling of having another classic monster sorted. :)
I've spent some time on the blink dog question as well for my 25mm collection. I agree the Grenadier ones are one of the best options if you get a encounter group of them. I went with Dungeon Dwellers ones as opportunity knocked.
On extending the tails, sounds like you have a solution that works, but yeah, with greensuff a wire armature is a necessity for pretty much any protuberence no matter how short. If I couldn't have trilled a small enough hole in the tail for a wire I probably would have cut off the tail completely and replaced with wire and greenstuff.
Hi Spooktalker,
I'm quite fond of the Heritage miniatures as well - even the more "amateurish" ones. I didn't really look for their Wink Dogs because I figured they were to big though.
I was thinking about the wire replacement as you mention, but the dogs are pretty small, so I had to think of a way that didn't risk drilling into my finger.
Thanks for reading and commenting!
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