Howard the Duck

Back in the day, Archive Miniatures produced a number of duck miniatures sourced from Marvel's Howard the Duck.

I can't say that I've ever read any of the stories, but I am familiar with Howard from the covers of the old comics.

Howard the Barbarian

In any event, I've always considered him to be the inspiration for the Durulz race, which first appeared in miniature form from Martian Metals and Citadel. The first three ducks on the left are Martian Metals Armored Ducks (RuneQuest 7001). The lone duck on the right is a Citadel Duck Adventurer from the RuneQuest Adventurers box set.

I always wanted to make Howard part of my Duck Army, so I bought a cheap HeroClix Howard (Deadpool and The X-Force #035) on eBay a while back.

When I started to rebase the figure I noticed a couple of things that seemed to be off about the sculpt. Why was he wearing pants?  Where is his cigar? Was this some sort of effort to make Howard respectable?

I did some searching on Google, and found out that in 1977 Disney forced Howard to wear pants under threat of legal action. I didn't find out anything about the cigar, though I think this particular sculpt is the 2015 series version of Howard in which he doesn't ever seem to have a cigar.

Anyway, this was unacceptable, so I had to depants him and return his cigar.

The first problem though, is his body shape. This is very apparent when he is compared with the other duck miniatures.

To be clear: he has no butt to speak of.

Sir Mix-A-Lot would be sad.

I carved away his pants and sculpted a duck-butt out of Kneadatite.

I'll probably do a little more work on the modification because it still doesn't look quite right, but that's it for now.

Dungeon Meshi & Walktapodes

I don't remember food (or lack thereof) ever being a particular issue when playing tabletop RPGs, but it was often a mechanic used in computer RPGs (e.g., Rogue, NetHack, Ultima).

One of the methods of preventing death by starvation in the dungeon in rogue-like games was to eat the corpses of monsters that you had killed in the dungeon.

The manga Dungeon Meshi by Ryōko Kui is a humorous take on this concept.

The English language version of the manga is published by Yen Press, and I believe that two volumes have been released so far.

The translated version uses the original subtitle of the manga, "Delicious in Dungeon" as the title, but I would have personally used something like "Dungeons and Dining" as a play off of D&D, or "Dungeon Eats" which is closer to what "Dungeon Meshi" would translate as.

Some of the monsters cooked up by the adventurers include giant bats, giant scorpions, myconids, slimes, living armor, carnivorous plants, and basilisks.


In one episode, they kill a kraken, but unfortunately it didn't taste as good as Marcille envisioned.

The episode reminded me of an article by Bill Johnson printed in the Wyrm's Footnotes about cooking walktapus.

Walktapus is also an ingredient of the Everlast biscuits used as rations by the troops of the Broo King of Dorastor.

The walktapus of course, is a tainted chaos creature from Glorantha with a head like a giant octopus, and a man-like body. It has the ability to regenerate, and can release poison gas in the manner that a normal octopus would release ink.

I recently was able to complete my collection of walktapodes when I picked up an Archive Giant Octopus (Fantasy 5038) which was originally used as the head of the Archive Walktapus (RuneQuest 819).

I've had the body (which is the same as that of the Arduin Shadow Golem) for years, but was missing the head.

The following image is of the Archive Walktapus, the Martian Metals Walktapus (RuneQuest 7002), and the Ral Partha Walktapus (RuneQuest 18-402).

The Martian Metals miniature comes in two pieces like the Archive miniature, while the Ral Partha miniature is a single piece casting.

Lance & Laser also made a walktapus, but at ~2.5" in height it would have towered over my other octopodes, so I had no use for it. The Lance & Laser walktapus suffered the fate of the Archive walktapus, and now only exists as a [giant] octopus from Armorcast.