The reason tabletop RPGs use polyhedral dice – in spite of them being such an unlikely thing to have on hand in the pre-gaming-store era, and rare even in the roleplaying hobby’s tabletop wargame predecessors – is because there just happened to be an educational supply store where they could easily be sourced near where the designers of Dungeons & Dragonslived.
The reason that D&D dragons are colour-coded is because the game pre-dates the widespread availability of fantasy minifigs, so they represented dragons using plastic dinosaurs from the local five-and-dime, and those are just the colours that the plastic dinosaurs used to represent each type of dragon happened to be.
The reason that iconic D&D monsters like the bulette, the owlbear and the rust monster exist is because one day, a bunch of bootleg Ultraman kaiju figurines just happened to be mixed in with the plastic dinosaurs, and – being unfamiliar with Ultraman, and the bootlegs in question being almost unrecognisably shitty anyway – they statted up what they thought the figurines looked like.
Sometimes I wonder what the history of the tabletop roleplaying hobby would have looked like if any of those coincidences had lined up just a little bit differently.
Art and design challenge, everyone:
Find the cheapest, weirdest, ugliest little toy or bauble you can at a local dollar store or thrift shop. Design a new tabletop monster off of that.
I would LOVE to try and figure out what kaiju ended up being the inspiration for what classic monster
Knock yourself out – the linked page contains numerous photos of what’s believed to be the specific set of plastic “dinosaurs” that served as the original minifigs for monsters in question. Some of the figures that are included in the set are clearly identifiable as classic Ultraman bootlegs, while others are less recognisable; to the best of my knowledge, nobody’s 100% sure what the figure that inspired the owlbear is supposed to be. For reference, it’s this one:
