I can’t take credit for this idea — it comes from two of the other GMs in my group: Don, whose yeti bobbler (illustrated here) has been his GMing mascot for years, and Sam, who keeps a little skull on hand to improve his die rolls.
I’ve enjoyed both of their mascots for the past couple of years, and at this year’s GenCon I decided to pick up a mascot for myself — B.A. Felton, the GM from “Knights of the Dinner Table.”
I had B.A. at the gaming table for the first time at last week’s Burning Empires session, and it was fun to have a mascot. That’s the whole reason for this post: I’ve never had a GMing mascot before, and I enjoyed starting a new gaming tradition.
It didn’t improve my GMing (and I’m not convinced the skull improves Sam’s die rolls…), but it was neat. If you’ve never had a GMing mascot, give it a whirl — you might enjoy it. And if you do have a mascot, I hope you’ll tell us about it in the comments.
Mines an old action figure from the ’80’s D&D toyline: Zarak, evil half-orc assassin. I fit two teeny-tiny six-siders in one of his hands. I should really take a pic of him and put it on my blog.
LOL…your timing is great. A few weeks before GenCon I had gotten my son a kids meal at Burger King, and they had these big-head Spiderman figures in it.
So I had the figure in the basement at our Gaming Table, and nicked named him Encephalitic Spiderman.
When one of the players asked for a ruling, I picked up the figure and said, “Encephalitic Spiderman says, ‘I’ll allow it'”. The table broke up laughing, and since then Encephalitic Spiderman is on the table next to me when we play.
When my Players feel like they are being railroaded or treated unfairly, they produce a foot tall frog garden ornament. The frog has it’s little flippers on it’s belly like it is laughing. Blu-tac was used to attach a giant plastic D6 to its’ belly with “1” facing up.
The frog would often admonish me in the early years of D&D 3.0.
Years later, I found a slightly larger frog wearing an impressive gold crown and sitting on a perfect sphere (another garden decoration). The next time that “The Players’ frog” made an appearance, “The GM’s Frog” appeared to shout him down.
I think you kind of had to be there but both frogs still hang out in the game room. So everyone has a mascot, potentially.
Not really a mascot, but I do have my Black Dice of Death, a set of large black dice (30-40mm) that I roll in the open.
The very first time I used them, I made something like 5 of 6 difficult saves. The rest of the combat I critted more than a few times, and hit far more often than I should have.
Obviously, the players didn’t like them. So they stayed. 😉
Oh yea – we have “Snuffy, the Patron Saint of Gaming” – a small, stuffed snuffleupagus! You have to rub his trunk for good die rolls!! 😉
My current campaign is pirate themed. When it is time to start play, i ceremoniously set up a small skull and crossbones flag. When I want to put my players on edge a bit, I have it at half mast.
I wasn’t GMing, but I bought a C3POtato head for our Star Wars campaign, which was kind of like the mascot for the whole group.
When my DM was running his homebrew game, we’d met with the NPC that would eventually be the campaign boss (so to speak). Once we found out that this guy was Serious Business, our DM took out his miniature and stuck it on top of the cabinets that faced our gaming table, so for months this evil looking guy with a big black sword was staring down at us from on high.
Mine is a small plush Cthulu… cuddly and
evil. Like the skull, I always tell people he
improves my die rolls.
We’ve never stumbled into a mascot… now you have me thinking. Though some “props” only barely apply… if they recurred, I suppose they might make the transition to mascot. Hmm.
Okay, these sound awesome — more of you need to follow Ken’s lead, and share pictures of your GMing mascots!
Hmmmm. If enough folks were interested in trying out Flickr, this would make a great photo group…