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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Erik Mona" data-source="post: 3444701" data-attributes="member: 2174">Ok, this is a kind of funny story.Way back in 2000 or so I was just a snot-nosed kid hired fresh off the Internet and given one of the least internal-respect-garnering jobs at Wizards of the Coast: Editor of the RPGA's Polyhedron Newszine. At the same time we were launching the Living Greyhawk campaign, putting out a free member module, and converting the Living City campaign from second to a still-not-finished third edition. I knew _no one_ at WotC, had a pretty strong impression that I wasn't well liked by most of them anyway, and was completely obsessed with my job. Naturally, I ended up staying at work until the wee hours of the morning working on the million projects I had assigned myself in order to stay busy.Happily, I was far from the only such workaholic, and I soon became friends with a handful of graphic designers--night owls all--who I'm still working with today. One of those was Sean Glenn, one of my best friends in the world and the current Senior Art Director of Paizo Publishing. But back then he was the flunkiest of the flunkies in the art department, an assistant marketing graphic designer with a similarly impossible pile of projects to my own. It didn't hurt that one of those responsibilities was art directing and designing the bi-monthly 32-page Polyhedron magazine.Epic after hours struggles ensued, and much 80s butt-rock was played at extremely loud volumes. In the hours after midnight, things tend to get a little loopy. On one such occasion, faced with some unanticipated space to fill, we hatched a now legendary (at least to us) plan. I'd already decided to theme the issue around monsters, since we'd just launched a member design contest (the RPGA used to do fun stuff like that all the time back in the day). I wrote an editorial about the loveable losers in the Fiend Folio. We had lots of neat articles, but we still had some annoying blank spots to fill.So Sean and I flipped through the old Fiend Folio, picked a bunch of the worst offenders, and came up with derogatory slams against each of the pictures. The repulsively stupid gorbel, for example, was depicted grabbing feebly onto a villager's shirt. I think the guy is running away in terror but it's difficult to understand why given the sheer stupidity of the monster concept "menacing" him. The gorbel is truly pathetic. Anyway, under the image we wrote "Schhhhpare some change?" Under the picture of the much-too-puffy Ogremoch bursting through a cavern wall we wrote "Hey, Kool-Aid!" You get the picture.We had a quarter-page space-filler with the retard-grin lava child and the saying "If you think I suck, check out the losers on page 18". We had a vote for which was the most pathetic Fiend Folio monster, with the finalists being the flumph, the achererai, the carbuncle, or the C.I.F.A.L. (Colonial Insect-Form Artificial Life). Not surprisingly, the C.I.F.A.L. (Colonial Insect-Form Artificial Life) won. That name is awful, and the picture surely was responsible for several votes.We had a good laugh about it at 4:00 in the morning on a weekday, and the members seemed to get a kick out of it too. It was fun.Years later, Wesley Schneider is editing "Dragon Presents: Monster Ecologies," and he decides to include an homage to the original "Monsters of Suck" experience. You're all in for a treat. I hope (but somehow doubt) that you'll find it as amusing as I do.--Erik Mona</blockquote>

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