"Sometimes human places create inhuman monsters"
Monsters. The ancient Greeks were either imaginative geniuses able to draw monsters from their imaginations or were really screwed up with monsters coming from their own warped psyche. Or both. However this little blog is not an in depth analysis of where monsters come from - that was solved long ago. "The womb of monsters is ignorance" whether the Greek monsters or the ones created by ignorant politicians, the murderous brown foreign migrant monster who comes to kill your family and steal your plumbing job.
Ignorance births monsters, knowledge kills them.
And on that note a brief foray into the core box monsters of MBP. Four classic Greek monsters, Cerberus, Medusa, Hydra and the Minotaur. Cerberus is familiar to everyone as a huge 3 headed dog from the underworld, the lovechild of Echidna and Typhon - No idea how that works but hey, Greeks. In MBP Cerberus is a massive 3 headed dog with lava breath and is an auto take for me. The ability to do 3 7 dice attacks (with an AoW card) is just too good. It is a god killer when combo'd with someone like Odysseus especially if the god doesn't have mighty throw. with a couple of cerberus in hand it can run into space occupied by Odysseus and target then next turn go to work. Any return hits are soaked up by Odysseus and his guard ability - hopefully passed on to nearby cannon fodder. After 21 dice even Gods are usually considering their future.
In my games what usually happens is there will be a Cerberus/Hydra Faces off as the multi headed monsters set to. I don't pick Hydra as much as Cerberus only because it is slower to get in position. Probably better as a defensive area denial piece with its ability to attack every adjacent area. I went with green as the base as its a creature of the Lernean marshes and there is a nod to this on the base with some marshy terrain, swamp flowers which are always white and yellow - and a glossy underside, dripping from the water.
The Hydra is another of the offspring from the Echidna/Typhon unlikely couplings so the sibling rivalry played out in my games is all too realistic.
The third of the core box monsters is Medusa, one of three Gorgons and apparently last in line for immortality as demonstrated by Perseus. Later Roman myths have her as a victim having been raped by Poseidon but the earlier Greek stories just have her as a badass. In MBP she is definitely that able to just remove troop units with a smile and to petrify everyone else. In a recent game my opponent moved her into a God v God conflict where I also had Odysseus and Hercules. Everyone stoned and to her advantage as she had no more god cards and i had no AoW cards. Additionally its a cool mini and has climb so there is literally no place to hide.
Last but actually least for me is the Minotaur. More Greek craziness involved in his birth and commitment to the Labyrinth but in MBP he is effectively a force of nature and a whirlwind of destruction. His ability to move 2 spaces doing drive by violence in each space is great if you can line up 3 adjacent spaces and get 2 runs there and back again clubbing everything in the way.
The miniature is a great rough looking brute with broken horns and a clearly unpleasant personality. Not sure if there is a Theseus in Pandora's box but if there is i'll be going head to broken horned head.
So that concludes part one of MBP monsters and I will do part two starting with Echidna and Typhon I think. Until then I'll leave the last words with the poet Tony Harrison from The Gaze of the Gorgon,
"the Gorgon was made out of the terror, not the terror out of the Gorgon."