By Ed Fortune
One of the things that make Dungeons & Dragons work so well is that it draws ideas from all sorts of fantasy stories and presents them in a way that allows people to make them unique to their own adventures. This sort of creative freedom explains why the movie Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves works so well, but it also leads to some really weird stuff.
Take, for example, Wizkid’s Dungeons & Dragons – Teeth of Dahlver-Nar Bite-Sized Artifact. This bizarre live-sized prop is a collection of monstrous teeth kept inside a leather pouch. It’s frankly one of the oddest bits of merchandise we’ve seen in a while, and given that STARBURST Towers has a whole Indiana Jones-style vault of weirdly geeky stuff, that’s saying something.
This cool cosplay prop is inspired by a high-level wondrous item found in the D&D book Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. In the game, the teeth can either be put in the ground to summon a monster in a manner similar to the classic Ray Harryhausen Hydra Teeth scene in Jason of the Argonauts, or your character can try to put them in their mouth where they magically become part of that hero’s dentures and grant powers such as telepathy or immunity from lightning. This is sort of hilarious because they are monster teeth, and some of them are quite big, a thing made all the more evident by this prop.
We get twenty different types of creature teeth, a paper chart with a diagram explaining what each tooth is, a leather pouch and a bone-coloured twenty-sided die. The pouch is okay, it’s designed to sit on a shelf and be a bowl of sorts to display the teeth, or you could tie the string and carry it around, but it’s not great at that as some of the teeth are quite big. There’s a small copyright mark on the bottom of the bag, so it’s best used for display purposes.
We get twenty different types of teeth. The smallest is a halfling incisor, which is very small and easy to miss. The pit fiend tooth is the largest; it’s about 12 cm long and is bright metallic green. The ‘sliver of tarrasque tooth’ is almost as big and is perhaps the most interesting item, as a tarrasque is basically a Godzilla-style beast. We get a Red Dragon fang, described as ‘ruby veined’, an effect done with very shiny red paint. For twenty plastic props, they look pretty good, with a nifty amount of weathering on some that makes them look realistic in a fantasy sort of way. Some of these are meant to look like gem-stone type teeth, and Wizkids have been fairly cunning with the translucent plastic to get the effect.
Overall this is a very weird addition to any D&D fans trophy room, but perfect to put next to a shelf with your Blue Dragon’s head trophy plaque and Wand of Orcus.
