I’m thinking of starting an occasional feature in which I look at pictures of monsters from various editions of D&D. This time I’ll be looking at everyone’s favourite two-headed giant, the ettin, with the illustrations from AD&D 1e Monster Manual, AD&D 2e Monstrous Compendium, D&D 3e Monster Manual, D&D 4e Monster Manual, with OSRIC as the only old school clone in attendance. Labyrinth Lord, Basic Fantasy Roleplaying and Swords & Wizardry are all missing in action due to not featuring an illustration of an ettin or, even more egregiously, not even having stats for an ettin in the first place. The ettin from the Pathfinder Bestiary is also absent due to the fact that I couldn’t find a nicely cropped image of it.
The first thing that strikes me about these is that the 1e ettin is really bad. The less said about that the better.
The second thing is that most of these pictures fail to communicate the scale of the thing very well. Most of them could be as well just pictures of a two-headed caveman if they were to be shown devoid of context. The ones that, to me, demonstrate the scale to the fullest are the 3e one (you can tell that its club is an uprooted tree) and the OSRIC one (due to having two human-sized creatures in the foreground for scale). The 4e one migitates this somewhat with the little skull necklace, but otherwise the 1e, 2e and 4e ones have very little to show us that these pictures are of large creatures.
The 3e and 4e ettins have the art advantage, obviously, due to the higher production values of said editions, but of the two I prefer the 3e ettin, simply because it looks more monstrous and savage by virtue of its boar-like face. However, at the same time the 3e ettin isn’t really doing anything, and its expression and pose don’t really communicate its savagery to a full extent. While the 4e ettin has the most dynamic pose of all of the ettins, it simply looks like it’s posing for its own sake. Also, I don’t really like its face, because it’s a bit too human-like.
With all said, I personally like the ettin from OSRIC above all the others: the picture has the advantage of not only demonstrating the ettin’s scale but also of showing the ettin in a game-relevant situation. It also demonstrates one of the facts about the ettin that the other pictures don’t really address: the fact that it’s got two heads means it can look for those pesky adventurers in two directions at the same time.
