Just as “The Hobbit” was my introduction to fantasy, this book was my introduction to Dungeons & Dragons. It was tucked away with my dad’s back issues of Heavy Metal, the first couple Rifts books [footnote: Rifts (Palladium Books, 1990)] [footnote: Rifts Sourcebook One (Palladium Books, 1991)], and a series of Frank Frazetta art books [footnote: The Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta series (Peacock Press, 1975–1985)], which were formative in a very different way.
I knew that Dungeons & Dragons and Rifts were the same type of game, but the Rifts rules were (and largely remain) impenetrable to me, so they weren't much help as a guiding light. I was left imagining playing D&D without a good idea of what that meant, primarily based on the scenes depicted and described in this book, and of course Gygax’s flowery preface [footnote: Preface].
This should have been a gateway drug that sent me immediately scrambling for more, but the ghosts of the Satanic Panic still haunted my slice of small town USA, and my liberal parents were drifting into their Christian talk radio era. My cousin’s breakdown, or whatever you want to call it, didn’t help.
Older cousins often play the role of Ben Kenobi in a kid’s Dungeons & Dragons adventure. However, a few years ago, mine decided to retreat to an outbuilding on our family property to write a manuscript inspired by his group’s second edition campaign.
This “building” was an abandoned chicken coop with a small footprint and generous ventilation by way of split timber walls. I guess Daniel didn’t mind the breeze or the spiders. It sat empty for years, though, so the chicken shit was long gone at least, and the rats had moved out. It was well-built, though, and remained sturdy and dry after decades in the pacific northwest weather.
The coop sat near the property line, in the shadow of a birch grove that was beginning to overtake it. A perimeter of cottonwoods, apple trees, and an unstoppable Japanese knotweed infestation afforded the area considerable privacy from the rest of the property.
One afternoon when Daniel was away, I sneaked a look. His cot and sleeping bag were against the far wall. An old typewriter was set up on a folding table, along with a pair of antique oil lamps he'd borrowed from our grandma's collection. Beside the typewriter was the manuscript. It was about 100 pages in a flexible black binder, just sitting there. I opened the binder and glanced at the first pages, then I got cold feet. He packed up and left a few days later. I wonder if he still has the manuscript, but after all these years it's probably best to let the mystery be.
What? That’s it? Okay, not exactly a “Mazes & Monsters” level freakout, but don't undersell it. A lot of people write manuscripts, and very few decamp to abandoned chicken coops to do so. At any rate, it convinced my family that Dungeons & Dragons was a dangerous influence. So it was a shock to find those books on my dad’s shelf years later, packed with images of foul creatures and ritual magic, and exhortations to the reader to conjure mythical worlds full of eldritch horrors.
The Satanic Panic bugaboos became a central part of the appeal for me, and remain so. It adds an aura of foreboding to some of these paintings. The ancient elf clutching a glowing crystal wasn’t just cool, it was dangerous. It imperiled one’s mortal soul, and good luck finding a suburban boy who doesn’t enjoy imperiling his mortal soul. The “Wizards, druids, and clerics” section was always my favorite, for that reason. That’s the stuff that gave the Jack Chick types fits. You’d think “Griffons and other mythical beasts” would be my favorite, but they misspelled my name.
I recently repurchased this book to replace the copy I cut and pasted all over middle-school binders. It’s a 40-year-old glue-bound book, so the pages are loose, which was a good excuse to (gently) remove them to get make the high-res scans I’ve included throughout.
Many of these pieces were included in the more recent “Art & Arcana,” but the presentation is usually better (read: larger) here. This book is more of an art showcase—D&D was barely a decade old when this was book was compiled, and this art style was still taking over. "Art & Arcana" is essential, though, for its deeper dive into the history [footnote: See also: Eye of the Beholder: The Art of Dungeons & Dragons (2019)].
So yeah, this book was Dungeons & Dragons to me for a couple years. Until I met a kid with a binder filled with OD&D hand-me-downs from his uncle. That’s when I finally got to learn all about polyhedral dice, the real purpose of graph paper, and how it all comes together to form what is objectively the best hobby in the world. But that’s a story for another post [footnote: Narrator: It wasn't.].
It’d be wrong to wrap this up without so much as a mention of “The Art of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Game.” As a collection I find it lacking, but its best pieces (“Avalyne, the Life-Giver”, “Dragon slayers, and proud of it!”, “Gods of Lankhmar”) stack up favorably against its sibling. Arguably higher highs, but fewer of them, and too much filler.
I also just remembered my dad also had the “Dragonlance Saga 1991 Fantasy Art Calendar” and a few others I’m having trouble identifying.
How did this man never roll a D20 in his life?? It’s a tragedy. Oh well, to eBay!
