It’s not hard for some us to remember Dungeons & Dragons (we never used the “Advanced” much. We just called it “Dee-N-Dee”) back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The ads were in all the comic books and magazines, if you were addicted to those as well. It was a magical time to be into Fantasy, after the dribblings we got in earlier years, Hildebrandt calendars, Sword & Sorcery comics, and the occasional show like Hawk the Slayer. Suddenly, heroic fantasy was everywhere, and it was dominated by D&D.
One of the ways TSR promoted the game was through a clever series of ads that formed a serial. There were actually three sets of these. The first appeared in Marvel and DC comics in August 1981. The fighter, the magic-user and the elf encounter green slime. The writer had the difficult task of crowding in plenty of D&D style information but also create an exciting incident. The choice of only three made sense for a party of five or six would be almost impossible.
More segments followed featuring Indel, Valerius and Grimslade…and no Saren, the female cleric. Stephen D. Sullivan wrote the script for these comics. Sullivan added the cleric Saren because the party lacked this essential character class as well as a female.The green slime hurts the elf and the cleric must use her powers to save him. Unfortunately, he falls through a trap in the floor.
The last batch had art by Bill Willingham, who becomes the regular artist. The part goes to save Indel but are attacked by goblins. The magic-user, Grimslade, puts them to sleep. Meanwhile, the elf encounters–what else? A Dragon!
The group come to the rescue, the fighter, Valerius, brandishing the Great Sword Naril. But the dragon doesn’t want to fight.
Some back story…
The party heads through the creepy woods known as Oakthorn and are set upon by two were-creatures.
Werewolves defeated they go through the Swamp of Lobella and arrive at the Mountains of Ash.
This is the comic that I remember the most for some reason! In a scene right out of The Lord of the Rings, the wizard saves everybody by creating a dimensional door. And then–
A second shorter comic was produced for slicker magazines like Epic Illustrated, appearing between October 1981 and April 1982. The artwork had to be improved to appear in a magazine known for its slick art and better paper. Our cast has changed. We have Auric, Tirra and the wizard, Khellek in the dungeons of Roakire. Another lycanthrope attack, a jackalwere!
The encounter other monsters including a Beholder.
And a purple worm!
Khellek blasts the worm then reads a scroll. Again, no more segments.
A final comic was done in 1982, “Quest Through the Savage Country”. It was supposed to be six pages but was dropped before it was finished. It begins, like all good D&D games, in a pub. Ranger Rory Gallan is drinking, when he is interrupted by the gnome Shadrak and a beautiful sorceress.
The trio leave in a flying boat but encounter a storm giant…
All of these comics start but never really finish. And that is the very nature of a D&D campaign. You might start five strong, then one time Bob can’t play but you forge on and then you’re down to three and finally, the DM calls it quits. Then you start up with another bunch of guys and on and on it goes. These comics obviously worked to sell games or TSR would have dropped them. I have to say I enjoyed Bill Willingham’s artwork and I hope he had some influence on the actual AD&D comics that followed from DC in 1988.
Conclusion
My love affair with AD&D didn’t fizzle out but it did change over time. By 1985, I had switched from Dee-N-Dee to Cee-Oh-Cee, or Call of Cthulhu, the Horror RPG. Role-playing games were part of my new writing career by this time. I had tried to sell Dragon Magazine on a new character class called “The Dragon Rider” (even wrote to Anne McCaffrey to iron out legal issues) but the piece was rejected. I later sold “The City in the Sea” to Chaosium for Cthulhu 2000 and then “An Untapped Market: Writing Role-Playng Games” to Writer’s Digest so I guess that worked out.
The character class of Private Detective in Call of Cthulhu inspired me to create the Book Collector stories and The Book of the Black Sun. These days I prefer writing Sword & Sorcery with the Arthan series. These old serial comics make me smile and remember rolling dice at 3 in the morning and wonder how we were going to escape the goblins in the lower dungeon…
Thanks to these two websites: Kuronons: D&D History and A Rust Monster Ate My Sword.
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