If I could give this a bonus half a star, I would. It's not ground-breaking fantasy, but it's a good instructional comic both for doing a media tie-in and for playing your own standard D&D game. But one of the characters is an iron golem, another is an elf who veers between xenophobia and exogamy sure, the halfling is a little thief, but the paladin has a past where he was a drunken bum. It's pretty much like your campaign at home. Sure, we have an odd group of adventurers here, going around finding artifacts. There's also mentions of characters and topics that RPG players will recognize, from Elminster to Halruaa.Īnd yet, Grubb doesn't give us a bunch of 1st-level characters that hew directly to the rules. (There's one pretty funny moment when one character wonders what creature could possibly change its appearance, which the other characters answer with a litany of all the many entries in the Monstrous Manual that include that power.) And these adventurers do sometimes act as if they've read the rule books so the paladin might comment on what type of breath weapon a dragon has. Also we get all the typical monsters, from dragons to ogre magi. For instance, when a wizard casts a spell, they often announce what it is: 'Magic Missile' is a pretty common word balloon here. There's a lot that we might call fan-service, with recognizable rules and flavor from the game.

The secret is an interesting balancing act between recognizable elements, some new elements, and showing something of what that might be for real characters.

1 - Ianto's Tomb didn't work for me at all.)īut let's skate by all that and get to the meat: this comic shows how to do a media tie-in well. (Then again, I'm arguably even more in the bag for the Dark Sun setting and Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Sun Vol. It's real tempting to start this off with some reality checking: this wasn't great literature this review isn't meant to spark a rediscovery of these classic (i.e., 1980s) comics and I'm deeply in the bag for D&D and Forgotten Realms.

Dungeons & Dragons by Jeff Grubb