Dungeons and Dragons Art and Arcana: A Visual History

741 Pages·2018·551.07 MB·English

by  Michael Witwer

Copyright © 2018 by Michael Witwer, Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson, and Sam
Witwer.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown
Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.tenspeed.com
Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks of
Penguin Random House LLC.
Wizards of the Coast, Dungeons & Dragons, D&D, Advanced Dungeons &
Dragons, their respective logos, Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide,
Monster Manual, all TSR, Inc. published titles, all Wizards of the Coast published
titles, Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, Dragonlance, Eberron, Dark Sun,
Planescape, Spelljammer, Baldur’s Gate, and the dragon ampersand are trademarks
and/or registered trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA and other
countries. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission. All other trademarks are the
property of their respective owners.
Unless expressly listed in the section beginning on this page, all images are
copyright © by Wizards of the Coast LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher.
Hardcover ISBN 9780399580949
Ebook ISBN 9780399580956
Front cover art by Larry Elmore
v5.3.1
prh
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
READ MAGIC: ABOUT THIS BOOK
1 DETECT MAGIC
(ORIGINAL EDITION)
2 PYROTECHNICS
(1ST EDITION)
3 EXPLOSIVE RUNES
(THE CRASH OF 1983)
4 POLYMORPH SELF
(2ND EDITION)
5 BIGBY’S INTERPOSING HAND
(THE FALL OF TSR)
6 REINCARNATION
(3RD EDITION)
7 SIMULACRUM
(V3.5 AND DDM)
8 MAZE
(4TH EDITION)
9 WISH
(5TH EDITION)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS & CREDITS
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
INDEX
This 1980 ad was ostensibly TSR’s answer to the stigma that D&D was exclusively for
geeks, suggesting instead that playing the game and being cool were compatible.
FOREWORD
BY JOE MANGANIELLO
I GREW UP IN the 1980s, and despite what Stranger Things would have you believe,
in those days, Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t cool. In fact, mentioning it at all
opened you up to various forms of societally accepted ridicule and potential
physical altercations. Like I said, this was the eighties, an era when anything that
didn’t look like it belonged at a yacht party was deemed Satanic. Apart from Ozzy
Osborne, a man who once bit the head off of a live dove in a business meeting,
I’m not sure anyone or anything bore a stronger or more unfair stigma than
Dungeons & Dragons.
Enter young me: a tall, skinny yet athletic, and excruciatingly nerdy kid. I
became obsessed with all things fantasy from the first time the chime told me to
turn the page of my little Hobbit record book. That Hobbit record was my gateway
drug to tracking down everything one needed to play Dungeons & Dragons, but
for the aforementioned reasons, I had no one to play with. So, I stocked up on all
of the Choose Your Own Adventure and Super Endless Quest books I could find
and resigned myself to staring down the soulfully sentient eyes of Larry Elmore’s
magnificent, red dragon as I tried to trick myself into forgetting I’d played the
adventure inside the red box—solo—a dozen times already.
Then, one fateful day at the bookstore, my eye caught a familiar art style
gracing the front of several novels in the fantasy section. They were The
Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, with cover art by
none other than TSR’s Larry Elmore. I purchased all three books at once and
absolutely devoured them, and then did the same with the next three, and then the
next twenty or so books after that. I read them so fast that I ultimately turned to
shoplifting them in order to support my habit. (I actually went back twenty years
later and repaid the bookstores for what I took, and I have subsequently
apologized to Margaret and Tracy.) It was during this phase that a schoolmate
named Bill Simons noticed me reading one of the novels and revealed his shared
love for the books. Bill was the one who introduced me to the rulebooks and
artwork of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and the playable Dragonlance
adventure modules. It was a revelation. My eyes were opened to the legendary
artwork from masters like Clyde Caldwell, Todd Lockwood, the great Erol Otus
and his iconic Deities & Demigods cover, and the visionary Jeff Easley, whose
paintings are what most people have, for decades, pictured when they think about
D&D (that is until very recently, when modern D&D artist Hydro74 and his
otherworldly limited edition covers for 5th edition supplements Volo’s Guide to
Monsters and Xanathar’s Guide to Everything proved that the look of the universe
is perpetually expanding).
As Dungeons & Dragons has evolved, so has the look of the game. And that’s
exactly what this book is all about. Within these pages you will find the most
complete history of Dungeons & Dragons ever assembled: a book that’s long
overdue but one that’s lacked the proper perspective until now. In the last fifteen
years, there’s been a major cultural shift. We now live in a world in which The
Lord of the Rings trilogy amassed three billion dollars at the box office and
garnered seventeen Academy Awards including Best Picture, while Game of
Thrones continues to dominate at the Emmys and Golden Globes.
That nerdy, basement game for weirdos and “Satanists” has somehow become
both mainstream and prestigious. It has survived the slings and arrows of its
detractors and is now experiencing a renaissance after forty-plus years of
existence, something few brands ever witness. If Winston Churchill was right in
saying, “history is written by the victors,” then the fact that this book is in your
hands means Dungeons & Dragons won.
P.S. For my birthday this past year, my wife asked Wizards of the Coast to put her
in contact with Jeff Easley. She commissioned him to paint a Dragonlance-style