Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History Michael Witwer, Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson, Sam Witwer

966 Pages·2018·37.039 MB·English

by  Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History Michael Witwer, Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson, Sam Witwer

A COMPILED VOLUME OF INFORMATION AND IMAGERY
FOR LOVERS OF DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, INCLUDING ART,
ADVERTISING, EPHEMERA, AND MORE.

CONTENTS
FOREWORD vii
INTRODUCTION 1
READ MAGIC: ABOUT THIS BOOK 5
1 DETECT MAGIC
(ORIGINAL EDITION) 7
2 PYROTECHNICS
3 EXPLOSIVE RUNES
(THE CRASH OF 1983) 149
4 POLYMORPH SELF
(2ND EDITION) 217
5 BIGBY’S INTERPOSING HAND
(THE FALL OF TSR) 259
6 REINCARNATION
(3RD EDITION) 287
7 SIMULACRUM
(V3.5 AND DDM) 325
8 MAZE
(4TH EDITION) 351
9 WISH
(5TH EDITION) 389
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS & CREDITS 428
ABOUT THE AUTHORS 433
INDEX 434

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.
This 1980 ad was ostensibly
TSR’s answer to the stigma In the last fifteen years, there’s been a major cultural shift. We now live in a world in which The Lord
that D&D was exclusively for of the Rings trilogy amassed three billion dollars at the box office and garnered seventeen Academy
geeks, suggesting instead
Awards including Best Picture, while Game of Thrones continues to dominate at the Emmys and
that playing the game and
being cool were compatible. Golden Globes.
vii