Flights of Fantasy

Refreshing my memory about one of the cartoons in last Saturday's Graphical History Tour, I came across a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons doodles I had drawn 40 years ago this month.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Sept. 8, 1983

The previous year, I had written a much-too-long article for the ill-fated Kenosha Tribune about GenCon, the annual August convention of fantasy gamers hosted by TSR Inc. Originally held in the company's hometown of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin (hence its name), the convention moved to the more spacious University of Wisconsin at Parkside just outside of Kenosha from 1978 to 1984.

In 1983, I stuck to drawings, GenCon having included an art show in that year's convention. GenCon was held August 18 and 19, 1983.

I had a hard time finding the original of this pen-and-ink drawing, until I remembered that in spite of the stiffness of the characters, I liked it enough to have it framed and hanging it in my old apartment.

"Arbar Laurethôl's Inexplicable Dream," August, 1983

Sure enough, there it was, somewhat yellowed from its years on a wall, still in a frame on a basement shelf of odds and ends from my apartment that have never found a home in our house. 

I'm fairly certain that I don't have the original drawings for the D&D creatures in the Ranger clipping at the top of this post, however. I do have some similar sketches for the GenCon recap in a Ranger the next September; but if I ever got the kobold, grimlock, and white dragon drawings back from the Ranger, I probably slipped them into my AD&D manuals that got soaked after our basement flooded several years ago.

For someone who hates drawing buildings, I certainly included quite a bit of architecture in "Arbar Laurethôl's Inexplicable Dream."

"Attack of the Corbinards"

I dispensed quickly with the task of drawing any architecture in "Attack of the Corbinards," in which Hitchcock gets medieval. It could probably have benefited on a cinematic level from a more populated battlefield. 

None of these drawings were stored with the others; this one shared a folder with some charcoal drawings and wound up with some charcoal smudges on it (removed with Photoshop).

But I believe it was included in the 1983 art display. It doesn't have a title on the back, but it does have my signature and the numbering of the exhibit organizers there. The signature on the front of these, by the way, is a quondam runification of my name.

Further technical arcana: the siren and "Arbar Laurethôl's Inexplicable Dream" were drawn on bristol board, whereas "Attack of the Corbinards" was drawn on plain old typing paper. It also wasn't printed in the Ranger, so now it's a Bergetoons exclusive.

Stormtrooperback Saturday

Readers who followed the link from the Bergetoons Facebook page the other day might have noticed that the graphic on the FB post wasn't actually from this week's cartoon. Actually, it was a portion of this:

Back in my college days and well into my 20s, I was a Dungeons & Dragons player, and even attended a couple of GenCons back when they were hosted at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. I wrote a running narrative of one of the campaigns I played in, and this was an illustration for the cover of Volume IV.

Our dungeon master (the person who devises the setting for the other players to role play in) wanted to switch us over from a medieval game to a futuristic one, to which end he placed one suit of storm trooper armor in a dungeon. My fighter character tried it on, found that it was much lighter yet more effective than the chain mail he was wearing before, and happily took it as his own.

It had the drawback of being radioactive, but my character wasn't smart enough to make the connection between the suit and his hair falling out.

In more traditional garb

I also remember a Star Wars-themed game I played in at one of those GenCons in which all us players were Sky-Walk-R clones trapped in a filming of Episode IV -- the only episode to have come out at that point.  The slightest deviation from the plot could prove fatal to a character; and when time came for the game to be over, the surviving Sky-Walk-R clones were still trapped in the trash compactor of the Death Star as we players were struggling to remember how that particular problem was overcome in the movie.

It is quite possible that we had neglected to instruct R2D2 to tap into the Death Star's main computer.

Days of Dungeons and Dragons

We've pretty much cleaned up everything we can in our basement. Our little flood -- God's subtle way of telling us it was high time to clean up the basement -- may yet force us to replace the drywall in the furnished section of the basement, and we're crossing our fingers that no water wicked up through the corks of the wine bottles stored upside down in the bottom boxes. We've filled up our garbage bin twice and recycling bin once, and I've taken trumkloads of damp cardboard to the recycling dumpster at work; and there is still plenty of garbage left to go.

This is a drawing in colored pencil from the inside front cover of one of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons books I had to throw out. I'm already forgetting which book -- I think perhaps it was inside the Dungeon Master's Manual, but I can't even remember finding a Dungeon Master's Manual in the box. I could swear that I owned one, but the more I think about it, the more I become convinced that I only scanned drawings out of three books.

And I remember for certain that the remaining drawings in this series were inside the Fiend Folio and the Monster Manual II.

At any rate, this was the second or third drawing, continuing the theme of having a doorway in the background. Or maybe it's a window. At any rate, this monster has arms long enough to be of some use. She clearly doesn't get enough sleep, however.

D and D Days

Yesterday morning, I went down to the basement to fetch a box of cereal from the pantry, and stepped into a half inch of water.

Probably overworked due to this rainy spring, our eight-year-old sump pump had stopped, and water rising (we now believe) through a hole left in the floor by the guys who installed our basement bathroom covered the entire basement from one end to the other. I was able quickly to restart the sump pump, but a fair amount of damage was already done to nearly all of the cardboard boxes anywhere on the floor.

Among the lost items was a box full of the scripts from all of the plays I have ever been in (including a book of all of George Bernard Shaw's plays bought because the local theatre guild needed the scripts for You Never Can Tell returned) -- ouch! I also was forced to discard, some of my old friends will be horrified to read, all of my 1980's era Dungeons and Dragons manuals.

I haven't played D and D in nearly 30 years, but I couldn't throw those manuals out without first scanning the drawings I added inside the covers.

This is the first drawing, from the back cover of the Monster Manual. I drew it using some green fountain pen ink that had belonged to my grandfather, and without first sketching out a pencil outline of any kind -- meaning, whatever line I put on the page, I was stuck with.

What I'm saying there is that you shouldn't try to make any sense of this particular drawing. The short-armed ape-like beast, the mallet-wielding creature with eyestalks beneath its nose, and the fire-breathing horse aren't patterned after any monster in the game, mythology, literature, movies, or the Reagan administration.

Some of the other drawings make more coherent attempts to tell some sort of story. The media vary from Bic felt tip pens to colored pencil, some of which did not hold fast against a little bit of water at all. I'll be posting a few of the other sketches from time to time as the spirit moves me.