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.