Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 1 art preview

[Evil Roy Slade]

Originally Posted by Toadkiller_Dog

I will happily color in your monsters with crayons and markers just like I did to my Fiend Folio when I was 9.

In my ongoing lackadaisical efforts at rebuilding my long-lost 1st edition AD&D collection, I bought a used copy of Monster Manual II a few months back. I bought it with some reservations, as some nameless previous owner had spent what I like to think of as many thoughtful evenings colouring in all the monsters illustrations with pencil crayons. Still, it was three bucks, so I decided I could live with that.

What I discovered later is that he had also undertaken to illustrate all the unrendered creatures. By the time of MM II, TSR were past all the easy pickings like dragons and centaurs and past all the loopy Fiend Folio offerings like floops or whatever those floating things were called. Now we were into Giant Weasel territory.

I suppose the editors at TSR had decided that gamers did not really need to be shown what an owl looked like, or a badger, but there they were, illustrated laboriously (which is not the same as well). Each quadruped was rendered as a brownish tube, with four brownish tubes projecting downwards at a perpendicular angle and a tiny sphere at one end of the main tube with rudimentary facial features. Each winged animal was shown with wings widely spread, as if posing for a coat of arms. It is awesome.