From Mike’s Desk

I pulled out my copy of Snarfquest</a href> here the other day. It has always been one of my favorite comics. Drawn by Larry Elmore, it originally ran in Dragon (magazine). Elmore is today perhaps best known as having done the cover paintings for the original Dragonlance novels written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. This strikes me as sort of odd, because the Snarfquest comics are really fantastic.

Beyond the comic’s cult following, other role-playing oriented comics such as Knights of Dinner Table are perhaps better known. The difference between Snarfquest and Knights of the Dinner Table is Snarfquest can be understood outside of a role-playing context. And yet, for those familiar with role-playing games, the comic captures the magic of actual role-playing. As Roger E. Moore points out in the 1987 compilation of the book, “I particularly like Snarfquest because it reads like a parody of a typical fantasy role-playing game, showing how great ends come from small beginnings, with lots of weird stuff in between.”