It tooks all the way until “Phases of the Moon” for the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons comic to deliver my favorite storyline, but the Forgotten Realms line did it in its second story. That said, while I enjoy “The Dragonreach Saga” for its main story, the real thing that gets me to latch onto this tale as something wonderful comes in its B-plot.

Let’s dive into a tale of dragons, villainy, and…mid-wifery?

Flight of the Realms Master

This story picks up right after the last one left off. With Agrivar and Vartan now the newest members of the Realms Master crew, Captain Omen offers to show them around. Argivar agrees, but Vartan is more interested in Ishi, who is writing a letter to her father about her “dishonorable” actions in the last adventure. When Vartan points out that she couldn’t help being enchanted by Gornak, she responds that it’s really her fighting style that she’s ashamed of.

I find Ishi to be written reasonably respectfully and with a good character arc. Then again, I’m a white guy and like fellow white guy Jeff Grubb, who wrote this story, I didn’t bat an eye when D&D regularly trotted out eastern-themed fantasy under the Oriental Adventures banner. I wonder how differently Ishi might have felt if she were written by an Asian author, or even just brought back for another adventure by someone writing today.

Below decks, Omen shows Agrivar the secret of the Realms Master: a magic item called the Astrolabe of Nimbral which allows magical transport throughout the Realms. That is how the ship, currently sailing off the Sword Coast, can get all the way to landlocked Shadowdale hundreds of miles away in an instant.

The crew is off to find Elminster and question him about artifacts such as the Hand of Vaprak. But as is so often the way, not all is peaceful in Shadowdale…

Should’ve Let Sleeping Dragons Lie

Omen parks the Realms Master in a river and proceeds into Shadowdale via lifeboat. He decides it’s best to “Razzle-dazzle the rustics and have them wondering about you instead of what you might be carrying on your ship.” But no sooner do they arrive than they meet a farmer complaining about a sleeping dragon. Minder goes to say hello, but meets with poor results.

The dragon breathes gas on Minder, which leads to a fight as everyone rushes in to defend her. Only Agrivar finds a proper solution to deal with the startled dragon: surrender.

The dragon has come seeking Elminster of Shadowdale because someone is beheading dragons. Omen has some choice words to say about Elminster…

…which come back to bite him only a moment later.

The good news is that our intrepid crew had just received an epic quest from a real dragon. The bad news is that they ticked off Elminster in the process.

Quest Details

Luckily, Omen does some fast talking to get himself back on Elminster’s good side…or close to it, anyway.

The dragon, Murilantilathenes, or Muri for short, lays out the situation to all assembled: something is beheading dragons of the north, and if it isn’t stopped the dragons will assemble into a flight and seek new lands. The results would be catastrophic wherever they landed, likely resulting in large-scale destruction of human communities.

That all seems a bit dramatic to me, as the Forgotten Realms is a huge area with a lot of open space. A flight of dragons could find plenty of hospitable lands without destroying someone else’s home. On the other hand, maybe some of the dragons are just looking for trouble–it is both good and evil dragons who are being beheaded, after all.

Dwalimor volunteers his group and uses a scroll to cast polymorph any object (an 8th-level spell) and give Minder wings. Him burning such powerful magic for so little reason is largely so he can show off in front of Elminster.

Elminster, not to be outdone, decides to burn his own 8th-level spell to transport his people back to his tower a few miles away.

The mission is laid out: Agrivar, Ishi, Minder, and Vartan are to find the creature responsible for the dragons’ deaths. Meanwhile, Dwalimor and Foxy will be at Elminster’s tower, drinking and boasting.

Sounds fair, no?

Seeking Divine Aid

Muri takes the adventurers to a dragon congress. The other dragons, however, are not so keen on letting outsiders into their midst.

Muri presents Vartan in his defense, revealing that the cleric has an important ally that can aid the dragons in finding the culprit: his god. Through a ritual that puts Vartan’s life at risk, he journeys to the realm of Labelas Enoreth, elven god of time and longevity.

The conversation takes moments for Vartan, but lasts for over half an hour for everyone else, who sees the elf sitting rigidly in physical form while his Astral self converses with Labelas. A red dragon at the congress gets impatient and decides to kill Vartan, bringing Agrivar to release his barely-concealed resentment for the evil wyrm.

The red dragon gets the best of Agrivar as Vartan comes to his senses, but nobody suspected that the dragon killer was in their midst. Before the red can deliver the killing blow, the harvester takes his head.

The dragons scatter like frightened insects, and Agrivar is none too happy with anyone.

As I mentioned before, a lot of this comic is about Agrivar’s moral struggles. His decision to quit leads him on a journey that will eventually teach him a lesson. But first…let’s check on what’s going on back at Elminster’s tower…

Meanwhile, with the Wizards…

Elminster hires out adventurers all the time to do his dirty work, but what does he do while they’re away? The answer, it seems is sit around and drink.

Mourngrym is forced to sit around with a pair of increasingly inebriated wizards because his wife is pregnant and doesn’t want him underfoot. This, naturally, will lead to a sitcom-style birthing scene later on. But first, Foxy decides to slip off and do some searching around Elminster’s tower.

Foxy is giving the place the “old once-over,” on Dwalimor’s orders. Meanwhile, Dwalimor gets into a boasting contest with Elminster…

In his serach, Foxy accidentally breaks a jar that contains an assassin seeking to kill the last heir of Tethyr. That heir happens to be Lhaeo, Elminster’s scribe.

Of course, the wizards who might be able to stop said assassin are busy boasting about artifacts they’ve dealt with in the past.

Shout out to the Moonpenguin of Boof, which Elminster gave to Maskar Wands. We know from “Catspaw” that Khelben “Blackstaff” Arunsun used that artifact to uncover the operations of the beholder Xanathar.

Lhaeo goes off to find Foxy, which gets him caught up in the mess. Mourngrym goes to check on Lhaeo and winds up fighting the assassin. Meanwhile, Dwalimor and Elminster are still going at it.

Elminster’s role in this story really works for me. In most novels and adventures, he’s presented as basically omniscient, which gives him a smugness that can be very irritating. Here he’s somewhat nonplussed at the chaos going on around him, but definitely didn’t foresee these events. He gets drunk, he shows pride, and he’s generally a flawed but fun character. None of this ruins his reputation as the Realms’ most powerful mage, but it does make him more interesting than I’ve seen in virtually any other Forgotten Realms product.

Agrivar’s Journey

While this is going on, Agrivar is going through a bit of introspection after quitting the group. His story is told in silent panels at the bottom of each page, which offsets the zaniness found in Elminster’s tower.

Spotting a mountain lion surrounded by wolves, Agrivar leaps into the fray to defend the creature.

This seems like a good deed, but the mountain lion then sets off to chase down and kill a deer.

The lesson Agrivar takes is that the mountain lion is simply following its nature…as the red dragon did when it attacked him.

This is a little iffy because the dragon is a sentient being and it gets dicey when something with intelligence and agency is bound to its “nature,” but that’s typical fantasy literature for you. Regardless, Agrivar realizes that the dragon attacking him doesn’t mean it’s not worth defending, and he decides to rejoin the group.

As it turns out, the mountain lion is Muri, who set the whole scene up to teach this lesson to Agrivar, but I suppose the deception is to be forgiven for helping the paladin stay on his path.

Don’t Mess with a Pregnant Lady

After finally setting aside their drunken boasting, Dwalimor and Elminster pursue the assassin, who flees the battle. Outside the tower, he finds a hostage: the pregnant Shaerl Amcathra, come to drag her husband away from his drinking time.

This goes badly for the hostage taker.

It’s not quite the rampage from Order of the Stick, but the general lesson is that an adventurer is an adventurer, regardless of whether she has a baby inside her.

Elminster re-imprisons the assassin and all seems under control. But remember the sitcom-esque antics I promised before?

You guessed it. Shaerl’s gone into labor.

Heads on the Chopping Block

Muri brings Agrivar back to the group, which met with devastation while he was gone.

The dragon killer slaughtered the congress and left our intrepid heroes buried under rubble. Using the power he siphoned off of dead dragons, he summoned something that even the assembled might of multiple dragons was no match for.

Vartan, unhappy with Agrivar’s departure, accuses the paladin of cowardice and gets a smack in the face.

Agrivar’s conflict is actually in keeping with older versions of the paladin’s code which prevented paladins from knowingly working with evil-aligned creatures. By the strictest readings of AD&D rules, he would have lost his paladin abilities for not fighting the red dragon, despite the existence of a greater evil out there.

Agrivar states that he made a mistake, but it would be a greater mistake not to correct things by slaying the summoned beast.

It would be great to have Elminster to aid the adventurers now, but he’s occupied because the midwife is delivering triplets in another part of Shadowdale. Nonetheless, Elminster checks the scrying pool to see what’s going on…

“A tarrasque” and “You’re in luck. There’s only one of them” frustrates the heck out of me. There’s only one in the Forgotten Realms. Jeff Grubb, who worked with Ed Greenwood to translate the Realms to an official setting, wrote this comic, so it’s weird that he didn’t know that. Every once in a while D&D comics put something in that doesn’t just take liberties with the rules but flies directly in their face to a baffling point.

Anyway, seeing that the Tarrasque is rampaging through the Realms, Elminster rushes to save the day. Except…

Again, I love this version of Elminster. The D&D comics are made great by the main characters’ many foibles and comedic touches. In this story, Elminster is as flawed as any of our heroes. And he’s smart enough to prioritize caring for an angry pregnant woman over fighting the Tarrasque. If this Elminster showed up more often in fiction and adventures, I might still be running the Forgotten Realms instead of having slipped off to my homebrew campaign setting.

Fight to the Finish

While Elminster plays midwife, Dwalimor rushes to help his crew against the Tarrasque (no, I am not going to call it “a tarrasque”). Unfortunately, he forgets about its reflective carapace which sends spells back at their caster.

The design of the Tarrasque threw me for a loop when I first read this comic, because I was used to a creature that looked like this:

That thing looks nothing like the giant turtle-monster we see in this comic. In truth, however, this Tarrasque is much closer to its original presentation in the 1st edition:

As with many things, 2nd edition was the outlier in terms of how this creature was presented.

With Dwalimor no match for the Tarrasque, he tries to go for the masked figure who uses it as a mount. Even that goes against him, but the rest of the crew arrives to finish the battle.

Unfortunately, the masked wizard is protected by a wall of force. Unable to stop the Tarrasque or attack the one who controls it, Dwalimor crosses his fingers and hopes he can disrupt the connection between the staff and its wielder. To do that, he does one of the few things that can actually hurt the Tarrasque: he uses Minder as a projectile.

The Tarrasque reels in surprise at actually being hurt, and the wizard momentarily loses his protections. Agrivar tries to finish it once and for all, but our mysterious foe escapes.

And thus the day is saved, albeit with loose ends. The Tarrasque goes back to its torpor, the mage is gone for now, and Shaerl’s baby is delivered safely. Elminster gives Dwalimor what he came for: a list of the powerful artifacts he’s been monitoring (abridged, of course), and everyone parts way as friends.

“The Dragonreach Saga” is ambitious, and doesn’t always deliver on that ambition. We’re given an evil wizard with no identity and just a few snippets of internal monologue. Agrivar’s brief retirement, although providing some good character insight, makes him look pretty bad in the long run considering that it led to so much death.

Despite that, this is one of my favorite D&D comics because it showcases the quirkiness of the Forgotten Realms. You’ve got powerful adventurers all over the place, and they get sidetracked by the sort of stupid stuff that happens at a gaming table, such as drunken boasting and sitcom-level antics. It has far and away my favorite depiction of Elminster and really shows off how the Forgotten Realms can be both epic and silly at the same time.

Hats off to this one, because it will forever be one of my favorites.

_{Images: DC Comics, Wizards of the Coast}