All good things must come to an end. In 1991, TSR decided that they wanted to create their own line of comics, breaking the licensing agreement they had with DC. This meant the end of several ongoing titles at DC, including Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and Forgotten Realms. As such, “Rites and Wrongs” is our last tale with the adventurers from Waterdeep.

Fittingly, it all begins with some drunken carousing…

Vajra is a Mean Drunk

While Vajra sumbles about with a group of drunkards, one of them makes the mistake of slapping her took hard on the back and knocking her over.

The knives come out, and for a moment it looks like we’re going to jump right into a fight scene.

Luckily, the other members of the drinking gang intervene and cooler heads prevail…or at least they do until the group gets to their next bar. There, Vajra overhears someone claiming that they survived the slave pits of Manshaka. Having experienced those pits firsthand, she has some choice words to say.

Turns out that getting into a bar brawl while barely able to stand is a bad idea, though, and Vajra gets tossed out a window. She soon finds a familiar cloaked figure standing over her.

Thankfully, Conner’s actions aren’t as creepy as his words seem. He dumps Vajra into a canal and lets the cold water sober her up. And, just like that, we’re about to embark upon Conner’s latest scheme.

The Child Bride

Well, when I say “not as creepy as his words seem,” I don’t mean “not creepy at all.” In relaying his latest scheme to Vajra, Conner brings up a scam he used to call “The Child Bride.”

The rest of the group is pretty suspicious of Conner for a change. I had to double-check to make sure that Dan Mishkin, the writer of this arc, is the same guy who wrote “Spell Games,” which went way out of its way to portray Conner as a dashing rogue who was a step ahead of even the gods and had everyone’s respect. Maybe Mishkin had the same misgivings I had about Conner’s betrayal then…or maybe, like the character himself, the author changed with time.

Conner claims that time is catching up to him, but he has one last job to do first.

The plan is to convince a mage named Glandowr that Vajra is the bride of a demon lord (called tanar’ri here, because D&D was in the midst of the Satanic Panic and didn’t want the say the D word). Of course, the job would require a spellcaster to make the lie seem real. Kyri volunteers her aid, and it was totally her idea and not something Conner manipulated her into, he swears.

The Quest Begins

Through most of this series, the majority of the companions have cut Conner slack, while Vajra always assumes the worst of him. That changes here, with Onyx and Timoth showing immediate suspicions while Vajra seems to buy the idea that Conner is doing one last job before retiring.

Well, mostly. Vajra certainly doesn’t believe Conner’s tale about how he met Glandowr…

Right off the bat, Conner proves wrong about knowing the only safe path into the wizard’s tower, since that “safe” route is guarded by a wight. Luckily, Kyri combats it with a light spell followed by Otiluke’s resilient sphere to trap it.

This was back in the day when light was a very powerful 1st-level spell, as it could blind a creature.

Both Kyri and Vajra question why the wizard who supposedly knows Conner is coming has undead blocking the path, but Conner continues showing as much confidence in his schemes as ever.

In response to Vajra’s question, he tells her that the only vengeance he ever worried about was hers.

But, as it turns out, he’s not as confident as he seems…

Meeting the Wizard

Conner, Kyri, and Vajra meet Glandowr, and he is in no mood to hear Conner spin a yarn.

While Conner tries to stammer through his scheme, Kyri and Vajra notice that he clearly isn’t his normal glib self.

Hoping to smooth things over when Conner falters, Vajra gets involved…much to her detriment.

Well, Conner, maybe she would know what she was doing if you didn’t withhold crucial information.

Believing she is supposed to be the “bride” offered to Glandowr, Vajra tries to present herself to the wizard. This goes badly, because Glandowr wasn’t promised Vajra…

He was promised Kyri.

So Conner’s “one last job” seems to have led to Vajra dying and Kyri being imprisoned by an evil wizard. Smooth.

When Everything Goes Wrong

With Vajra dead and Kyri captive, Conner moves on to his backup plan: moping around Selûne’s Smile and getting drunk.

Conner smashes a bottle, which brings Luna, Onyx, and Timoth downstairs to investigate. Naturally, they’re none too happy to find that Vajra is dead…and are even less happy when Conner admits that Vajra was supposed to get out safely but Kyri wasn’t.

The group naturally wants the whole story, and Conner obliges by showing why he’s been clutching his chest in pain from time to time.

As it turns out, one of Conner’s schemes finally blew up in a way he couldn’t spin to his advantage. He tried fleecing the wizard Glandowr, only to discover that the wizard was in fact a demon named Strumferral. Banished from his home plane, Strumferral planned to send offspring to the Abyss so they could create a “magical avenue” he could follow home. He implanted the first of these offspring in Conner to see if mortals could survive the process. Conner did, but exists in constant pain as a result. Desperate to find a way out, he realized that Kyri might survive the process better than he.

Might.

Onyx offers a solution: kill Conner and put him out of his misery. But the conversation gets interrupted when Vajra appears in one of the inn’s windows.

Vajra is not actually dead, but rather transported to the Plane of Earth, where the is stuck in an air pocket and surrounded by rock. This should come as no surprise to readers, as we’ve seen the “it looks like they’re dead but they were just teleported” trick before. It’s a little played out by now, but at least Strumferral is aware that AD&D‘s disintegrate spell does nothing on a successful save. I’d go for an alternative, too. In fact, I can’t remember ever using disintegrate in AD&D to successfully kill a powerful enemy; the best I could do was dig a deep pit with it and push the bad guys in.

With Vajra in mortal peril, Luna pulls out the big magic.

Luna probably should have given them their armor, too, but at least they’ve got a path to saving one of their teammates.

Earth to Earth

With nary a moment to prepare themselves, Onyx and Timoth arrive in the Elemental Plane of Earth, where they immediately find themselves in battle with a giant slug.

Also, there are apparently stirges there?

This is confusing to me because while Luna does explain that there are pockets of air in the Plane of Earth, I don’t see how stirges can do anything but slowly starve to death. Then again, maybe they’re feeding on giant slugs.

(Don’t even get me started speculating on how breathing could be possible in a dimension filled with infinite quantities of earth and only a few bits of air…I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole.)

Angered by the acid breath of the slug, Onyx gives it what-for and chases it away. The pair then finds Vajra clinging from a stalactite and about to fall into a planar vortex.

Timoth grabs the bones of a long-dead dragon that phased into solid rock when it came to the Plane of Earth. Earth elementals then arise to take them out, but Luna opens a portal that allows all three to go home.

Once home, Vajra’s first order of business is to give Conner a little bit of what he deserves.

Her second order of business is to suit up and fight to save Kyri. But does Kyri even want to be saved?

Yes, it seems that Kyri has gotten quite comfortable as Strumferral’s servant. Or, more accurately, the comic has decided to show her shifting allegiance by jumping headlong into more fanservice.

Back to the Castle

It seems like everything up to this point has unfolded in about 24 hours. At sunrise, Onyx, Timoth, and Vajra enter Glandowr/Strumferral’s tower intent on freeing Kyri. Naturally, the demon is ready for their arrival.

Unfortunately for our heroes, Kyri doesn’t want to be rescued. In fact, she seems ready to kill her friends.

Kyri’s evil half was last dealt with in “The Ostus Legacy,” when her good and evil half merged. It looks like Strumferral unlocked her evil half and turned it against her former allies.

Kyri tries to close the walls in on the group with her ring of telekinesis, but Vajra breaks her concentration with a hit to the head. Then they receive some help…maybe.

Conner’s going back to his devil-may-care swashbuckling persona, but his mask has slipped too far by now. Even folks who gave him a pass before know that he’s only out for himself this time around.

Kyri runs for Strumferral, who does major damage to Onyx. Seeing her friend badly wounded stirs resistance within her.

In game terms, Kyri saved all of her karma, luck, or whatever you want to call it for one big saving throw, knowing she would need a nat 20 to defeat the demon. She hits Strumferral with an ice storm and then casts the demonic energy he put into her away.

It seems that if Kyri was able to cast the seed out of her own body, she might have been able to help Conner with his own predicament…if only the old rogue had trusted her enough to tell the whole story from the beginning.

The Final Fight

Through this series, our heroes have battled dragons, giant skeletons, demons, and gods. But the last fight in this comic book comes down to two mortals slugging it out: Conner and Vajra.

It’s quite sad, because for almost the entire series Conner has played the jerk with a heart of gold. Even with his biggest failing, abandoning Vajra, he had planned to rescue her but the plan didn’t work out.

However, there’s always one constant with Conner’s plans: he puts himself at no real risk. Even when he apparently died during “Spell Games,” he was covered through a deal he made with the god Tyr. But now that he’s finally been outmaneuvered and is faced with real consequences, he throws all his scruples out the window and fights for Strumferral.

I’ve wanted Conner to get his comeuppance for a long time, and I was really irritated that he came out of “Spell Games” looking like a master manipulator. So on the one hand it’s nice to see everyone finally call him out for being so selfish. And Vajra is right in the dialogue above: this could have been avoided if Conner had asked for help. After all, he could have enlisted the aid of the goddess of the moon! But Conner always has to feel like he’s the most clever and capable out there. It’s always his plan, and anybody who doesn’t follow it, even when he doesn’t tell them the real plan, is the problem.

On the other hand, this turn of fortune feels a little hollow to me. Maybe I’m just wishing that Conner actually had a moment of realization himself and changed his ways. Instead, he betrays the one scruple he ever had, drawing a hidden dagger in a last, desperate attempt to kill Vajra and save his own hide.

But then, not everyone gets a moment of self-realization before they die. Some go to the grave carrying the same faults they did through their entire lives.

Thus Conner dies, his final gambit failed, after trying to betray the one person he ever seemed to really care about.

Saying Goodbye to Luna

If I can backtrack a bit, there was a cutaway from the fight against Strumferral that I skipped over:

This becomes relevant later, as the group tracks down Strumferral, who fled the area when it became apparent that Conner was going to lose.

The Time of Troubles is approaching, and Selûne has been called away from Faerûn (although she will soon be cast back there, along with the other gods, when that cataclysm begins). But she leaves Vajra with a blessing as she departs.

I know I called the fight with Conner the last one in the book, but that wasn’t technically correct. On the other hand, with Vajra’s newly enchanted blade, Strumferral isn’t really much of a fight.

Now we really are done, and it’s time for the epilogue.

Saying Goodbye

One thing I really have to give this series is that it tied things up well. While it’s sad to say goodbye to our heroes, we’ve spent a good long time with them and their stories have been told. The last pages of this comic really feel like the end of a long-running campaign.

Vajra, despite being in the right for killing Conner, doesn’t feel at peace. She sets off to search for a greater cause and to make sense of her surrogate father’s death.

Vajra’s piece of Forgotten Realms lore after this comic is scarce, although she does pop up in a Dragon Magazine article detailing the heroes of Selûne’s Smile. She fought in several wars after this, and she, Onyx, and Timoth all get shout-outs in the Lands of Intrigue boxed set.

I love Onyx’s thought bubble there.

Timoth initially assumes that Vajra wants to them to accompany her, but she decides that she needs to travel alone for a while. Nonetheless, they would meet again, as Onyx and Timoth also get some action in the Lands of Intrigue set (and, sadly, not much elsewhere in Realmslore).

As for Kyri, she’s sticking around Waterdeep for a while…

Kyri shows up a bit more often in 2nd edition Realmslore. She became one of the Masked Lords of Waterdeep in 1368 DR (about a decade after the events of this comic) and served as one of Khelben Arunsun’s secret agents with the Moonstars. She makes an appearance in the 2nd edition adventure For Duty & Deity, where she provides a path to the realm of Graz’zt so the PCs can save the goddess Waukeen. Apparently, she has a knack for aiding goddesses trapped in human form.

After Khelben’s death, Kyriani went on to advise the next Blackstaff, Tsarra Chasdren. And when Tsarra died, Kyri became the third Blackstaff. Unlike the other characters, she got mentions all the way up through 4th edition D&D and is still around in the setting, albeit as a ghost who lives in Blackstaff Tower and advises those who take Khelben’s mantle.

And thus ends the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons comic. While not every storyline is a hit, I think the series as a whole is really good. The characters lean toward clichés but have just enough different about them to make them unique and compelling. Most of all, this series feels like it could happen at a table. It’s got the mix of goofiness and epic stakes that makes D&D such a classic.

_{Images: DC Comics}