I’ve lately been immersed in covers, as I prepare the graphical resources for Designers & Dragons Origins, my four-book series of product histories for OD&D, BD&D, and AD&D 1e. Many of those covers are classics that have been homaged and parodied many times. Following is a look at the homages to the three core AD&D 1e rulebooks, with lots of attention to the single cover that’s gotten the most attention over the years.
AD&D 1e Monster Manual (1977)
AD&D 1e led off with the Monster Manual (1977), prepared well before there were rules for the game! The cover by Dave Sutherland III offers a fun division of monsters into the wilderness and the dungeons, but it hasn’t gotten much attention over the years. In fact, the major revisits to the cover are limited to two series that have revisited all of the AD&D 1e covers. The three core books were all reprinted in Wizards of the Coast’s Premium Edition (2012), with the original art cut down to a tiny excerpt. Meanwhile, when Troll Lord Games put out the eighth printing of the Player’s Handbook for Castles & Crusades in 2021, they began a series of homage covers that reimagined the original AD&D 1e covers in a more modern style. That included their Monsters & Treasure (2022).
(Did you see the new tarrasque in Troll Lord’s homage? That’s a critter that wasn’t even invented when the original Monster Manual came out!)
AD&D 1e Players Handbook (1978)
Dave Trampier painted the original cover to the AD&D 1e Players Handbook (1978). It may be the most homaged RPG cover of all time. It was also TSR who first realized the iconic power of Trampier’s cover when they parodied it to mark off the April Fool’s section of Dragon #120 (April 1987)—a piece of art they used the next year for the cover of The Mail Order Hobby Shop Catalog (1988).
It took another decade for a homage to appear from a third party, and even then it was from Kenzer & Company, who was producing Hackmaster 4e under license from Wizards of the Coast. Their line was full of cover homages, but the HackMaster Player’s Handbook (2001) was one of the most fun because it showed the scene from the AD&D 1e Players Handbook a few minutes earlier, when the adventurers were still fighting the lizard men.
The ’00s were when nostalgia first crested and began to beat down on the industry, as D&D 3e brought back old players and as the OGL gave them the ability to create their own classic products, sparking the OSR. A wave of comics were another vehicle for nostalgia of the era, including Dork Tower, which had begun a few years earlier. Its first collection, Dork Covenant (2002), was then the first major take on the Trampier’s Players Handbook cover that wasn’t either produced or licensed by the owner of D&D. A few years’ later, the cover of Dungeons and Zombies (2004), a fantasy supplement for All Flesh Must Be Eaten, offered as big of a milestone, as it brought that classic cover to a totally different RPG. Wizards got into the act around the same time with Players Handbook II (2006) for D&D 3.5e, which offered a close-up of the eye-dol theft in the original.
By that point, homaging Trampier’s Players Handbook has become a roleplaying institution. Revenge of the Rat King (2006) was another OSR piece, Scroll of Exalts (2010) was perhaps the most distant homage ever with its mechanic idol, and Knights of the Dinner Table #179 (2011) demonstrated that parodies would continue to be found in comics. Wizards of the Coast produced the Premium Edition of the Players Handbook (2012) around the same time, which isn’t included here, as it just offered a closeup of the original idol.
In the ’10s, Players Handbook homages could be found in even the indiest of games, such as No Country for Old Kobolds (2016) and Advanced Lovers & Lesbians (2022) for Thirsty Sword Lesbians. Meanwhile, the 8th printing of the Players Handbook (2021) for Castles & Crusades is what kicked-off Troll Lord’s homage trilogy.
Finally, though it’s not exactly an homage, Dave Trampier’s artwork for TSR’s first Dungeon Masters Screen (1979) definitely references his Players Handbook work and may even be a sequel: the idol is now eye-less and lizard men arc marching against a human castle in revenge.
Also check out Into the Demon Idol (2023) for a one-page dungeon of the adventure!
(Thanks to reddit for most of these references, and a few more I chose not to use.)
AD&D 1e Dungeon Masters Guide (1979)
The last of the core AD&D 1e rulebooks was the Dungeon Masters Guide, with cover again by Sutherland. This is the famous City of Brass cover, which showed adventurers fighting an efreet on the front cover and offered a glimpse of the much-storied city on the back. This time around, the HackMaster 4e GameMaster’s Guide (2001) depicted the battle a few second later, as the wizard’s spell has gone off and the warrior has been slain.
As the OSR expanded, Necromancer Games decided to homage Sutherland’s work for their City of Brass (2007), but they cleverly combined the two covers, placing the battle more clearly in the city itself. When Frog God Games revamped the supplement as City of Brass 5e (2019), they continued to evolve the artwork away from the original. As usual, Troll Lord Games then offered their own take with their Castle Keepers Guide, in its fourth printing (2023).
The Replacements (1983)
In 1983, TSR revamped their D&D trade dress and also redid the covers of all of their hardcovers except the Fiend Folio, with the intent of better appealing to the mass-market and making their games more family-friendly. The new covers by Jeff Easley were perhaps more technically proficient but lost the indie style that had defined early D&D. These later covers were also forgotten in a way that the more stylized designs by artists such as Dave Sutherland, Dave Trampier, Erol Otus, and others were not. (Easley’s striking dungeon master may be the exception to that, as well as some of his other works that didn’t re-cover existing books, Unearthed Arcana in particular.)
