Artist: Dave Trampier, I’d say.
Source: Gary Gygax,
Players Handbook (TSR, 1979)
Class:
BARD
Although I do not especially like nor dislike
BARDS and have never played one, I feel STRANGELY COMPELLED to pretend I absolutely adore
BARDS, so here goes.
I have loved
BARDS ever since I read Phyllis Eisenstein’s
Born to Exile (1978) when… I wasn’t even born yet…, which features the minstrel Alaric and may well be the first truly Fantasy novel in the classic sense of the word I ever read.
Since we’re only allowed to post one picture each – and one picture only and from some D&D source at that – and because there aren’t actually any D&D pictures that inspired me to love anything about D&D, I suppose I’ll have to go with the picture of the stringed instrument in Appendix II of the 1E
Players Handbook – which I actually like.
And I’m not even pretending
too much here, for it is true that this picture in combination with the magnificent names in
BARDS Table I and
BARDS Table II on the next page and the fact that the class was in an Appendix rather than with the other classes for reasons I didn’t understand when I first started using the PHB, actually did intrigue and mystify me no end back in the day, all of which has always made me want to play a
BARD – but which I never ended up doing.
Had I been allowed to use a picture not from some D&D source to express my love for
BARDS, I suppose I would have had a hard time choosing between this one, by Richard Hescox:
This one, by Justin Sweet:
An this one, by the inimitable Donato Giancola:
But alas, it is not to be.