French D&D Images

As promised, here are some scans of a few pieces of artwork from the 1982 French edition of Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set edited by Tom Moldvay. What you'll notice is that a great many of the images below are re-imaginings of pieces that appeared in the original 1981 English language version, like this one:

The original version of this from the 1981 edition is almost identical, right down to the numbers shown on most of the dice, so why bother commissioning a new piece?

Goofy though it is, I actually really like this illustration by Jim Holloway. There is a comparable illustration in the 1981 edition, but it depicts two people (one male, one female) imagining themselves as D&D characters, not one, and neither looks anything like this fellow, who seems a truer representative of the cohort of gamers entering the hobby via the Basic Rules.

This looks to be another Jim Holloway piece, depicting what I suspect are meant to be a thief, an elf, and a dwarf. It's wholly original and has no antecedent in the 1981 edition.

This is Larry Elmore's version of the famed alignment illustration from the 1981 book. I can't be certain, but I think it had previously appeared elsewhere, perhaps in an issue of Polyhedron, but my memory is faulty after three decades.

Here's another reworking, this time of Erol Otus's wizards arguing over who gets which magic items from their latest haul. While the entirety of this piece by Larry Elmore (so far as I can recall) never appeared anywhere, the female magic-user on the left makes several appearances in the 1983 Frank Mentzer-edited Basic Set.

There are many more illustrations in the French Basic Rules I can share if there's sufficient interest in seeing them. I picked the ones above because they struck me as interesting and because the majority of them are either direct re-imaginings of things found in the 1981 English version or depict similar things. I find myself wondering why all the interior artwork is new and unique to this edition but the Erol Otus cover painting was retained. Regardless, I find it helps give the 1982 French version a flavor all its own that distinguishes it from the original work from which it was derived.