Donjons et Dragons

Despite Clark Ashton Smith's knowledge and use of the French language in his poetry and fiction, this post is not about him. Rather, it's about a curious book sent to me by an English-speaking reader, who thought I might find it fascinating – and he was correct!

Written by Mathilde Maraninchi and published in 1982, Donjons et Dragons is an incredible artifact from the early days of the hobby. At just under 100 pages in length, it's both an introduction to "a new type of boardgame [jeu de société]: the roleplaying game" and as a playable summary of the rules themselves. That latter part, for me, is one of the most remarkable things about this peculiar volume: it functions as a bootleg D&D rulebook released a year before the official French translation of the Moldvay Basic Set (which I owned). 

There is a great deal I could say about Donjons et Dragons simply on the basis of reading it and perhaps I will in future posts. For now, though, I wanted to focus on the interior artwork by Joël Bordier, which is incredible. For example, here are the illustrations of several of the character classes:

There also some remarkable monster illustrations as well, in this case a young green dragon with red spots (dragon vert à pois rouges junior) and a gelatinous cube color (cube gélatineux de couleur):

As I said, the book is probably worthy of several more posts. Before I do that, though, I'm curious to see if any of my French-speaking readers are familiar with this book and, especially, the circumstances under which it was published. It appeared before any TSR-sanctioned edition of D&D and looks to be a pretty close copy of the 1977 Holmes rulebook (though I haven't spent much time comparing them, to be honest). That makes it a unique historical document, if nothing else.