Believe it or not, this picture used to really bug me as a younger man and I spent way too many hours thinking about it or arguing about it with my friends. It's a piece of Dave Trampier art that appears on page 93 of the
AD&D Players Handbook. Simply as a piece of history, I think it's quite significant. First, it's a reminder that, way back when, giant frogs were in fact considered a real threat to adventurers. I recall the giant frogs outside the moathouse of the Temple of Elemental Evil wreaking terrible havoc on more than one party. The ability to swallow a target whole is a mighty one and giant frogs in my experience often made good use of it.
Second, look at the elf. Yes, that's an elf. See, a lot of people would have you believe that Gary was lying through his teeth when he said that Tolkien's
The Lord of the Rings had little influence on
D&D. They'll point to all sorts of evidence to prove their point, but they rarely look at how elves were depicted in the original three
AD&D books. To my mind, they have more to do with fairy tale elves than with the Nordic-inspired demigods-among-men of Middle Earth. I mean, just look at that guy facing off against the giant frog. Aside from the really big nose and ears, he's even got the Hat and the Shoes. That's no Legalas or Elrond there, my friends. Heck, even the Keebler Elves are so non-traditional that they don't wear the Shoes anymore.
But neither of these points is why I was obsessed with this illustration as a youth. Immediately beneath this piece of artwork are the descriptions of two 9th-level magic-user spells,
temporal stasis and
time stop. Now, if you look at the picture, you'll see that the elf is making the universal "Stop!" motion with his hand. And if you look at the giant frog, you'll see that he does appear to be caught in mid-jump. To me, it was clear that the elf had just cast one of those two spells on the frog. The problem -- aside from the fact that
time stop has no somatic component, thus making the hand gesture needless -- was that no elf could possibly cast a 9th-level magic-user spell. So how was he freezing the frog in place like that? Some of my friends argued that he was doing no such thing, but I always made the case that the placement of the illustration suggested otherwise. Throughout the PHB, the illustrations generally related to the text, so why not here? Was he some sort of uber-elf who could cast such high-level spells? Had Tramp not read the
AD&D rules or, worse yet, did Gary not care about the lack of "realism" in the book's illustrations?
I still have no definitive answer after all these years, but I still think about that picture.
Now, I'm on record as adoring T1 for reasons I've explained before. However, many of my childhood friends hated it, thinking it dull and uninspired. Indeed, one of them used to make fun of the module by pointing to this illustration, which we presumed illustrated the NPCs Burne and Rufus, and making up dialog to go with it:
