Retrospective: The Shady Dragon Inn

I got a lot of use out of TSR's The Rogues Gallery back in the day, for reasons I explain here. Nevertheless, I still had a prodigious appetite for pre-generated characters I could use as henchmen, hirelings, or opponents. That's why I readily picked up a copy of 1983's The Shady Dragon Inn, despite its being for "kiddie D&D" – and I'm glad I did.

Unlike The Rogues Gallery, whose pre-generated characters were little more than a single line of game statistics, those in The Shady Dragon Inn were more fully described, with names, vital statistics, equipment, and even an illustration by the incomparable Jim Holloway. In my opinion, this made the characters presented herein much more memorable and, to this day, I can still recall the monikers of several of them, like Boris Bonesnapper, Umberto the Ugly, and Dorcas Deepdelver. The illustrations alone – complete with bearded female dwarves, as God and Tolkien intended – are almost worth the price of admission alone. As he so often did, Holloway presents us with characters who are distinctive and a little quirky, which is to say, real. Take a gander at this motley crew of magic-users for a sense of what I mean.

Less creditably – and part of why I caviled at buying this at first – The Shady Dragon Inn also included similar write-ups for the characters of the AD&D toy line, like Strongheart the Paladin (here a fighter, because this is a D&D product) and Warduke. This section only takes up four pages, so it's not a huge detraction from the rest of the book's content, but it bugs me nonetheless. Nearly forty years later, I still find the creation of D&D toys and even more bizarre products to be irksome. 

The Shady Dragon Inn also includes a collection of adventuring parties of various levels and compositions using the characters presented in the book. This is very useful and a feature of old school play that doesn't seem to be all that commonplace today. Rounding out the product is a large map of the eponymous Shady Dragon Inn (though the text, oddly, calls it the Shady Dragon Tavern), presumably intended for use with miniatures or counters. There's no description of the place, which is just as well, since it's rather generic in its layout. Unlike the characters, I don't think I ever made use of the map in my campaigns of old.