By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
The explosive success of Dungeons and Dragons podcasts, including The Adventure Zone, Not Another Dungeons and Dragons Podcast, and Rotating Heroes, has helped make the classic tabletop game more popular than ever before. Critical Role, the largest and most successful actual play podcast, even turned their campaign into an animated series, The Legend of Vox Machina, on Amazon Prime, but that wasn’t the first D&D campaign to become a series. In 1990, the anime Record of Lodoss War brought author Ryo Mizuno’s home-brew game to life.
Actual Play Before Podcasts
Record of Lodoss War began as a serialized “replay” in Comptiq, a Japanese magazine, as a transcript of Mizuno’s D&D sessions. Using Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition as a base for the story of high fantasy featuring the adventuring party of Woodchuck, Slayn, Etoh, Parn, Deedlit, and Ghlim, each representing a different class from the game. Undertaking a mission from the king, the adventuring party starts out by getting a green dragon very angry, and the stakes only go up from there.
As everyone who has ever played a Dungeons and Dragons campaign knows, there’s a rhythm to the adventure, and Record of Lodoss War captures that same crescendo, complete with grand mysteries, betrayals, and a final battle that shakes the heavens. No anime since, not even Slayers or Delicious in Dungeon, has brought a campaign to life in quite the same way. The original series is only 13 episodes long, so it goes faster than any home campaign.
Old-School Fantasy Throwback
To say that Record of Lodoss War was an instant success would be an understatement. The original novels that Ryo Mizuno wrote before the anime have sold over 10 million copies in Japan, over a dozen video games, tabletop role-playing games, and two spin-off franchises, Legend of Crystania and Rune Soldier. The two spin-offs take place after the end of the original series and explore what happened to some of the party after the final battle. Record of Lodoss War: Chronicles of the Heroic Knight, released in 1998, brings (most) of the party back together again for a 27-episode series that benefits from better animation and music mixing but doesn’t have the same appeal as the original.
To this day, there’s been massively successful fantasy anime, including Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End that have pushed the medium forward with bold storytelling and fantastic new takes on the old tropes. Yet, there’s something to be said about a series like Record of Lodoss War that embraces the classic tropes from the young Parn’s ascension into leadership hitting all the classic RPG beats to the isolationist elves Deedlit is trying to save, and Woodchuck, a thief, and with that one-word description, you know exactly to expect. There’s nothing wrong with a cliche anime every now and then, and for the most part, the 1990 series has aged well and remains perfectly watchable today.
Role-playing games, including Dungeons and Dragons, have changed over the years, which is why “Elf” is no longer a class, and goblins are no longer forced to be an evil race; going back to watch Record of Lodoss War is like opening a time capsule that contains THAC0. It’s rough around the edges, Pirotess the Dark Elf’s design is pure fanservice, and the plot doesn’t surpass the first seasons of The Adventure Zone, NaDDPoD, or Critical Role, but it’s fun to go back to where it all began.
If you’ve never watched Record of Lodoss War, you can stream it on Crunchyroll.
