They are soon joined by Deedlit, a wispy Elf who is Friend to All Living Things (and who falls for Parn like a cliff-diver in concrete shoes). Joining up with them are the wizard with the cool name, Slayn Starseeker, and his friend, the dwarf Ghim, who are on a quest to locate a missing White Mage named Laylia. The swelling orchestral score by Mitsuo Hagita makes it an aural feast as well.Īs far as plot goes, it's standard RPG fare: Kid Hero Parn and his cleric buddy Etoh find themselves Walking the Earth, investigating evil after Parn gets himself thrown out of his hometown. The lovely art and character designs by Yutaka Izubuchi and Nobuteru Yuki make the OVA series a visual feast, in spite of its rather limited animation. What is 'it'? It is Record of Lodoss War, a sprawling epic which incorporates nearly every Tolkien-esque, and D&D, fantasy cliche in the book, but does so with style, panache and sincerity. Its dedicated tabletop RPG system was created after TSR turned down an opportunity to create an official Dungeons & Dragons supplement based on it. It even returned to its roots as the most popular tabletop role-playing game in Japan for a time.

In 1990, it became an animated 13-part OVA series, and from then on it branched into movies, manga and TV series (some of which were alternate universe versions of the OVA, but which followed the story in the original novels more closely). It first began as a series of role-playing game sessions (with the 1983 Basic Set of Dungeons & Dragons, no less), recorded and transcribed into a series of Actual Play articles in Comptiq Magazine from 1986 to 1988 to commemorate D&D's first anniversary of publication in Japan, which were then adapted into a series of novels by game master Ryo Mizuno, published from 1988 to 1993.

Record of Lodoss War by Ryo Mizuno