Dungeons & Dragons: Total Party Killers #1
Writer: Christopher Hastings
Artist: Denis Medri
Colorist: Dan Jackson
Cover Artist: Elizabeth Beals
Ever since the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons was released back in the year 2000, it's been possible to play as some of the more monstrous races of its fantasy world. Even so, most groups have their own rules or limitations as to which races you're actually able to play.
Dungeons & Dragons: Total Party Killers throws all of those rules out the window.
Monty Haul
The powerful and terrible wizard Custos has died! His tower, now without a master, sits empty. Well, empty except for the monsters under his control. You see, Custos was the creator of the Gorget of Dominance, which allows him to control anyone (or anything) that he places a special brooch onto. Now that he is dead, those under his control are still trapped under his sway, unless a new master claims the Gorget.
Enter the adventuring party of druid Drusilia, wizard Val, and dimwitted barbarian Cholm. At the entrance to the tower, they meet thief Tilli and decide to pool their resources to find the Gorget of Dominance and destroy it...
Just kidding. Tilli is actually a lycanthrope under the control of the Gorget, who is working with some of the other captive monsters—mind flayer Q'Laxx, baby beholder Looksy, spellcasting gelatinous cube Mucus Cubus, and death knight Strago—to trick a group of adventurers into removing the Gorget from Custos's corpse. This would break the magic and free the monstrous party to leave the tower and return to the world outside.
It's a great plan, except each group of adventurers they lure there keeps killing the other monsters—their friends—and then dying themselves. This latest group seems like it might be different, but one of them seems to be hiding a powerful and dangerous secret of their own...
Dungeon Master's Lament
This was a lot of fun.
I was a little surprised by how much time the story took to the "reveal" of the monsters working together as a sort of adventuring party, given that it was made clear from the solicitations that they were the leads of the book. The build was done very well, don't get me wrong. If someone picked this up off the shelf on a whim because they saw the Dungeons & Dragons name on it, I think they'd have been genuinely surprised when the reveal came around.
The cast of characters is genuinely creative. Not the "regular" adventurers—they're about as generic as they come—but the monstrous ones are all very unique. One of the non-monster characters does have a pretty big secret that connects to some major elements of the Forgotten Realms, so that drives the story in a bit of a new direction. I just don't want to spoil it here. Plus, if you don't know the Realms, I don't think it'll mean anything to you anyway.
Back to the monster cast. Q'Laxx, the mind flayer, is actually able to absorb the personality and memories of the last person it devoured, which is an interesting change from the normal version that just plain eats your brains, old-school Venom-style. I can see plenty of fun to be had as it feeds on different individuals while the party is on its quest. The baby beholder, Looksy, is actually pretty cute, and almost Grogu-inspired in its facial expressions and how it acts. Tilli and Strago are pretty standard lycanthropes and death knights, nothing too crazy about them (yet). The real star of this motley bunch is the gelatinous cube Mucus Cubus, who has developed intelligence and the ability to cast spells thanks to the items and artifacts trapped within it. I guess it absorbed some really powerful individuals over the years. Just the image of a gelatinous cube with hands coming out of it is hilarious to me.
The actual plot is pretty straightforward, since again I knew the pitch for the series going into it. It's paced well and built nicely, though. There's some good dialogue between the characters, with some decent banter. Cholm is maybe a little too dumb—I'm sure they were going for a Minsc-like character, since he's so well-known thanks to the Baldur's Gate games, but it didn't quite work.
Now that the setup is out of the way, and the big reveal from one of the human adventurers has thrown a wrench into the monsters' plans, the real story of this miniseries can begin. I have no idea just where they're going to take it, but it looks like it should be a ton of fun and I'm excited to follow this unconventional adventuring party wherever they may go.
Loaded Dice
Since the release of the Chris Pine-starring Dungeons & Dragons movie a few years ago, we've been seeing a lot more "fun" adventuring parties in the novels and comics. Since Dark Horse took over the D&D license, they've very much leaned into that—first with The Fallbacks, and now with Total Party Killers. To keep these types of stories from devolving into feeling like a game table where everyone just stops caring what they do, you need a strong creative team. Thankfully, TPK has just that.
Christopher Hastings is a very funny writer. Doctor McNinja is hilarious, and I was a huge fan of his Gwenpool run at Marvel. So I had high expectations for this book, given the concept and him at the helm. I'm happy to say he does a great job with this first issue. We meet a ton of characters as he builds the plot, but everyone gets a moment or two to shine before many of them meet an untimely end. His dialogue and banter are enjoyable, with a couple of memorable lines. And the big reveal that I've alluded to but not spoiled is very effective here, so kudos to him for holding that until just the right moment and then changing the game with it.
On art, Denis Medri does a very good job. His style reminds me of Andrea Di Vito in a way—he's got that clean, rounded, almost cartoonish look going on. If you know D&D, you can tell at a glance what class the non-monster adventurers likely are. The monsters all look, well, monstrous, but creative and fun at the same time. There are some sudden and awful deaths, and he really sells the impact of those. All in all, it's a silly and fun story, and his art reflects that.
Colorist Dan Jackson is a great fit for Medri's art. He gives everything a bright and colorful look that fits the cartoonish style, and he gets plenty of fun effects to play with. From spellcasting text bubbles to a singing mouther bard and its horrible voice, to plenty of different power effects, he gets lots of opportunities to really show his stuff. And with where the party has to go at the end of the issue, we're going to see him play with even more cool stuff going forward.
Roll with Advantage
Dungeons & Dragons: Total Party Killers #1 is great fun, showing a completely different type of adventuring party than has hit the page (or probably your game table) before. Even though the monstrous nature of the group was known going in, they were still able to hit me with one big surprise that changed the trajectory of the story going forward. "A lycanthrope, a death knight, a beholder, a mind flayer, and a gelatinous cube walk into a dungeon" sounds like a setup for a bad D&D joke, but it's actually the starting point for what seems like it'll be a unique and hilarious adventure.