Review: ‘Saturday Morning Adventures Dungeons & Dragons’ #3 Rolls Minimal Damage

Welcome to the table,

I’ve talked about the adventures of the Dragonborn Paladin and The Cat Wizard before. Two characters that my buddy Bob and I played in a campaign that ran a few years, and honestly is one of the best times I have ever had as a player. We were overclocked and ran absolutely wild across the Cthulhu Mythos-themed hellscape that was the campaign setting. We did, however, have a few moments that totally threw us and we were worried we were not going to make it through the night.

One such occasion was when we encountered a beholder guarding a vault at the bottom of an ancient haunted tower. It saw us before we saw it (one would guess all those eyes gave it the advantage) and got the drop on us unprepared and unready for combat. We spent the next five hours near death and worried we were going to lose our characters with every dice roll.

On top of being a difficult combatant, beholders typically come with a few nasty magical abilities they can shoot out of their plethora of eyes. The ones we were most worried that this particular Beholder had were disintegration that would have turned us to ash and dust, a death ray that would have seen us drop on the spot, and a petrification ray that would turn us into stone statues to be shattered at the Beholders whim.

I still think that fight was the most difficult combat of the game and we took down a god at one point.

All that to say, when a Beholder showed up in issue #3 of IDW’s Saturday Morning Adventures Dungeons & Dragons I knew the stakes had just gotten way higher than I expected them to get.

The tone on this issue seems to get a little darker than I was expecting from the series. That is not a bad thing by any stretch, it just feels noticeably different than the vibe from the first two issues of the series.

The gang is split up at the beginning of the issue, due to some wild magic shenanigans from the sorcerer who brought them here, and within the first few pages Eric the Cavalier and Diana the Acrobat encounter a Beholder hellbent on destroying them.

The fact Eric says the line “I would’ve preferred the dragon” when he realizes a Beholder is about to attack felt like it was written by someone who played the game or at the least knows the Monster Manual fairly well.

There is a twist in this issue that I did not see coming, but it plays out after a tired trope that felt a little too telegraphed. The twist, I kinda suspected from the beginning, with the 40th anniversary of D&D coming in 2024 and there being a lot of “Year of the Villain” stuff teased. It feels like a prelude to something way bigger down the line that makes sense for the synergy of the comic and the parent franchise.

I hate to say this, but this issue, even with the Beholder and the big twist, still felt a little flat. Almost like a gap issue. If you like the series, and I do, this is still a must-have issue because you don’t want to miss a chunk of the story, but it was not really an exciting read. I did not get pumped up at any point. The beholder line was for sure amusing, but the edge felt diminished. There were some panels with books that felt phoned in and rendered weird, and all in all it just sorta did not work for me.

It was a good comic, but the art did not dazzle as much, the story needed to have this beat for sure but the whole issue just kind of lacked the sparkle that the first two issues had.

You can pick up a copy at this link and like me, I am sure you are still looking forward to the next offering. Hopefully, this is just where the story catches its breath for the next epic adventure moment.

As all my gamers can attest, you can’t always roll critical hits.

Until next time, it really was not a bad issue. It just legit felt flat. The dialog and everything just did not get me pumped. I know the team tried but they dealt minimal damage on this one.