Read These Manga if You Love Anime and D&D
Does your fandom exist in the intersection of D&D and anime? Do you need a way to get more of both in your life? These manga will help!
Anime was my intro to nerd culture. Everything from conventions and cosplay to comic books and tabletop gaming stemmed from the stylized subtitled cartoons. I probably wouldn’t have started to find writing so enjoyable if it wasn’t for fanfiction based on, you guessed it, anime.
And from anime came conventions and the Otakon LARP, which led me straight to tabletop roleplaying. If you, like me, love both anime and D&D and aren’t sure what anime to marathon next, I have a few recommendations for you.
1. Record of Lodoss War
Record of Lodoss War is one of the most RPG-feeling anime out there, and that’s by design. The setting was originally created for an RPG and the structure and conventions were purposefully laid out to remind of us adventure RPGs. Even the main party reads like characters you’d want to see in your party… But maybe not characters you would see in your party because while Lodoss War is the ideal, most of us playing a little harder, loose, and goofy with our D&D adventures.
2. Magic Knight Rayearth
A little on the older side, but one of my favorites. Rayearth is a pretty standard magical girl isekai show about three Jr. High students suddenly transported to a magical world in need of saving. As they gain experience their armor, spells, and weapons all level up with them in a way that feels like updating a D&D character sheet, and their story arcs are very reminiscent of a D&D campaign at its most classic. The art is by CLAMP, who are some of my longtime favorites, so the art is still beautiful. Sometimes I still flip through my Rayearth artbooks.
3. That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime
Satoru is an average 37-year-old office worker who gets transported to a strange world (another isekai, I know) and changed into a slime with the ability to absorb almost anything and mimic their appearance and abilities. There’s a dragon, a quest, goblins, and dwarves, and the main character is the roundish anime equivalent of an intelligent gelatinous cube! This show feels like it should be absolute nonsense, but its popularity is definitely deserved.
4. Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End
There is a decent chance that you’re watching this anime air right now in real-time. And if that’s the case, you know how D&D this is. There are parties of adventurers, silly spells for nothing, and lots of classic D&D monsters. But what really does it for me is how true the characters feel. Some of them pretend to be the proud, normal, focused adventurers you see in most epic fantasy. But deep down they’re goofy weirdoes who can’t remember to check chests for mimics and get distracted on side-quests for fifty years.
5. Delicious in Dungeon
Another anime that’s coming out right now, Delicious in Dungeon is sort of that tabletop RPG trope where all of your players want to adopt all of the NPCs and make pets of all of the monsters…. Only now they want to eat them. Look, the dungeon is deep, and carrying enough rations will get heavy. So why not eat the monsters?
Oh hey! BoLS might make a little dolla-dolla if you decide to buy these items. We need that money to buy raw meat to feed to our carnivorous plant from outer space. If we don’t feed him, he’ll turn on us.
