Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: First Quest – The Music

Dungeons & Dragons on Vinyl (and cassette)

A nearly forgotten gem from the mid-eighties era of Dungeons & Dragons is the unusual album, First Quest: The Music, not to be confused with the 1994 release by TSR, also called First Quest. I had been playing D&D for a few years by the time this came out, but I do not remember seeing or hearing about it until the early nineties. That is when I started playing the game with a new group and one of the players, who had been playing as long as I had, brought the record to one of our sessions.

We all sat there, passing the album around and listening to this strange mix of spoken word and electronic orchestration. Eventually, we all just huddled over the table trying to read the adventure module that came with it. It had caught our attention, but despite the album being in front of us, no one knew anything about it.

A few years ago, I was browsing YouTube for D&D material when this album showed up. I bookmarked it and have listened to it a few times since. Enough to develop an opinion on the album and I have to say, I like it. It’s a bit uneven, which might be because it has various artists working on it, but many of the tracks are solid, and the narration is wonderful.

The narration was provided by Valentine Dyall (1908-1985), who passed away before the album was released. Dyall was a character actor, with a great voice. He was the narrator of the BBC Radio horror series Appointment with Fear and played the Black Guardian during the Tom Baker's era of Doctor Who.

Released in 1985, the double album was available on LP and cassette, with plans for it to be released on Compact Disc. I think mediocre sales doomed the CD release, a shame since a digital version would have likely helped preserve the album. At least it would have raised the probability of it availability in the digital era of music.

The electronic-based music seems perfect for the era of gaming. It adds an otherworldliness to the album. The seventies and eighties were a great time for the growth of electronic music in both pop culture and film music. Its rise paralleled the birth and growth of D&D. So it seems natural that an early attempt to add music to role-playing would lean into it. I could do without the more repetitive tracks, but even if I don’t love a track, it does help set a mood.

First Quest also included an adventure outline, and it is not one to be entered into casually. The creators suggest 15th level or higher. Even with that level, I think you would need the right mix and a lenient Dungeon Master to succeed in the game. I have never played or run First Quest. If I did, I would spend a good amount of time balancing it out and fleshing out the outline, since it is lacking the detail most players would expect by 1985 game standards.

According to a contest run by White Dwarf Magazine in 1986, the concept had some talented people behind it, including Tom Kirby, Jim Bambra, Phil Gallagher of TSR (UK), and Paul Cockburn. The project seems to have largely originated with TSR UK. They would even fly out to Los Angeles to meet with Gary Gygax to get his blessing on the album before its release. Gary had this to say about the album:

Close your eyes and experience a musical odyssey through a magical underworld of adventure filled with hobgoblins, gnomes, dragons, monsters, and heroes.

E. Gary Gygax

While First Quest was available in the United States, I don’t remember it being mentioned in any US-based publications. It was featured in the UK-based White Dwarf, which not only advertised the album but also hosted a contest. In issue 23, they state, “White Dwarf has 25 copies of First Quest, the AD&D double LP, to give away, along with 3 First Quest T-shirts. First Quest is a new venture as far as role-playing goes: it comes complete with outlines for an AD&D adventure on the sleeves of the two records.”

I love this contest because it makes you answer two questions, although they give you a hint, to make it a little easier. What they want to know where the artwork included in the album comes from and who painted it. I cannot find a photo of the shirt, but I would guess it was printed with the album contest and that I would love to own one. Here is the contest page. Would you have been able to enter the contest?

Looking at the album’s entry on Discogs, I see a bunch of names attached to the album including David Miller, Denis Haines, Steve Parsons, Phil Thornton, G.P. Hall, and Barrie Guard, all of whom contributed tracks to the album. Miller is especially interesting, I stumbled across this often-cited comment by David Miller on Blogonomicon:

Greetings - my name is David Miller and I was one of the contributors/organizers of/for/to this album. It was a lot of fun getting it together. As anyone who's played D&D knows, you can't really play a loose, free-wheeling game to the constraints of the flow of the tracks but it was a gas, nevertheless. As part of all this I went to Los Angeles and visited E. Gary Gygax to get his blessing and support. He lived (as you might expect) in this weird, large old house that did, in fact, look somewhat spooky. As I knocked on the door I heard the sound of a very large and intimidating dog barking from somewhere inside - that was somewhat unsettling... Eventually Mr Gygax let me in, listened to the album and he was well into it. He also demonstrated for me a variety of manoeuvers by which one could dispatch a varying quantity of orcs, depending on how they approached you, what armaments they were carrying and what mood they were in....it may come in useful one day....

I worked as a team with Phil Thornton (we were both in the band/group/entity/manifestation known as Expandis which is still a going concern). It was, as I say, a lot of fun doing this and would incorporate such unorthodox techniques as mildly tormenting one of his young infant children so as to achieve some authentically pitiful cries of despair on one of the tracks. That sons therapy is still on-going to this day. I too am amused by the "especially mediocre" description...I shall comfort myself by deciding that that was due to the other contributors efforts or lack thereof. I don't know who did the Bloodguard track but it wasn't us....I am a huge Thomas Covenant fan and wouldn't disrespect them like that...not after all they went through. There were also First Quest T-Shirts (of which I have a couple, still unwrapped) and other stuff, I'm sure. I was responsible for bringing Valentine Dyall on board, more because I've always been a huge Goons fan and he was on those recording from time to time sounding quite menacing even amidst the madness. I'm afraid I wrote his voice-over script, which is, indeed, especially mediocre and I cringe even to this day when I hear it. He deserved much better than that, especially as he passed on soon after...not the most fitting swan song. My belated apologies to him. He hadn't been getting any work for a long time and I hear he was very grateful for this so I'm glad of that, at least. I would have loved to have met him but was out of town when his recording sessions occurred.

Thanks for posting the tracks - I really enjoyed having them pop up out of the woodwork and listening to them again after all this time, mediocre as they may be... :)

Bye for now.....

With Dungeons & Dragons collecting continuing to grow in popularity, the price for First Quest in either LP or cassette continues to climb. Lucky for the curious, collectors like Blognomicon have helped preserve this gem. From their single post, the information, and their scans and audio files have found their ways to dozens of places on the internet. It has also inspired other collectors to find a copy of their own.

First Quest was a niche product and I want to say it was ahead of its time, and that’s why it didn’t succeed, but I don’t think that’s what happened. While an album adventure for RPGs seems like a fun idea, it takes away agency from the people running the game. Add to that its limited replayability, and it becomes pretty obvious why we never got more of these albums. Still, we are lucky we got this one album. It is a wonderful artifact of its time that was put together by talented people and thanks to the internet, we all get an opportunity to enjoy it.