Black Gate

Art evolves, one generation of role-players leading into the next and each attaches it’s best memories to the artists that defined their games of choice. This ongoing series continues, but if you’ve missed previous entries they can be found here.

With the help of Wizards of the Coast I had my ‘Caldwell Lyssa’, and the weeks for the project were growing short. These final days became the most trying for me as artists started to hedge, deadlines were missed, and suddenly I faced the possibility that I might not get twenty artists when I was assured only months before that I’d have twenty-five.

Still, with every prick of a thorny dropout, there were those who provided a silver lining. Out there among the countless catalogues of incredible gaming work there were some artists who simply smiled and said ‘when do you need it’.

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The evolution of fantasy art finds another player this week, but if you’ve missed any past artist you can restart the journey here.

With the latest version in hand, I now had a ‘Nouveau Lyssa’, and my industry contacts were growing with seventeen artists down, the original total of ten far surpassed. Still, if I wanted twenty it was going to be difficult to do.

I went back into my desires for the project, and over the course of the months involved there were still regrets about some artists who’d said ‘no thank you’. One of these was Clyde Caldwell. Surprisingly, although Clyde had refused an entry into the project, he was always gracious enough to reply to emails.

After a year of random emails we’d grown rather close, and I think that fact made his exclusion to the project all the more painful to me.

You see, there’s the very intriguing part of Clyde’s decision not to do the project. According to his own website, and I quote: “I generally don’t take on a private commission unless I like the subject matter (Hint: In case you haven’t noticed, I like to draw and paint scantily clad or nude, sexy female characters!)”. Now, I read that quote a hundred times, and each time I did so I kept saying to myself ‘what the hell?’ Lyssa IS his favorite subject matter! It’s something I still haven’t made sense of to this day.

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Yep, it’s Art Evolution Wednesday here on Black Gate! If you’ve been absent on Wednesdays for the past three months you can find what has come before here.

Now my ‘Goth Lyssa’ was in the ring of honor and I was looking to continue my collection with someone I’d grown kind of gaga for after attending GenCon 09, but let me set the stage…

I love fantasy art, that’s a given, but I have to admit if I’m not looking over dragons and knights I like to sit back with a chai tea and dream of the work of Alphonse Mucha. I’ve had a Mucha calendar above my desk for seven straight years, and you know, the images just keep getting better.

This love of Art Nouveau is kind of core deep for me, and during that 09 GenCon I was trying to get over my horrible intro debacle with Jeff Easley in 08 by being a cool and collected art aficionado. Yeah, that lasted all of three seconds when I’m walking past a Chessex dice display and ran into the art of Echo Chernik.

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The scope of Art Evolution continues, but if you’ve missed any previous artists you can go back and find them here.

‘Middle-Earth Lyssa’ was complete, and I was looking for more recruits. During this whole process I’d kept to my promise, making sure that every person I’d come in contact with, even those who’d turned me down, continued to get updates.

The winter progressed, and during the dead of that cold time it was a great surprise, and certainly a sense of justification for my efforts, when Brom emailed me and said that he’d see what he could do to help out.

Well, three cheers for Brom, a true man of character!

When I was in college, and spent most of my mother’s hard-earned money on comic books [instead of food, or gas, or clothing, or heat…], but I was happy with my long-boxes. That said, I neglected my RPG collection, but lucky for me a friend in my little circle of role-players decided to purchase the TSR campaign setting Dark Sun. As a DM at heart, I decided that I’d take a break from running a game [and therefore having to buy all the books involved in it] and let this guy do the legwork.

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Art Evolution, the project that shows the personal take on a single unifying character by the greatest artists in the RPG field, continues. But if you’ve missed some, you can find the beginning here.

After last week’s entry I had my ‘3rd Edition Lyssa’, and I was ready to move further back in my timeline. For that purpose, I got into my way-back machine and dialed in the dawn of RPGs, the year 1976.

If you go back further than 76’ you’re fooling yourself if you think anything a gamer played was more than an advanced miniatures game. However, in that year D&D was beginning its infant run and Flying Buffalo put out its first module Castle Buffalo for Tunnels & Trolls.

That now infamous and out of print module was graced with a cover by Liz Danforth, the Queen of the Role Playing Game. Liz was doing RPGs before the world knew what RPGs were, and although I was only five years old at the time, I would come to appreciate her grace and dedication when I later discovered Middle-Earth Role-Playing from Iron Crown Enterprises in the mid-eighties.

As you’ve already seen, the first book I ever read was The Hobbit, so it certainly came to pass that when I.C.E. started producing role-playing in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth I was right there ready to buy a part of the experience.

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Art Evolution continues, from its roots here, to the incredible talent that created the newest vision in ‘Dragon Chess Lyssa’.

Now things were fully flowing in a uniform direction, and the more people I talked to the better the reception. This project was real, solid, and I decided it was time to go back to John O’Neill and give him an update.

O’Neill gave me another ambiguous ‘can’t wait to see what you’ve got’. Again, nothing to write home about, but certainly a continuing vote of confidence that what I was doing would at least be viewed by the movers and shakers in the Black Gate rooftop headquarters.

Not wanting to push matters with O’Neill, I just put my nose back to the grindstone and continued on with my article recruitment. To this end I determined that I’d contact Todd Lockwood.

Now I’m not going to blow smoke here, I knew Todd’s work having immersed myself in D&D 3rd Edition when it released in the late 90s, but I’d never considered his work life-altering because of a single restricting issue, the covers of the 3rd Edition core books were all without picture art [I know, blasphemy!]. From that standpoint nothing in 3rd Edition struck me as particularly awe-inspiring, and it’s much harder to make a huge impression when you are dealing with smaller interior art.

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Art Evolution, the continuing study of a single iconic character as imagined by the greatest fantasy RPG artists in the past thirty years continues, but if you want to view previous artists, you can begin here.

‘Dragonlance Lyssa’ was complete, as was a personal dream. I’d managed to get Larry Elmore, and was continuing down my list of incredible talent. As I’ve mentioned several times before, I like to read old issues of Dragon Magazine, and you can’t possibly do that without stumbling over an issue with a Den Beauvais cover.

This is also a good jumping off point in itself, and that is the very important role Dragon Magazine played in the landscape of the RPG field. In its original incarnation, ‘The Dragon’ was first published in June 1976, predating even the module series we’ve seen thus far in this article. Even its founder, Gygax, didn’t believe it would have the lifespan or impact that it did for gamers across the globe, but in its finality that print version of Dragon lasted thirty-one years.

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As we enter week twelve of the Art Evolution project, I’m going to have to take a moment and digress. If you’re looking for the project’s beginning, you can find it here. Or you can click to see my ‘Groovy Lyssa‘ from last week.

In 1984 I was thirteen years old, in junior high school, and had managed to maintain the appearance of being a ‘C’ student when I truly couldn’t read above the very rudiments of the written word. I absolutely hated the idea of reading, and I’d done everything in my power to prevent the school-driven establishment from making me do so.

I’d managed to slip through the cracks, a lost student, presumably one who would end up failing out of high school — or just getting the minimum scores needed for a base diploma, with no hope of a higher education. I was fine with that, and although my clever ruse of literary competence was eventually discovered by my mother (who spent a summer tutoring me to some semblance of reading ability between sixth and seventh grade), I still hated the prospect of books.

This continued until the middle of my seventh grade. One day while on a field trip to Indianapolis with my class, my malcontent view of books changed forever. I was in the big city, and big cities had bookstores, and this particular one had a Waldenbooks [R.I.P. Waldens, I miss you each time I’m forced to go to a mall] with a large fantasy book section.

I stood dumbstruck by what I saw there that day, and a friend of mine pulled down a copy of Dragons of Autumn Twilight and said, “This book was awesome.” Because unlike me, my friend Jason could read…

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Art Evolution, 1979-2009, continues as we journey back in time to the founding days of the RPG genre. For those of you who have missed what’s come before, you can catch-up here.

The year was now twenty-ten, I had my ‘Iron Kingdoms Lyssa‘, and I was deep in the process of expanding my vision of true Art Evolution to a full-blown epic. Ten artists down and I was ready to move on to the second half of my dream list.

The first name on that slate was Brom. Pressed by Tony DiTerlizzi, and with other artists clamoring for this gothic-genius to be included, as well as my own love of the Dark Sun universe, I sent out my appeal him. Unfortunately Brom turned me down, nicely, to be sure, but he didn’t have the time to commit.

I took a breath, tried to find my Zen center, and placed images of a Brom Lyssa on hold. As in the cases of Erol and Clyde, it’s very tough to give up a dream, and I determined that if I kept these wonderful artists in the project loop, there might be a chance for a change of heart before all was said and done.

Putting my Dark Sun boxes to the side, I pulled forth one of the great TSR modules of all time, B2: Keep on the Borderlands. This cover was done by Jim Roslof, someone I’d seen on Facebook, and although he was long and again retired, he had been the Art Director at TSR when they went from black and white to full color. This was someone who mattered, and I needed to include him.

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Art Evolution, the project to catalogue great fantasy RPG artists over the past thirty years depicting a single character, began here, and the tenth master is detailed below.

With the inclusion of a ‘Battletech Lyssa‘ I’d done it, landing nine of my ten artists and only Erol Otus still holding out. What to do next? I emailed Erol, told him I had a venue for market, all nine other artists signed on, and we only needed him to complete the project. Erol promptly denied me again…

Still, nine representations put me over the moon. I looked back at my bookshelves and decided to try and live inside the mantra of my own lofty dreams. It was time to break out of the boundaries of money and convention and just go for it.

I pulled down Iron Kingdoms and rediscovered Matthew D. Wilson, a favorite of mine since the day I first saw TSR’s Forgotten Realms supplement The Unapproachable East. I broke out my D&D 3rd Edition Players Handbook and tripped over myself for not already including the works of Todd Lockwood. Going with Tony DiTerlizzi’s advice, I dipped into the early nineties with my collection of Dark Sun boxed sets and decided Brom was an absolute must.

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