Art Evolution 4: David Deitrick
In my ongoing Art Evolution series, I explained my plan to collect ten of the greatest fantasy role-playing artists of all time for a shared project. They were to illustrate a single character in their most recognizable style. So far, the list has included Jeff Laubenstein, Eric Vedder, and Jeff Dee, with this week adding again to that prestigious list.
Three down, and I now had a “1st Edition D&D Lyssa”, but I’d only scratched the surface of my goal and all the artists I’d collected so far weren’t cold calls. These were people I’d already worked with, friends and partners, and the list that remained loomed much larger than this current success. I kept asking myself, ‘do you want this for you, or do you want it for something greater?’
I chewed on that as I read through an old Dragon magazine one afternoon in late August [a pastime I strongly suggest doing once a month to anyone still role-playing]. While reading, I stumbled on a beautiful advertisement for the Traveller RPG.
I recognized the art as something I’d loved in my teens, but had no idea who drew it. Going to my bookshelves I pulled down a copy of FASA’s House Davion supplement for Battletech and managed to put a name to a style… David Deitrick.
I remembered him from a hundred different pictures that had shaped my role-playing life in the late eighties. Everything about his work screamed military, and that style lent so well to the science-fiction bent of the companies he helped characterize.
I’m an old TSR module fan, and as such I’ve always been intrigued by how the concept of such media came into existence. For the most part they fall in series, kind of like writers follow Tolkien with the concept of connected books and characters in a trilogy. It makes perfect sense, especially if you’re trying to create an extended campaign with a gaming group that meets on a regular basis. Series modules facilitate that, and recently I had the opportunity to chat with one of the original designers of a TSR foundation adventure path, the L Series ‘Lendore Isles.’
I’m a gamer, a lifer, someone who at the age of thirty-nine doesn’t get to roll dice like it did at nineteen, but I still take a week’s vacation every year to hang out with High School friends and revisit campaigns where characters have been on paper long enough to legally drink in the U.S.