Black Gate

It’s the day after Christmas here in L.A. as I write this, the office quiet, but I felt like going in anyway and getting some work done. Perhaps it was because yesterday, after a wonderful feast of turkey, potatoes, and all the fixings, I took a walk with the family three miles from my home out onto the Palos Verdes peninsula. This walk, in seventy degree temperatures with a slight easterly breeze and done in shorts and a T-shirt, held an immense amount of physical beauty.

With a cloudless azure sky, and a tranquil ocean all the way to the mountainous shadows of Catalina Island, the channel is was an epic vista. Still, what strikes a writer’s soul is often the movement of it all, the flights of pelicans looking like pteranodons sailing at eye level as you walk atop the hundred foot bluffs that drop into the whitewater curls of water churning below. If you look down into the kelp fields further out from the breakers you can spy the blazing orange Garibaldi, the state fish of California, as they shine under the waves amid the deep green strands, and further out into the endless blue go the whales.

Gray’s this time of year, majestic and high breaching, they spew mist into the air in pods traveling south, their monstrous tales fully lifted from the waves before plunging down once more into the depths.

It’s a stirring event, these migrations, and as I went home I couldn’t help but think about my next article and how the artist I’d be featuring had first seen and been moved by similar events, this time humpbacks, off the western cape of South Africa.

This gift of nature, and having shared his life between England and Africa, helped shape an artist who transitioned from full-time historical military drawer to the role of visionary painter in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.

So, today I bring you the next part of my argument as to why the Middle-Earth Role Playing game is the most beautiful RPG ever made.

PART TWO:

…

Read More Read More

Yes indeed, I bring you another tale of art before you attempt to burst the buttons off your jeans with a hearty Thanksgiving feast. All winter holidays are something strange here in L.A., and it’s hard to think about turkey, snow, and roasting anything when the sun is bright and ocean breeze carries the promise of white-tipped surf and meditative tranquility.

Art, however, never takes a holiday [nor do we here at Black Gate L.A. since John O’Neill thinks days off are a grand waste of time]. That being said, I began a project some time ago that is very dear to my heart, so much so that Ryan Harvey doesn’t even argue with me about it which is saying something.

Below, I’ll lay the groundwork for my argument in case you who read this would like to contradict me, but I warn you, my passion is unmatched, and without vacations I’ll simply outlast you. Today, then, begins Part One of a small series dedicated to this topic, and I hope you’ll take the time to read them and educate yourself.

Part One:

I would argue that the prettiest role-playing game ever produced was Iron Crown Enterprises the Middle-Earth Role-Playing. Certainly the game’s popularity in the RPG boom decade of the 1980s was only rivaled by the gorilla in the room of TSR’s AD&D, statistics from the time indicating MERP was second in sales totals for the decade behind the RPG giant.

…

Read More Read More

I guess my string of nostalgia continues here at the Black Gate L.A. offices. You see, it was ‘bring you son to work’ day last Friday and I decided even though it might come back to bite me, I’d expose my 5-year old son Ash to Ryan Harvey and Kandi. I figured if worse came to worse, I could just skip out and spend a few hours on the beach with him, but a few stars aligned and that wasn’t the case.

Luckily for me, unlucky for him, Ryan had left the office for the opening of Immortals, and Kandi took a personal day for a casting call in some new Roland Emmerich blockbuster so Ash and I sat in my office and had Starbucks as I tried to explain to him what it was I did exactly. The conversation quickly devolved into a justification for all things fantasy before he lost interest and asked if he could play Angry Birds on my iPhone.

This, for all you scoring at home, was a turning point for me. I had one of those ‘when I was a kid’ epiphanies. I mean really, when I was a kid there were no iPhones, heck we had a corded rotary phone in my house until the phone company demanded my mother remove it a decade ago, and that phone was even on a party line if anyone remembers what that is.

Yeah, I just turned the big 4-0 a couple of months back, and as I sat looking at my little pixie-faced boy with his Bieber hair and Quicksilver surfing attire I tried to remember what I was doing when I was getting ready to turn 6.

Well, I guess I was going to Star Wars, playing with action figures, enjoying platter meals at Burger Chef, and reenacting Smokey and the Bandit with my Hotwheels. In that year, 1977, the Atari 2600 would be released, but I’m sure I didn’t see it until I was 8 or 9, and probably didn’t own one until 1980 or 81. Yep, there were no video games for the first decade of my existence, but we somehow made due with our imagination.

…

Read More Read More