Black Gate

Way back in the day, I remember collecting I.C.E.’s Middle-Earth Role-Playing Game. If anyone ever bought those initial MERP supplements, they know that I.C.E. put a photo collection of what products were available on the back [much like TSR listed their products series on the backs of their early modules]. I was young, probably thirteen of fourteen at the time, and didn’t have much money, but I went out and collected everything represented on the back except three things, two of which were the campaign modules, Umbar Haven of the Corsairs and The Court of Ardor in Southern Middle Earth. Both were VERY early in the production line, probably out of print before I even started collecting, and the final piece was the MERP map set. Years later, I managed to purchase both Umbar and Ardor [actually my wife bought me Ardor after my first professional sale], but even though I’ve studied the image on that back cover a hundred times, and longed for the map beneath, I’ve never laid hands on a copy. The concept of that map laid the groundwork for my love of cartography and maps in general.

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When it comes to RPG art, there’re certainly a good number of pieces that will stick out in player’s minds for any number of reasons. Some of us remember images we based characters off of, some fell in love with representations of beautiful women, and others used specific books so much that the cover images turned into old friends.

Still, I believe that there is one particular set of RPG images that wedge themselves heavily in the mind of ALL gamers, and those are found on the reverse side of DM Screens. I don’t care what generation or edition of the game you’ve played, as a player you’ve spent countless hours staring at the art on those screens.

Truly, even if you’re not an ‘art guy,’ you’ve managed to study details in the images on those screens you’d never have noticed otherwise. The characters depicted are memories burned into your subconscious like a kind of Pavlovian conditioning, even a glance at those images giving rise to the urge to game no matter how many years you’ve been away from the table.

I started playing D&D Basic, which of course had no screens, but when I met my oldest gaming friend, Mark, I was introduced to a DM’s screen for the first time and the rest is history.

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Do you ever wonder why we fight? What is it in our DNA that makes us want to pound something if the mood strikes? I suppose I’d say it’s simple human nature, because what other reason makes sense? I mean, I always hated the saying ‘boys will be boys’ and yet when my son was two I took him to a park to play and got an odd wake-up call. You see, my wife and I took every pain and precaution to be sure that he never, ever, saw or was around a gun, and yet he walked right up to two abandoned squirt guns, lifted them up like he was in a John Woo movie and started pretending to shoot stuff. Seriously, I was looking around for the release of doves and a slow motion jump from the slide to the sand-pit.

I guess at our very core there’s a fighter in all of us. It’s probably the reason why Jon Schindehette over at ArtOrder was so surprised with the response to his art request for an ultimate fighter art composition. People just plain like human fighters, and the numbers involved in the impetus of the competition hold to that fact.

Certainly, the groundwork for many a gamer starts with the fighter. He’s essentially the ‘easy one’, the character class you give the new player because all you have to do is swing a weapon and hope the dice are lucky. There are no magic spells to learn, no prayer lists, holy symbols, or thieves tools. It’s just put on some armor, grab a sword, and go, and you know, I really love that!

So, when I started my rather epic quest in the realms of RPGs, just like discussed in my discourse on Basic D&D’s Red Box, I of course played a fighter. As a matter of fact, I was so obviously unoriginal, I stole Frank Mentzer’s Sir Fleetwood name example right along wth Jeff Easley’s image for the fighter I wanted to play and went from there.

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Orcus, Prince of the Undead. He’s an ancient legend, more so than any D&D text, but for the purpose of this article I’m going address the Gygaxian version and not the Etruscan.

Why Orcus? Well, because I’m upset with Orcus, that’s why. I feel like the big fella let me down. Once, back in the long, long, ago, I got the original AD&D Monster Manual, and in those pages I found the section on Demons and was captivated by it.

Here stood the tentacle-armed Demogorgon, and slime-spurting Juiblex, and the flail-wielding Yeenoghu, Demon Lord of Gnolls, but of all of them, Orcus jumped out into my imagination because he was so drastically different.

Orcus was this fat demon with a wand [I mean really, what self-respecting demon lord carries a wand?] He had the cloven hooves and legs of a goat, a beer belly, and the head of a ram. He wasn’t cool, or epic, and certainly wasn’t someone who would fill you with fear, but the reality in his visage gave me pause.

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