News — TSR

By the late 1970s RPG art was pretty comic book inspired, and although it went to realism with Elmore, Easley, and Parkinson, that didn’t mean that the people actually playing the games were losing hours of sleep wondering how the socioeconomic events of returning to their player-character villages with massive amounts of gold would actually negatively impact the lives of the citizenry from an inflationary standpoint. No, they were sitting around a table having fun, laughing at the stupid things people, and the dice that motivate their actions, do. To this end, gaming takes on a certain degree of humor,...

It is said the cover artist Michael Weaver began this painting at the start of the initial Gulf War [I remember watching CNN at midnight on my little TV in the dorm at I.U. when this went down] and completed it the day the war was over.  So, roughly the 17th of January 1991 to the 28th of February 1991.  Not bad for a months worth of work, and although I could never fully figure out what the deal was with floating two-handed sword, I did love it.  The magazine itself is are rather dull issue with a short story,...

Today I’m going to take a look at the art of I10 Ravenloft II: The House on Gryphon Hill by Tracy and Laura Hickman.Produced by TSR in 1986, the second coming of Strahd is another very cool addition to the I series of modules. It features David Cook, Jeff Grubb, Tracy & Laura Hickman, as well as Harold Johnson on the design team and comes in a 41 pages of cool content. I think it is a great precursor to the Ravenloft Boxed Set which would appear only a year later.Artwork for the adventure is standard for the time period,...

Today I'd like to take a look at a single piece of artwork that was done by artist Jim Holloway for TSR's Gamma World 2nd Edition in roughly 1983.  Now Holloway only spent two years at TSR, and to his recollection those weren't 'great times' considering how the company was changing from 1982 to 1984.  It was transitional, with Gary in L.A. and the company beginning to sag under its own weight of production, mismanagement, and the cooling of the fad that D&D had become circa 1979.  Still, in that period, under the art direction of Jim Roslof, the art...

October 1982 saw the release of Dragon Vol. VII, No. 5, Issue #66 with Editor-in-Chief Kim Mohan at the helm. It’s another strong issue from the ‘Below 100’ club, with great content for D&D [like Gary saying gun powder doesn’t work in AD&D], a counterargument piece by authors John Sapienza & Bruce Murphy where they debate the use of weapon restrictions by class, a look at Elfquest if the characters were from D&D, Gary’s take on the Jann, Dao, and Marid. New illusionist spells [later put into Unearthed Arcana], useful ways to employ Phantasmal Force, Speaking Thieves’ Cant, and a...