You could make that argument that Easley, Parkinson, or Caldwell shaped the destiny of D&D and TSR in the early 1980s, but in reality that is like comparing the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, or the Eagles to The Beatles. At the end of the day, any sane person knows there is no comparison as they are all had a telling impact on the industry. Below are some pieces from Larry Elmore I think changed the landscape of the RPG industry, and I'd love to hear if you agree or disagree.
Mentzer 'Red Box'... Now if the Red Box isn't as iconic to gamers as the Trampier PHB, then I don't know what is.
'The Death of Sturm', this scene was so powerful I threw Dragons of a Winter Night across my 10th Grade English classroom and Elmore truly did it justice!
Shadowrun, single-handedly brought the dystopian RPG genre to the masses. You might credit that FASA in general, but as this image graced the 1st & 2nd Edition covers, you know how important it was.
Death of Aleena: Larry broke upwards of a hundred thousand young men's hearts with the death of Aleena the Cleric, and without his rendition of her, I'd so no one would have cared much.
Watch who you hit on... And many folks thought Clyde Caldwell defined vampires with Ravenloft... not so fast Clyde.
Star Frontiers... Before this role-players thought space opera was a black booklet where characters died in character creation. Elmore opened our eyes to a fantastic and beautiful science fiction universe.
Innocence in the big fantasy city will ever be defined for me by this piece.
Clarion: One of the finest examples of ink-wash you will ever see, Clarion the Cleric from D&D Basic.
D&D Expert, and the definition of character advancement in art
Dragons of Autumn Twilight launched TSR into a fiction publishing house and brought D&D to the pure reading masses. For me, this image hasn't aged a day.
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I’d say that Elmore made a hell of an effect on gaming. Whether he CHANGED it is arguable, but before Elmore, we had very few artists of any major caliber. The remark about Star Frontiers is very true; Traveller had nearly NO art, and AD&D’s best artist was a guy who worked in pen and ink.
Elmore art shifted RPG gaming into its second phase: a place where YOU could be the guy or the gal in the painting facing off against a dragon or an alien invasion or whatever.
Did some very nice book covers too.
Well, you know what they say about opinions.
For myself, Mr. Elmore’s body of work is unsurpassed.
Scott: Andy is correct. TSR made its publishing deal with Random House before they ever published a single piece of Elmore’s artwork, which put D&D in major bookstores. They began distributing through Sears before then as well.
I bought my first D&D products at B. Dalton books, Sears, and AAFES (the Army-Air Force-Exchange stores), years before Elmore even started working for TSR. It was also being sold in mall toy stores, and I remember seeing the Basic and Expert sets with the Erol Otus box covers in Toys ’R Us.
Larry’s art is wonderful – but to say that he ‘changed gaming’ is overstating things.
Scott, everyone thinks Mr. Elmore’s a star! There is no issue on that.He is a wonderful artist.But your contention that the TSR game company couldnt get books and sets sold to the national retail distribution channels without his art on the cover is flat out wrong and very silly. I guess you were unaware of that? I’m sorry that you feel embarrassed but this info is easily searchable on the web wthout even getting to the point of interviewing employees and looking at sales data. That photo from the Sears catalog carrying the earlier Dungeons and Dragons product is not debatable unless you think someone went through the trouble of photoshopping it.
Listen, everyone makes mistakes. Mr. Elmore is fantastic but making him out to be a savior who brought unimaginable change to the gaming world is very strange. Im sure he’d agree! There’s no reason to butter him up any further unless there’s something else going on here that youre not telling us.
You love his art, and that’s cool. You love his art to the point of making him someone he’s not to create a fiction about how retail distribution was changed, and that’s not cool!
you have a lot of hits on the website for your blog and doing well, I am sure with your enthusiasm you have a bright future ahead! Just saying that a little more research will go a long way.
Andy D: I got 11.5K people to look at this article in which I believe, on my personal blog, that Jim Roslof’s vision for D&D, and bringing in Elmore, along with Easley & Holloway, and to a lesser extent Parkinson and Caldwell, changed what was acceptable from up and coming gaming companies forever. Elmore was the star, Elmore gets the credit, like a front man for a band, and garage shop art for RPGs was gone forever once he began working at TSR. If you believe that or not, I don’t care, but feel free to post your thoughts on your own blog and I promise not to come and debate you about it.