News — Easley

You know what amazes me? That I can only be halfway through the Players Manual when I’m already on Part Three of the Red Box art series! Seriously, how many pieces of art are in this baby? No, I’m not going to count, but when all is said and done it is a boatload.So, when we last left off, I was talking about characters, the first of which was the Cleric, and in this section the art details basically all of the Human class characters for Basic D&D.I well remember enjoying these a great deal when I attempted to play...

So we now hit Part Two of my continuing series on the art of the TSR Mentzer Edition Basic Red Box.Previously, I talked about my introduction to the source material, my journey through art and not the writing, and how that first adventure made me both exuberant and hollow. Once Easley and Elmore wrap up with the death of Aleena, your intrepid fighter semi-character goes back to town. Ah, is there anything better in all of D&D than ‘going back to town’? I doubt it, and here’s a primary reason why, because young gamers lack control in their lives and...

Where were you when the Red Box was released? I was in junior high, unable to read past a second grade level, and struggling with a newly formed weight problem. It was a tough time for many things in my life, but never my imagination. Nope, that always worked just fine, and by the time I could read at a level with my peers, had lost all the weight, and was in high school, the Red Box was a relic of the past, and yet it still remained entrenched in my mind even after I’d moved on to ‘Advanced’ D&D.I...

There are a number of reasons to hold Spelljammer as something ‘special’.  The primary of these should certainly be the originality of the setting, but for a lover of the history of RPGs, there is something much more fundamentally intriguing about this product to me. Produced by TSR in 1989 and written by Jeff Grubb, this is what I would consider the final product of TSR’s ‘Golden Era’.  Some might argue that moniker belongs to the Forgotten Realms, but that is a bit too early, and Dark Sun a bit too late. Spelljammer, however, falls perfectly in the wheelhouse of...

Back in the mid-1980s my DM, Mark, and I had a kind of gaming arms race going on.  Unfortunately for me, our remote location in rural northern Indiana didn’t give me access to a gaming store that wasn’t more than an hour away, and his older brother Greg, already in college, always managed to get him info and product well before I could lay hands on it.  This was the case with most everything pertaining to AD&D until at last, in 1986, I managed to get my first hardcover TSR book before him.   That book, Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide. Unfortunately for...