News — Jeff Easley

I must admit I've always been intrigued by GW6 because it was a Gary Gygax written adventure I own but have never played.  I can only assume this is that case because of the level requirement, 18+, which in 1st Edition D&D is very hard to come by.  I remember speaking with E. Gary Gygax once and he indicated his archmage Tenser was only 17th level, if that puts things into perspective, so Isle of the Ape is something that kind of stays on the shelf to be looked at but not participated in. Artistically, the cover was done by...

Back in 1988, when the Forgotten Realms was in its infancy on the open market, TSR produced the 96 page Lords of Darkness adventure anthology. It is set in various places around the Forgotten Realms, and has a nice intro by Ed Greenwood. All adventures focus on the dead, and the cover is a sublime Jeff Easley, who is an undead master as far as I’m concerned. Interior work is done by artist Karl Waller who provides some really slick b/w illustrations that capture the horror adventures find when dealing with the dead.Adventures included in the anthology focus on particular...

Like every single non-D&D title TSR had in the mid-1980s, Star Frontiers met a quick and profound end.  I lamented it leaving the hobby, especially with the inclusion of Zebulon's Guide to Frontier Space, but those were the breaks for Boot Hill, Gangbusters, Gamma World, and this beloved science fiction series.  Whatever the case, I still love to take a look at the 'color' of the game and imagine what could have been if Easley, Elmore, Parkinson, Caldwell, Truman, Roslof, Trampier, and Holloway had gotten another half dozen years to create inside the frame.  It is one thing we will...

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’m going to give a little ‘love’ to Gamma World 2nd Edition. Although you’d be hard pressed to find a player out there to calls 2nd Edition their favorite iteration of the game, it still has some cool work done for it so I’ll take a look at the art of The Cleansing War of Garik Blackhand [which BTW wins the TSR award for longest title of a product]This is a strange little bit of work as there are two credited artists in it, Jim Holloway and David ‘Deisel’ LaForce. As the first printing was in 1983, this seems...