News — Jim Roslof

The 1981 release of the Tom Moldvay edition of D&D Basic was before my time. I was 10 when this book was published by TSR for the final time, and I wouldn’t enter the hobby until the Red Box two years later.Still, the nostalgia content for the Moldvay box still resonates heavily in the OSR today, the bulk of players remembering it fondly right alongside the Trampier PHB and the Sutherland MM and DMG. When taking a look at it today, I’m moved by the interior artistic content since it captures a perfect era in the TSR evolution, something...

If you are an old school gamer, then you probably have a vague memory of the first D&D product you ever saw. For me, those visions of the past cycle around three distinct images, none of which I’m exactly sure were really ‘the first’. One, of course, is Elmore’s cover of the Red Box, viewed in the Sears Christmas Catalogue. Two, would be Jim Holloway’s cover for Dragon Magazine #88 owned by a fellow student in my 7th Grade art class who sat across from me. Third, would have been Jim Roslof’s cover for A2 Secret of the Slavers Stockade...

Today I’m going to take a look at the artwork from TSR’s X2: Castle Amber (Chateau d’Amberville). Now I’ve only played this module once, back in probably 1987 in my little room upstairs at my mom’s house with my old DM Mark and his neighbors Aaron and Jay. Truly, I don’t remember too much about the adventure save that it was one of the first ones where I ever ran one of my most powerful characters of all time, the eventual Hierophant of Cabal, Belmarillian the Watcher.There is a room [spoilers follow] in which characters are beset by mysterious dreams,...

The first thing that strikes me about Dragon #67 is the cover, which is a bit of a divergence from the standard stuff people were growing used to from Dragon.  Instead of the basic adventure fantasy and S&S images, we are greeted with a fantasy dinner party complete with sword-wielding Viking slicing a turkey down the center.   What exactly does this mean?  I guess you’d have to ask the artist, Jack Crane, or perhaps the Kim Mohan who was the Editor-in-Chief.  Whatever the case, I’ll accept it for face value, a bit of old school tongue-in-cheek humor for the...

I’m not sure how many of you out there ever tried the XSOLO series of modules from TSR, but there are a couple that are very fun.  I’m not really certain Lathan’s Gold is one of them, but still, it has some nice artwork in it and I’m tempted to take out my dice and give it a shot just to see. Written by Merle M. Rasmussen [is that a real name?] and produced in 1984, the module takes your character into the Sea of Dread [a favorite setting of mine and one that I’ve played in as recently as...