News — TSR

Now certainly RPG art had been changing and metamorphosising since its inception, first from the likes Dee, Willingham, Otus, Roslof and other local talent in Wisconsin, then to the hiring of oil painters into the 1980s ‘pit’ with Easley, Elmore, Caldwell, and Parkinson, and finally to the addition of outside the box talents such as Baxa, Brom, and freelancers such as DiTerlizzi, but it wasn’t until the advent of the WotC D&D 3.0 that a full scale change began to take place market wide. Although D&D 3.0 might not be WoW for the tabletop, as it existed four years prior...

I was never one to be overly familiar with Dungeon Magazine. Sure, I’d seen my first Dragon at age 13, but Dungeon never made its way into my teenage life and so an early infatuation or understanding wasn’t there for me.Still, being a hardcore gamer, there had to be a point where I finally discovered that Dungeon was the cousin of Dragon, only instead of having articles it was filled with adventures. By the time this became known to me I’d pretty much given up on adventures and designed all my gaming sessions myself, but nonetheless a particular fondness for...

Everyone has a ‘First Dragon’, and for me it was Dragon #88. Sure, I didn’t actually own it, as it was in the possession of a boy I didn’t get along with overly well, but he did sit across from me in art class and laid this issue on his desk one afternoon in middle-school. I was both amazed and intrigued by it, and when I actually got to flip through the pages I was blow away by the artwork I found [because of course at this time I had no idea how to actually play D&D] For that reason,...

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 1980 release of the colorized cover edition of T1 The Village of Hommlet is certainly a foundation of the RPG industry and an iconic piece for almost any role-player brought into the game from the late 1970s all the way up to 1990.Truly, it is an incredible piece of work, penned by Gary Gygax and established as ‘the’ introductory module for the new Advanced Dungeons & Dragons system. Now certainly, B2 Keep on the Borderlands and X1 Isle of Dread might be more popular because they were included in the Basic and Expert boxed sets respectively, but again, that...