News — Wizards of the Coast

I freely admit I was a huge fan of D&D 3E when it came out. I was there the first day it launched, leaving Circuit City on my lunch break to go to the mall in this little half-hidden comic shop to buy the Players Handbook. It had a couple of sample monsters in the back and I remember being completely confused by all the changes. Still, as I started playing, the system made sense, and the more I played the more I enjoyed. This joy was extended when I discovered WotC would be releasing character class Guide Books. Today,...

Hey all, I just want to say again that over on Black Gate.com my ‘Top 10 RPG Artists’ article is in a knife fight death duel like Steven Segal versus Tommy Lee Jones in Under Siege with another article, so if you haven’t checked it out please help me out and do so here.Otherwise, I wanted to take a look at one of my all-time favorite gaming supplements, the 3E Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting because my friend Sean K. Reynolds announced yesterday he was leaving Paizo for my home state of Indiana and thus I dedicate the review to him.Released...

I don’t get it, I really don’t… Somewhere along the way RPG artist Wayne Reynolds became the whipping boy for everything that ever went wrong with RPG artwork, and frankly that is completely unfair and moronic.No matter the forum, any mention of Wayne Reynolds will inevitably bring up phrases like ‘Wayne Reynolds caused the failure of D&D’ or ‘I loathe Wayne Reynolds’ or ‘Wayne Reynolds makes me sick’, or my personal favorite ‘Wayne Reynolds is an absolute disgrace!’. I posted an article this week concerning the art for the D&D 3.0 Players Handbook, in which Wayne doesn’t even appear, and...

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...

There is always a vast wealth of behind the scenes stuff going on in each and every Dragon Magazine.  Seriously, if you take a look at the inner workings of Dragon, much like layers of sedimentation on an archaeological dig, you’ll find a wealth of information about the industry as a whole. Dragon #285 is a perfect example of this.  Published by Wizards of the Coast in July of 2001, it is a time-capsule of a dying era of art in the RPG industry. Art Directed by Peter Whitley, this magazine shows just what art was becoming before the full...