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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...

The 1992 release of TSR’s Dark*Sun Dragon King’s hardcover for 2nd Edition Dungeons & Dragons [boy is that a mouthful!] hit right in the prime of my college years. I never collected Dark*Sun back then, but I played it with my roommate Rob in a single campaign that was a good deal of fun [because I was always the DM and got to get out from behind the screens for a while].Thus, I didn’t own this supplement when it came out and had to acquire it when I set about looking for Dark*Sun on eBay in probably 2005. It was...

Today on Black Gate I take a look at why I thought TSR's art department failed to capture Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar.  You can read it here.

When I.C.E. produced the MERP campaign supplement The Court of Ardor in Southern Middle Earth the company was still in its infancy. In fact, MERP as a game didn’t even exist, just the world map and two other campaign settings, Umbar: Haven of the Corsairs and Angmar: Land of the Witch King [to this point, a player would have used Rolemaster]. I find this incredibly interesting for a couple of reasons, but the primary of which is how Pete Fenlon looked at the Middle-Earth license he’d recently managed to wrangle from the Tolkien estate.You see, what sane person gets the...

There are certain issues of Dragon Magazine that resonate with me, and then there are others that have absolutely no meaning whatsoever. The latter had been the case for Issue #95 from March 1985 until I took it down from my collection to have a look for today’s AotG review.Now I probably had never read this issue because the cover doesn’t speak to me. It was always a rather odd and far too realistic cover concerning a 1970s thrift shop feel. Still, upon taking the time to really study Dean Morrissey’s work, entitled ‘Toad’s Cloak Armorsmith Shop’, I began to...