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By 1989 the art department of TSR was in flux. It had shrunk and morphed into a much smaller version of itself from a decade earlier. Elmore and Parkinson were gone, Caldwell was on his way out, and only Easley remained of the core oil masters.In this period, TSR began the extensive use of freelance talent to help fill out supplements, but the effect on the game also helped fracture the cohesive nature of the common narrative. Sure, Easley was still doing the lion’s share of core covers, but other than that we were seeing a randomization of talent and...

In 1986, the market for TSR products was cooling. The company was in a spiritual tailspin after the dismissal of Gary Gygax, and shifting technology was a barbarian at the gate with Nintendo’s release of their NES that propelled Super Mario Brothers to the bestselling video game of all time.It was also a period when the bread and butter modules of the early 1980s were slipping, either to players having ‘grown up’ into DMs that preferred to run their own homebrews or just market share loss taking its inevitable toll. That said, TSR was still producing modules in their now...

Is it odd that I think it’s strange there is a more recent version of the Serenity RPG than the one produced by Margaret Weis Productions in 2005? I mean, it HAS been eight years since that game came out… REALLY!? Eight years!? How is that possible?Whatever the case, I’ll be taking a look at the first edition of this game as it is the only one I own and the only one I’ve ever played. Well, perhaps ‘played’ is a strong word, since what I attempted was yet another horrific failure of a play by email campaign that ended...

Today I’m taking a look at Iron Crown Enterprises Cities of Middle-Earth: Minas Tirith. My love affair with MERP started long, long ago, probably because Tolkien taught me to read, and while D&D taught me to create, the ability to imagine my own tales in J.R.R. Tolkien’s world was a carrot I couldn’t resist.That said, there was something about the artwork for this setting that also inspired me to bigger and better things. I credit both MERP and D&D equally for my current life path as an art director [well, and Elmore’s covers or Dragonlance].This particular book, which bears an...

There are those seminal moments in your gaming life, those times when something seems to fundamentally change right before your eyes. To me, the advent of D&D 3.0 was one of those, as was the introduction of ‘iconic’ characters for that setting. Still, it wasn’t unit I first laid eyes on the Epic Level Handbook that I realized just how incredible those iconic characters could be if taken to the upper levels of advancement.I was so impressed, in fact, that I focused my attention on just how I could make an epic level campaign. It wasn’t long before I had...