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I am often amazed at how far the realms of gaming have come, especially when I open my original basic D&D red box and see the equipment lists.  There, you can have a sword… not a longsword, falchion, kopesh, scimitar, rapier, etc, but a sword.  Yeah, when I played, that was how we did things J Still, as anything evolves, especially an RPG, the more fluff and development, the more ‘cool’ stuff is going to get created.  This even takes place as editions of the game get built, and what better place to find everything you and your players could...

Today I’m taking a bit of a divergence from my standard RPG art reviews because I wanted to talk a bit about building an RPG.  Recently, I had the possibility of a RPG project fall to me here at Art of the Genre and I have to say I’m struggling with it.  Not, per se, the creation of the system itself, but instead what I want from a game I’d take the time to build.  Back in 1985 I built my first RPG, a post-apocalyptic shout out to Mad Max called ‘Future Warrior’.  It had roughly a hybrid D&D base...

Someone back in 1982, my assumption being Jim Roslof, thought it would be a good idea to let a single artist handle all the art responsibilities for a single AD&D adventure module.  What came next was an inspirational series that helped define Jim Holloway’s career at TSR, either for better or for worse. To me, the creation of I3: Pharaoh, written by Tracy and Laura Hickman, is genre defining adventure that is the first step in distancing TSR from the 1970s module prototype, which I have to say is no easy task.  I3 has more polish, more maps, and yes,...

Let me make this very clear before I begin, I’m both a huge fan of George R.R. Martin and also one of his greatest haters.  How can that be, you might ask?  Well, I believe his first three novels in The Song of Fire and Ice may be the greatest pieces of fantasy fiction since Tolkien, but after that, Martin imploded into a kind of literary oblivion that almost fully invalidates what he did in those books.  Bottom line, it should have been a trilogy, and milking this dead and decrepit cow has spoiled everything he was so brilliantly trying...

In 1985 Kevin Siembieda was still relatively new to the RPG field, but he still had the vision to begin licensing various IP such as Robotech, and to a lesser impact, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The brainchild of Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman had become something of an underground comic sensation by this period, but it would take a couple more years until it exploded into the mass market success we still consider it today, so Siembieda managed to wrangle a license to produce the RPG with his standard Palladium mechanic. Now I know that mechanic is tired, and old,...