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In my continuing series of posts on old Dragon Magazine art, I’m going to be going over Dragon #136.  I’ve owned two copies of this Dragon, not because I particularly loved it, but because fate decided I should have two.  However, that isn’t to say there aren’t some very cool things in #136, as I found when rereading it for this article.  So before I get into the artwork, let me just give gamers a quick rundown of what resources they might enjoy inside. First, you get a great look at gaming cities, with a fantasy city builder by Thomas...

There are a number of reasons to hold Spelljammer as something ‘special’.  The primary of these should certainly be the originality of the setting, but for a lover of the history of RPGs, there is something much more fundamentally intriguing about this product to me. Produced by TSR in 1989 and written by Jeff Grubb, this is what I would consider the final product of TSR’s ‘Golden Era’.  Some might argue that moniker belongs to the Forgotten Realms, but that is a bit too early, and Dark Sun a bit too late. Spelljammer, however, falls perfectly in the wheelhouse of...

Conan, what is best in life?  How many times have we as gamers both heard and repeated that tag line?  Too many, I’d imagine, but somehow it just never gets old.  For me, the journey to the works of Robert E. Howard took longer than I would have liked, but once there I was ever swept away in the adventures that followed Conan. Thus, having missed purchasing the TSR version of Conan in the early 1980s, I was eager to own Mongoose Publishing’s D20 editions when they hit the market during the great D20 boom of the early 2000s.  Today,...

When I was in college, circa 1989, my friend Matt was reading the Black Company series by author Glen Cook.  He insisted I read it as well, and so to assuage my newest friend I began a series that eventually took me all the way to the birth of my son in 2006.  Truly, the chronicles of the Black Company are some of the best books I’ve ever read, and so it was with great anticipation that I awaited the D20 release of Green Ronin’s The Black Company RPG. Produced in 2004 and written by Robert J. Schwalb and Owen...

When people who know artists think about Planescape, they typically think of Tony DiTerlizzi.  That makes sense, as he pretty much made his name as a fantasy artist with this TSR product line, but certainly he wasn’t the only artist to participate in it. Today, I’m going to look at another artist who helped define a small piece of the game, R.K. Post.  Now certainly Post isn’t known for Planescape, as Magic the Gathering is his bread and butter, but he did do some great work for many TSR products as one of the final members of the TSR ‘pit’...