Black Gate

Art Evolution, the project that shows the personal take on a single unifying character by the greatest artists in the RPG field, continues. But if you’ve missed some, you can find the beginning here.

After last week’s entry I had my ‘3rd Edition Lyssa’, and I was ready to move further back in my timeline. For that purpose, I got into my way-back machine and dialed in the dawn of RPGs, the year 1976.

If you go back further than 76’ you’re fooling yourself if you think anything a gamer played was more than an advanced miniatures game. However, in that year D&D was beginning its infant run and Flying Buffalo put out its first module Castle Buffalo for Tunnels & Trolls.

That now infamous and out of print module was graced with a cover by Liz Danforth, the Queen of the Role Playing Game. Liz was doing RPGs before the world knew what RPGs were, and although I was only five years old at the time, I would come to appreciate her grace and dedication when I later discovered Middle-Earth Role-Playing from Iron Crown Enterprises in the mid-eighties.

As you’ve already seen, the first book I ever read was The Hobbit, so it certainly came to pass that when I.C.E. started producing role-playing in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth I was right there ready to buy a part of the experience.

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Art Evolution continues, from its roots here, to the incredible talent that created the newest vision in ‘Dragon Chess Lyssa’.

Now things were fully flowing in a uniform direction, and the more people I talked to the better the reception. This project was real, solid, and I decided it was time to go back to John O’Neill and give him an update.

O’Neill gave me another ambiguous ‘can’t wait to see what you’ve got’. Again, nothing to write home about, but certainly a continuing vote of confidence that what I was doing would at least be viewed by the movers and shakers in the Black Gate rooftop headquarters.

Not wanting to push matters with O’Neill, I just put my nose back to the grindstone and continued on with my article recruitment. To this end I determined that I’d contact Todd Lockwood.

Now I’m not going to blow smoke here, I knew Todd’s work having immersed myself in D&D 3rd Edition when it released in the late 90s, but I’d never considered his work life-altering because of a single restricting issue, the covers of the 3rd Edition core books were all without picture art [I know, blasphemy!]. From that standpoint nothing in 3rd Edition struck me as particularly awe-inspiring, and it’s much harder to make a huge impression when you are dealing with smaller interior art.

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