Morno Calendar

     Bradley W. Schenck, the artist "Formerly Known As Morno" (his Acaeum handle), has put together a calendar of art from the 1970s including his covers for the first three D&D "Dungeon Masters Kits" (modules) published by Wee Warriors: Palace of the Vampire Queen, Dwarven Glory and Misty Isles. It's called Morno's Dice of Fate and can be previewed and ordered here (his website). You can pick the month you want it to start with.

     He's written a blog post about it on his website (Webomator); here's an excerpt:

     "From right around 1975 to sometime in 1978 I drew illustrations for some of the earliest D&D supplements, modules and fanzines, and even had one cover and two illustrated stories in TSR’s own The Dragon magazine. I also did some of the covers and illustrations for Dave Hargrave’s Arduin rules sets and for a great many products, some peculiar in retrospect, for Wee Warriors; that included the first commercial D&D character sheets and the very first module for the game (Palace of the Vampire Queen). There’s a huge, long and complex history of those products that I frankly don’t remember very well after all this time. But in this age of eBay and the Web it’s not too hard to ferret that history out."

     Some of his work for the Arduin Adventure (1980) can be seen in my 2011 post here.

     And on the Acaeum he writes:

     "So recently I fired up my scanner and Photoshop and worked through the pages of my 1978 "Dice of Fate" portfolio and some other bits and pieces from the seventies, and eventually I ended up with this calendar of old (or, I guess, distinguished) Morno art from 1975-1978.

     I can guarantee that there are some things in here that none of you will have seen; a couple made their only appearance in that portfolio, and a couple are Tolkien illustrations that only ever existed as greeting cards back in the day."

     As a bonus, here's his first ever cover for the APAzine Alarums & Excursions, edited by Lee Gold. This is from issue #11 (May 1976, scan courtesy Hall of the Mountain King), and is not in the calendar, although two other A&E covers are according to the artist (only one has the A&E logo). Issue #11 also happens to contain the very first published D&D article by J. Eric Holmes, Warrior-for-Hire.