Art & Arcana on sale again - get the original Tomb of Horrors

 

Today I notice that the Art & Arcana Special Edition - which includes a reprint of the original version of Tomb of Horrors resembling an OD&D supplement - is back in stock and on sale and at an even lower listed price than before, $61.61 (albeit there's no extra coupon). That's lower than the pre-order price I paid when it came out ($63.50). Find it here:

Art & Arcana Special Edition

One thing I forgot to mention last time that is of interest to readers of this blog is that the book includes a drawing by Chris Holmes of a displacer beast from the 70s, drawn for the Basic rulebook manuscript (which appears courtesy of Billy Galaxy).

Update: I was asked about the content of the posters in this set. I took a look at my set and found:

• AD&D Player's Handbook cover (1978) by Dave Trampier (16 x 10")
• DM Screen cover (1979) by Dave Trampier (18 x 14")
• Keep on the Borderlands cover (1980) by Jim Roslof (8 x 10")
• AD&D Fiend Folio cover (1981) by Emmanuel (16 x 10")
• World of Greyhawk box cover (1983) by Jeff Easley (8 x 10")
• Swords of Deceit module cover (1986) by Keith Parkinson (8 x 10")
• AD&D 2E PHB interior (PCs with slain tiny dragon)(1989) by Larry Elmore (8 x10")
• Forge of Fury module cover (2000) by Todd Lockwood (16 x 10")
• "Promotional painting for D&D 30th Anniversary (2004) by Todd Lockwood (16 x 10")
• Storm King's Thunder interior painting (2016) by Chris Rahn (24 x 16")

Earlier post (from April):

The Special Edition of the D&D artbook Art & Arcana is currently selling for $69.99 on Amazon, plus when I look at the page I'm also seeing a coupon for $23.33, making the total only $46.66. If you can get it for this, it's a great deal for a set that has a list price of $125. 

The real hidden gem of the set is a reprint of the original OD&D tournament version of Tomb of Horrors, in a digest format resembling the LBBs. FWIW, the page says only 10 copies are left in stock.

Art & Arcana Special Edition

See also my earlier posts:

Locations for the Tomb of Horrors on the Great Kingdom Map

Delta's D&D Hotspot: Tomb of Ra-Hotep

Earlier Update (from April):

Amazon is no longer has the coupon available, but the book is still available new for $69.99 (follow the link above).

FIGHT ON fanzine returns with an issue dedicated to J. Eric Holmes!

 

The long dormant OSR zine Fight On! has returned from the crypt with a new issue, #15, dedicated to none other than J. Eric Holmes...! 

Find it on DrivethruRPG (currently PDF only; print is coming) or on Lulu (print or PDF).

For this issue I contributed an article, titled "Ten Ways to Holmesify Your Game", which goes over ten different rules or themes you can use to make your D&D game more "Holmesian". It is accompanied by an illustration by Cameron Hawkey of adventurers tangling with a purple worm.

Other Holmesian content in this issue includes:

• "Holmes Town Heroes" by Tony Rowe (with whom I co-authored an chapter about Holmes in the recent book Fifty Years of D&D), which provides D&D character write-ups for Boinger, Zereth and Murray the Mage from Holmes' stories.

• "Bringing it All Back Holmes": Holmes Basic origin stories from Aron Clark (author of the Holmes & Clark RPG), Grodog and Calithena.

• "Distributary of Darkness" by Alex Zisch expands an area of the Sample Dungeon.

• Two original dungeon maps by J. Eric Holmes that relate to the Maze of Peril (these can also be found in Things Better Left Alone).

• A page of art by Chris Holmes

Plus loads of other content, including a continuation of the long-running Darkness Beneath megadungeon!

All of the Back issues of Fight On are also available, either individually or in compilations (see the links above).

Playing at the World revised edition out in JulyWith a cover by Erol Otus!

Cover by Erol Otus...!

Playing at the World, Jon Peterson's 2012 groundbreaking history of the origin of RPGs, has been out of print for a number of years, with secondhand copies going for increasingly higher prices, but as I reported previously a revised second edition is coming later this year from MIT Press. 

The expanded book will now be split into two volumes, with the first one, Volume 1: The Invention of Dungeons & Dragons, coming out on July 30th of this year. Per the publisher info, this volume "distills the story of how the wargaming clubs and fanzines circulating around the upper Midwest in the 1970s culminated in Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson’s seminal role-playing game, D&D". 

The MIT Press and Amazon pre-order pages have now been updated with the cover art: a fantastic illustration by the legendary old school TSR artist Erol Otus (shown above)*. The first volume is now available for pre-order from Amazon for $29.95, and with a price guarantee:

Playing at the World, 2nd Edition, Volume 1: The Invention of D&D

I've pre-ordered it myself.

It will be followed later by Volume 2: The Three Pillars of Role-Playing Games, "a deeper dive into the history of the setting, system, and character of D&D". This appears to correspond to chapters 2-4 of the original edition, which were: 2: Setting - The Medieval Fantasy Genre; 3: System - The Rules of the Game; and 4: Character - Roles and Immersion. 

*Thanks for captainjapan on the OD&D74 forums for this news.

Gygax's Yggsburgh (2005) available once again

The front cover of Yggsburgh,
with an illustration by Jeffrey Catherine Jones

If you haven't heard, Gary Gygax's Yggsburgh sandbox campaign setting, originally released in 2005 and withdrawn from sales after he passed away in 2008, is once again available for purchase from Troll Lord Games, following an agreement with the Gygax estate. You can pre-order the hardcover from the TLG site for $65, which also includes an immediate download of the PDF, or you can buy the PDF alone from DrivethruRPG for $19.99:

Yggsburgh Print (pre-order) + PDF 

Yggsburgh PDF only

For those unfamiliar with it, Yggsburgh is a re-casting of Gygax's long-delayed City of Greyhawk project, intended as a setting for exploring the Castle Greyhawk dungeons, here re-christened Castle Zagyg.  

Back in May of 1980, shortly before the initial publication of the World of Greyhawk campaign setting, Gary Gygax discussed future releases for the setting in issue 37 of The Dragon, where in his regular column "From the Sorcerer's Scroll", under the title "Greyhawk: The Shape of the World", he estimated that "The City of Greyhawk might make a 1981 publication date, certainly 1982, and about the same time the series which will eventually represent the whole of the Dungeons of Castle Greyhawk will begin". Sadly, neither title ever appeared under Gygax's byline, and became the most infamous of TSR vaporware. 

Decades later, in the early 2000s, Gygax finally started a new project to publish this material, this time under the aegis of TLG's Castles & Crusades RPG. However, only Yggsburgh and the first portion of the Castle Zagyg, titled the Upper Works (2007), were finished and released before Gygax passed away, and the license to publish them was withdrawn.

Yggsburgh is a sprawling 256-page hardcover book, with cover art by the great Jeffrey Catherine Jones, repurposed from the 1972 Avon paperback edition of Nine Princes of Amber by Roger Zelazny. This was the first novel in the Amber series, which was included by Gygax in Appendix N in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide in 1979. Originally, the entire series of Castle Zagyg books was slated to feature covers with Jones' classic work from the 1970s.

The book itself is also accompanied by an 8-page hexmap, drafted by Darlene in a style similar to her original maps for the World of Greyhawk, which was tipped into the back cover in the 2005 publication. This depicts an area 50 hexes east-west and 34 hexes north-south, at 1 mile per hex, for a total area of 1,700 square miles:

Players Version of the Yggsburgh Hex Map by Darlene

Rather than just being a high-level gazetteer, Yggsburgh is a big sandbox, which I'd compare to Lenard Lakofka's AD&D module L1 The Secret of Bone Hill. There's a city with 93 described areas, including the famous Green Dragon Inn, and an area map with 48 described locations, and including a number of fully detailed small dungeons, which is often overlooked: 

• Thieves' Underground (13 rooms)
• River King's Tomb (19 rooms)
• The Cursed Mine (14 rooms)
• The Gnome Burrows (25 rooms)
• The Unholy Ringstones (25 encounter areas)

These could easily be extracted and run as one-shots or dropped in other settings. 

Castle Zagyg and Rob Kuntz's Dark Chateau (2005) are also two of the intended locations in the sandbox, so there is the potential for larger dungeons, although this does make the campaign setting incomplete on its own if you intend to use those.

I've had the original hardback for many years, and it's probably my favorite late-era Gygax product. While I haven't run anything from it yet, I will pick it up every now and then and read a bit. It's sort of a glorious sprawling mess like the original AD&D DMG, but in campaign setting form.

RIP RUSS

 

One of Nicholson's full-page illustrations from the Fiend Folio,
depicting a party facing off against the Githyanki. Image Source.

It was sometime in the spring of 1983 that I came into possession of the fifth AD&D hardcover, the FIEND FOLIO. As I recall, I learned from a friend that Kay Bee Toys in the local mall had them on sale for a single dollar (!), a price low enough that I was able to convince my parents to get me one immediately rather than waiting for the next holiday.

A monster stat block & illustration from the Fiend Folio
See more here

While the format was similar to the MONSTER MANUAL, which I had received as an Xmas present just months before, the striking and strange-to-me interior illustrations made it feel like it had slipped in from an alternate timeline. Which it essentially had, being the product of the UK division of TSR, and compiling monsters submitted by readers of WHITE DWARF magazine. The artwork giving it this feel was heavy with dots, lines and cross-hatching, and largely the work of two of the UK-based artists, Alan Hunter, who we lost in 2012, and Russ Nicholson, who passed away last week, and is the subject of this appreciation post.

Death Knight by RUSS
Image Source

Of the two, Nicholson is much better known these days, having contributed more illustrations to the book, and more of the best-remembered monsters such as the Coffer Corpse, Death Knight, Demon: Lolth, Flind, Githyanki, Grell, Norker, Penanggalan, Retriever, Revenant, Skeleton Warrior, Son of Kyuss, Svirfneblin, and Xill, to name just a few. His prominent "RUSS" signature on his illustrations also helped cement his name in the mind of fans of the Fiend Folio.

Svirfneblin (Deep Gnome) by RUSS
Image Source

Nicholson excelled at both types of interior artwork found in the early monster tomes: the static "monster portrait" accompanying each stat block and the dynamic "action scene" depicting characters encountering monsters, such as the one at the top of this post. Both types were found in the original Monster Manual, and the Fiend Folio takes it up a notch with more of everything (sadly, the MONSTER MANUAL II would almost entirely eliminate the second category, making it much less thrilling to peruse, and starting a trend that has unfortunately continued). In addition to numerous monster portraits, larger fill-ins and the title-page monster, Nicholson also contributed two of the seven full-page pictures, which depict parties facing off against Githyanki and a Grell, respectively. All of these images remain indelibly burned into my mind's eye.

Image Source

His art in the Fiend Folio was an outgrowth of his work for the early years of White Dwarf. As a youth, I was only ever able to locate one of these issues: #29 (Feb/Mar 1982), found secondhand at the Game Workshop store in Baltimore, which was the first one in the US.  It featured one exquisite Nicholson, an illustration for the first Griselda story, "Lucki Eddi", a fiction series set in the Runequest world of Glorantha.

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.
Image Source.

Unfortunately, I don't recall encountering any other publications with his art as a youth. He is also well-known for illustrating the interiors of the first two Fighting Fantasy books, but those mostly eluded me, and I only ever came across one slightly later entry, at our local library. 

Illustration for the Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea RPG
Image Source

Naturally in the internet age I've been able to rectify this and have seen many more of his works from a long and productive career. In the last decade, at least before his health faltered, Nicholson was very active on the internet, both on G+ (where he even joined my Holmes Basic G+ Group), Facebook and on his own personal blog, The Gallery: the Art of Russ Nicholson, where he frequently shared large groups of scans of his art, old and new. And he remained very productive in new RPG art, often for newer publications, such as the DCC RPG rulebook and the Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea RPG (see above). I was always impressed by how consistent in style his newer work was with his classic illustrations.

A few years ago at virtual Gary Con, I had the pleasure of playing in a game where the entire party was a Githyanki, a fantastic AD&D scenario called "Secret of the Githyanki" run by Julian Bernick. I played an anti-paladin with a silver sword. And the entire time I pictured us and the setting looking just like Nicholson's pictures in the Fiend Folio.

Farewell, RUSS.

Sutherland Dragon Details

As promised in my earlier post about on the exhibit of the Holmes Basic cover art ⁠— aka the Sutherland Dragon ⁠— here are several close-ups of different portions.

The Fighter

The greens are more apparent, including in details such as the "emeralds" circling the pommel of the sword poking out from the treasure pile.

In the dragon's chest in the upper portion of this image you can clearly see multi-colored gems encrusted between the belly plates. A few are even gleaming, a detail which doesn't show up well because the gleams are white on a yellow background. 

Note Sutherland's signature, just visible below the shield. This portion of the image appeared on the bottom edge of the box set cover, where a bit more of his name can be seen than here.

The Magic-User

Here we see the wizard unobscured by the TSR logo and the other writing on the box cover.

Sutherland's attention to the lighting is very apparent in the yellow highlights and deep shadows applied to the wizard's blue robe.

The Dragon

Yellow bands of light radiate out from the wizard's torch, a detail that doesn't reproduce well on the boxed set cover. 

The motion lines accentuate the mood that the dragon has just been surprised. Sutherland used motion lines in other illustrations, particularly sword swings, such as on the title page of the Holmes Basic rulebook, as can be seen here.

As a reminder, the exhibit featuring this painting is at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA through Halloween, and then will be at the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, TN from May 20 to September 5, 2022, and then at the Flint Institute of Art in Flint, MI from September 23, 2002 through January 8, 2023.

The Holmes Basic Set Cover Art: Exhibited!

"The Sutherland Dragon" on display, photo by myself

About two weeks ago, while on vacation, I saw a cryptic post on FB implying that the original Holmes Basic Set cover art —  which I often refer to as "The Sutherland Dragon", after the artist — was on display in public ... somewhere. After a bit of searching, I confirmed that it was indeed being exhibited, as part of the show Enchanted: A History of Fantasy Illustration at the Norman Rockwell Museum in the town of Stockbridge in western Massachusetts. I hadn't heard of the show until that moment, but at the time I just happened to be within reasonable driving distance of the museum, and would not be as close again for some time, so a quick decision was made to take a previously unplanned side trip to the museum!

A Painting Rediscovered

Not all original D&D art still exists, but I've known for a while that Sutherland's painting does, because back in 2013 Steve Winter reported on Twitter that it had been found, like the Lost Ark of the Covenant, "in a crate in WotC's warehouse". Steve provided a photo, observing that the "detail is amazing", which showed that the art had slipped inside its framing while in storage:

(As an aside, I joined Twitter for the first time just so I could comment on Steve's tweet, which eventually led to regular usage, and I recently passed 700 followers).

At the time, Steve also wrote on his blog Howling Tower about the find, which he coincidentally posted on Holmes' date of birth.

I also have a vague recollection of hearing later that it was now hanging up at the WOTC offices. I've played in several games with Steve at NTRPG Con and Gary Con over the years since (Gamma World, for example), so I may have asked him about it at one point.

Update: I was reminded on Twitter that on page 394 of Art & Arcana (2018), there is a small inset showing a WOTC employee holding the Sutherland Dragon with the caption: "Wizards employee Curt Gould poses in front of the beast with a red dragon of his own — the original Dave Sutherland basic box painting that he discovered in a Wizards of the Coast warehouse in 2013". The painting is in the same frame as the current exhibit. This may have been the source of my vague recollection mentioned in the paragraph above.

The Exhibit Curator on Sutherland's Illustration

The Enchanted exhibit opened in mid-June, after which the museum held a virtual symposium, which included a keynote talk (archived here on Google) by the exhibition curator, Jesse Kowalski, who at one point shows Sutherland's art (at ~41:00) and says that "it is probably the painting I was most thrilled to have in the exhibit", and that "I believe it is the first time on view to the public. It's on loan from Wizards of the Coast", and while "...it's not the best painting, however, it's such an iconic work that started a whole generation of kids in the basement rolling dice".

Visiting the Museum

After driving several hours we arrived in Stockbridge, where Rockwell had lived, and then at the museum, which is in a beautiful leafy setting with picnic tables and sculptures, which currently includes a complimentary exhibit of contemporary fantasy sculpture, titled Land of Enchantment: A Fantastical Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition. In addition to the museum proper, which counts George Lucas and Steven Spielberg as donors, Rockwell's actual studio is also on the grounds, having been moved there from another location in town. 

Update: Thanks to a user on reddit, I've learned that Stockbridge is also famous as the setting of Arlo Guthrie's song Alice's Restaurant.

Seeing The Sutherland Dragon

After paying our entry fee and applying my sticker, I zipped through the rooms of the exhibit until I found what I was there for, which was hung next to another classic from the same era, David Trampier's Pseudo-dragon from the AD&D Monster Manual:

It was stunning to finally see the Sutherland Dragon in the person. The colors in the original are *much* brighter than the published image on the box cover, and many details are more apparent, such as the colorful, glinting gems stuck in the crevices between the dragon's belly scales, like Smaug in the Hobbit. I'll make a follow-up post with a few closer photos of details of the painting, so here I'll just talk about some overall impressions of the painting as it is on display in the exhibition.

The painting, which the wall text indicates is "acrylic on board", has been re-framed since 2013, and now includes triple matting (see the picture at the top of this blog). I imagine this was done by Wizards of the Coast, who the wall text indicates are still the owners. The catalog for the exhibit (see below for more on this) lists the size as 24 5/8" x 22", which I believe refers to the entire framing, or perhaps just the painted board inside. The new matting is more aggressive than in the earlier frame, limiting the visible portion of the painting to about 10" by 12", which is just a bit larger than the original box cover, which is about 9" by 11". I can guess why this was done, as it has the effect of focusing the presentation on the action of the scene: the wizard and warrior confronting the looming red dragon. And it also emphasizes that Sutherland was painting something just a bit larger in scale than what was needed for the product as published. 

Unfortunately, WOTC's new matting covers up some significant details from Sutherland's original painting. Like other TSR boxed games from this era, the cover art was printed not just on the top of the box lid, but also wraps around to the sides. In the case of the Holmes Basic Set, the left, top and right sides each show the blocks of dungeon walls, which were all part of Sutherland's painting. Since this is an exhibition focusing on illustration, I would have preferred to see the entire painting, along with discussion of how Sutherland arranged a composition that was intended for a wrap-around box top. 

The matting also shifts the "visible portion" of the painting downward from the published box cover, which covers up most of a significant detail that is visible at the top of the published box cover: the archway that connects the top of the columns and frames the dragon. As a positive, this shift keeps uncovered most of what was shown on the bottom box edge, allowing for an fuller unobstructed view of the two adventurers, which I enjoyed seeing.

 

For a visualization of what the entire painting might look like if the current matting was removed, here is a mock-up of the original art posted on the Xeveninti blog back in 2010. It was made by scanning the entirety of the original box (cover and all four sides), editing these together, and editing out the graphics:

I hope I don't sound too negative here; this was simply an observation I made while viewing the painting and thinking about it. My overall experience at the museum was terrific, I was thrilled to see the painting in person, and it is wonderful that it has been preserved ("it belongs in a museum!") and has been made available for public showing by WOTC.

Exhibition Catalog

I bought a copy of this at the gift shop, and you can purchase it online here. It's nicely done, edited by the curator of the exhibit, and lavishly filled with color images from the exhibit, plus other images not in the exhibit. There's an 11-page section called "Gaming", which includes a ~1/3-page image of the Sutherland painting — I, of course, wish they made this one full page like some of the other illustrations in the book — and a really nice large scan of Trampier's Pseudo-dragon, as well as other gaming art, including an Elmore and an Easley that were also in the show.

Thy Deadline

If you want to see the exhibit in person in Stockbridge, get there by October 31st of this year!

Update: Mike S. on FB found info here on where the show will later move to:

• May 20 to September 5, 2022: Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, TN
• September 23, 2022 to January 8, 2023: Flint Institute of Art in Flint, MI

Future Posts

I plan to make a few follow-up posts with some closer shots of the Sutherland Dragon, and also a few of the other artworks in the exhibition, including Trampier's Pseudo-Dragon. I'll update this section with the links once they are up.

See also:

Smaug versus the Sutherland Dragon

David Sutherland Day

Sutherland Dragon in Lego

Dragon+ 5 Wallpaper inspired by Sutherland Dragon

The "Come Visit My Dungeon" Sticker

 

The Come Visit My Dungeon sticker is a bit of early TSR ephemera that I have written about once before, way back in 2012. It was brought to my attention again recently when Ernie Gygax joined Twitter and pinned a post with the above photo, which is the highest resolution version of it that I have seen. The writing on the sign to the right is visible as:

"Lasciate ogni speranza Voi Ch'Entrate"

Which is from Dante's Divine Comedy, and is well known in translation as:

"All hope abandon, ye who enter in!"

The sticker art appears to be unsigned, and I haven't heard anywhere else who the artist is; I'll update this post if I learn this.

The sticker is associated with the Dungeon Hobby Shop. Per Ernie: "We had stacks of [this sticker] in our Shipping Dept of the Dungeon Distributors. I do not remember why we had them though. I think it is from the 772 Main St days rather than the earlier 723 Williams St." Elsewhere, Ernie indicated that the sticker was given out with purchases of a D&D set. 

However, the sticker may date back further than that, as TSR moved to 772 Main Street in the later '70s; the earliest date I've found in Dragon for that address is in The Dragon #20, November 1978. But there are several examples of the sticker attached to an early "woodgrain" OD&D set. One example can be seen in my earlier post, and was owned by Dave Arneson himself; it also has an address label with his name on the cover. Reportedly, he didn't care for the art on the cover. On the Acaeum, another copy was said to have had the sticker placed inside the box lid by Gary Gygax when bought from his basement.

There is also a roughly contemporary TSR T-shirt with the same Come Visit My Dungeon slogan on the front, under the art also used on the cover of the first issue of The Dragon. The back features Greg Bell's Lizardman art from the inside cover of Greyhawk, also used as TSR's "Lizard Logo". You can see a great photo of this T-shirt here, and another of Rob Kuntz wearing it here.

Scrum in Miniature: The Lost Art of Games Workshop's Holmes Basic

My fellow Scrum Club member Joe has started a series called the "Lost Art of D&D" on his blog Scrum in Miniature, and the second installment covers the replacement art by John Blanche and Fangorn that was used by Games Workshop in the first printing of Holmes Basic rulebook, first released in December 1977. The post goes through the rulebook and shows each replacement work contrasted with the original from the U.S. version (example above).

In a 2001 interview, Gary Gygax was asked about the UK version, and responded:

"Yes, I saw the work, and I approved. Ian [Livingstone] and Steve [Jackson of Games Workshop] convinced me that their audience didn't like the illustrations used in American versions of the game, so I gave them the okay to produce their own. I had a copy of the Basic Set rules, but it was lost when Lorraine Williams took over TSR..."

Lost Art of D&D No. 2: Games Workshop's Holmes Basic (1977)

After Games Workshop attained the license to print a co-branded edition of TSR's 1977 Dungeons & Dragons basic rules book, they set about putting their own stamp on it, designing a new cover and replacing a number of the illustrations they deemed too crudely drawn for their U.K. market.

Smaug vs the Sutherland Red Dragon

Left: Smaug by Tim Kirk (1975). Right: the cover of the Holmes Basic Set (July 1977). 
Click on the image for a larger view

David Sutherland painted a cover for the Holmes Basic Set that remains one of the most iconic early D&D illustrations. It literalized the title of Dungeons & Dragons, showing a dragon in a dungeon. The viewpoint is as if we are members of the party of adventurers who have just entered the chamber and disturbed the huge red dragon resting on its seemingly endless bed of gold and treasures.

This image has influenced the cover art of many successor sets ranging from later TSR D&D Basic Sets to the Pathfinder Beginner Box. Sutherland's take on the Red Dragon appeared in other D&D products of the era, including the Monster Manual and Monster Cards.

The 1975 Tolkien Calendar

Sutherland's dragon was in turn possibly influenced by an earlier image of red dragon on a pile of gold that was published about two years before Holmes Basic. This was a stunning depiction of Smaug by Tim Kirk that appeared in the 1975 Tolkien Calendar, which included works done as part of his MFA from Cal State. In particular, note the similar (but not identical) poses of the dragons, the head "whiskers" of the dragons, and the wide ventral neck scales. There are also similarities in the treasures embedded in the pile of gold, including urns, chests and embedded swords. There's even an arching shape over the head of each Dragon (vaulted ceiling for Smaug, entrance archway for the Sutherland Dragon).

Source: The Complete Guide to Tolkien Calendars

Kirk's illustration in turn appears to be a modernization of Tolkien's own "Conversations with Smaug", which appears in the Hobbit itself. Note how Tolkien has placed skulls on the floor around the pile of gold and compare this with the skulls in Kirk's pile of gold:

Source: The One Ring

Additional Evidence: Pig-Faced Orcs

By the mid-70s, Tolkien's Middle-Earth books had grown extremely popular and the 1975 calendar was the first to feature art from an artist other than Tolkien himself. It's easy to imagine that a fantasy artist such as Sutherland would have encountered this calendar. But there is one other bit of evidence that Sutherland was familiar with the Tolkien Calendars. The 1976 Tolkien Calendar (which would have been published in mid-to-late 1975) included art by the Brothers Hildebrandt, including this image of very pig-faced orcs: 

And Sutherland was the one who slightly thereafter introduced pig-faced orcs into D&D, via his illustrations in Swords & Spells (July 1976, per the Acaeum), Holmes Basic & the AD&D Monster Manual.

This illustration is spread across two pages in Swords & Spells. 
Source: OldSchoolFRP

See also:

David Sutherland Day

Holmes Portrait by David Crawford

A fantastic portrait of Dr. Holmes in an imagined study drawn by fan David Crawford! 

David posted it to the Holmes Basic Facebook group last week and gave me permission to share it here. He wrote: "A little sketch in tribute to J. Eric Holmes, depicted here as a wizard (Zenopus himself?!?) in study."

Holmes studies a tome on his desk, while before him "is the ruined tower of ZENOPUS in the crystal ball". Behind him, a skull sits on one shelf of a large bookcase filled with books.

It really captures his likeness, and the black ink line art is reminiscent of David Sutherland's work in the late '70s. I can imagine this piece appearing with Holmes bio in the Basic rulebook.

Thank you, David, for making this.

Tom Wham art on Gary Con XII Cups

Gary Con XII cup featuring Wham's Awful Green Things From Outer Space

Luke Gygax recently revealed the designs for the "Gary Con Collectible Stadium Cups" for this year's upcoming event. There are five designs, all featuring art by Tom Wham, most well-known for his self-illustrated board games, but also one of the three artists for the Holmes Basic rulebook. Wham was responsible for three pieces of art in the rulebook, including the famous Skull Mountain. Wham is a regular at Gary Con (scheduled to run four games this year) and a few years back I played in a session of Dragon Lairds (co-designed by Jim Ward) that he refereed, after which he signed the Skull Dungeon in one of my Basic rulebooks! While I didn't know he drew that until a few years ago, I've been a fan of his work since the '80s when I bought a Steve Jackson Games pocket box edition of his classic Awful Green Things From Outer Space, which I still have.

There are five (!) cup designs this year: four for purchase (two "Bright Green Beer" and two "Bright Blue Soda" cups), which give beer or soda discounts, and one white cup that you get if you are a GM, which combines both discounts.

The green cup shown above features the three life stages (egg, baby and adult) of the deadly aliens from Awful Green Things. Their look has varied slightly over the years, but the adults appear similar to those on the cover of the 1979 TSR version, which you can see on his website.

The white GM cup also features art from Awful Green Things, namely the steadfast Znutar robot, Leadfoot. Similar Leadfoot art appears on Wham's website here.

The other green cup features a group of Penguins. This art is more mysterious, but I came across it on his website with the caption, "Penguins of Destiny". This led me to a Worthpoint page archiving an Ebay auction for the original art (images included below), which says: 

Offered for auction is a piece of original art from the great Tom Wham plus a piece of rpg gaming history from Jim Ward. The Penguins of Destiny was an rpg event created by Jim Ward back in the day, and the players got a small penguin figure signed by Jim Ward at the event. Recreated in a piece of original art by Tom Wham for the Gen Con auction in 2013, both are being offered together.

Wham's game File 13: the Game Inventor's Game in Dragon #72 (August 1983) includes the "Penguins of Destiny - the Jim Ward life story game" in the list of invented games.

This blue cup features a running Snit from his other fondly remembered TSR game Snit's Revenge. This snit has distinctive bird-like feet, and I found it on one of the game tokens from the first boxed version from 1978:

Finally, the other blue cup features a flying dragon from Wham's more recent game, Feudality (2011). The dragon shows up on the cover of the game and on this page on his website (scroll to the bottom of the page).

See you at the con, hopefully with a Wham cup in hand! I'll be there and am scheduled to run two game sessions.

Obscure Art Friday: Weighing the Heart of the Dead by Erol Otus

Erol Otus, Weighing the Heart of the Dead. Image source

The above picture is a fantastic full-page illustration by Erol Otus from Deities & Demigods (later retitled Legends & Lore), the fourth AD&D hardcover released in 1980. A tour-de-force of TSR's bullpen of artists at the time, it includes the work of Darlene, Dee, Diesel, Jaquays, Otus, Rosolf, Sutherland and Trampier, and lesser known artists (Eymoth, Jeff Lanners), all together in a single tome. 

But this picture is not in the highly sought after first or second printings that include the Cthulhu & Melnibonean Mythos, and which get the most attention these days. It was only added to the third printing when the Cthulhu & Melnibonean Mythos were removed. Some clues to the change are that Otus' signature includes an "81", which is the year after the book was originally published, and that Jeff Dee illustrated the rest of the Egyptian Mythos.

I'm not sure why TSR added this picture; I thought maybe they needed to fill in a page but by my count those two Mythos total 16 pages, which was exactly the amount removed (reducing the page count from 144 to 128 pages). Perhaps TSR let Otus add it because they were removing his stunning work on the Cthulhu Mythos (which he drew all of), which was his major contribution to the book besides the cover, title page illustration, and a few Non-Human Deities.

I had the version with this picture when I was kid and always liked it; these days I only have the earlier version but at some point realized this picture was not in it. I posted about it a few years ago in the Holmes Basic Community on G+. Per our discussions there, the image is a bit confusingly placed, as it comes on page 43 at the end of the Chinese Mythos, whose last entry is "Yen-Wang-Yeh (judge of the dead)", but the image is clearly illustrating a scene from the Egyptian Mythos, which after removal of the Cthulhu Mythos is placed right after the Chinese Mythos. 

Thoth is pictured in the background, and Anubis  in the foreground, fulfilling his role as "collector of the souls for transportation to the house of the dead", per his entry in the Egyptian Mythos. Curiously, there does not seem to be any further description of the Judgement scene anywhere else in the Egyptian Mythos, including any description of the creature standing behind the scales.

I found the above scan at the Sharktanks tumblr, where they wrote: 

"The Egyptian rite of Judgement from TSR’s “Deities and Demigods” by Erol Otus, 1980.  Still the only artistic depiction of the rite I’ve seen outside of the original hieroglyphs. The Devourer of the Dead is a lot bigger in this version than in the ancient copies I’ve seen."

The Wikipedia entry for the Book of the Dead gives more information, including a picture showing the same entities:

"This detail scene, from the Papyrus of Hunefer (c. 1275 BCE), shows the scribe Hunefer's heart being weighed on the scale of Maat against the feather of truth, by the jackal-headed Anubis. The ibis-headed Thoth, scribe of the gods, records the result. If his heart equals exactly the weight of the feather, Hunefer is allowed to pass into the afterlife. If not, he is eaten by the waiting chimeric devouring creature Ammit composed of the deadly crocodile, lion, and hippopotamus. Vignettes such as these were a common illustration in Egyptian books of the dead."