Scrum in Miniature

  I've always found this to be an especially evocative piece.  I've only ever known it from the article on the Anti-Paladin NPC from  The Dragon  #39 (1980), but I've discovered that it was actually originally drawn three years earlier for a plate depicting the Lord of the Nazgul in a 1977  Lord of the Rings  portfolio. The artist, Cynthia Sims Millan , was not credited in that issue's editorial box, and her signature was obviously deliberately excised from the artwork itself (see above plate and below page from The Dragon ). At the very least this was extremely poor form on TSR's part, but I can't help but wonder if they even legally owned the rights to reprint the piece. Besides this portfolio and a listing in the artist database on Board Game Geek, I could find precious little on Millan . The only games she seems associated with are a handful published by Heritage USA around 1980, and on all but one of those she seems paired with artist/graphic designer ...

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.  The cover art was by John Blanche at the very start of his career as a fantasy illustrator. Blanche went on to be a mainstay at Games Workshop, producing countless illustrations for them. His fannish enthusiasm for the material--as an artist as well as a lifelong gamer--has deservedly made him a favorite over the decades. I first encountered Blanche's work in the David Day compendium, A Tolkien Bestiary (1978), to which he contributed five illustrations that sit comfortably alongside the book's chief illustrator, Ian Miller. I have a special fondness for this book, having coveted it as a child during my incipient Middle Earth fixation. My parent's procured an out-of-print copy of t...

Artist Alex Nuckols made what disappointingly ended up being a minor yet still evocative contribution to the visual history of D&D with a series of paintings he was commissioned to produce for a school supply company named St. Regis. It seems he painted nearly a dozen pieces that graced the covers of D&D-themed notebooks, folders, and three-ring binders in 1980-81. As a D&D-obsessed kid of 10-11 years old at the time, I owned three or four of these and have never parted with  them.  Here are some examples I found online. I’ve always regretted that Nuckols didn’t produce work for any actual gaming material released by TSR (or any game company) because to this day I think he captured the gritty feel and texture of how I imagined these fantasy worlds in my mind’s eye. He was certainly a more accomplished artist than many of those who ended up in the stable as staff at TSR at the time. Artistically, his compositions are always compelling and typically eschew...