Dungeons and Dragons Art Review - Tony Szczudlo

 Where did Tony Szczudlo come from? Is that last name even real? 

I was thinking about this because my daughter previously drew fantastical scenes and stories starting from around age four. They were really cool and had a lot of action. Now she mostly sceteches just individual people or faces, or just hands, just feet, trying to figure out how to accurately capture the human body and human movement. 

So, this reminded me of TSR's big four oil painters from The Pit - Jeff Easley, Larry Elmore, Clyde Caldwell, and Keith Parkinson. Most of their work is either static or involves action in a fairly limited scope without much detail going on in the background or the margins. Easley departs from this quite a bit, but his detail washes into blurs in the background very rapidly. Parkinson has a few more active pieces with a wide scale. Elmore has some really nice dynamic pieces, but they focus on just a handful of characters and the backgrounds tend to be much more static or, to be very precise, scenic landscapes. 

That's where Tony Szczudlo comes in. He did paintings for TSR's Birthright Dungeons and Dragons setting. This would have been later 1990s, not too long before Wizards of the Coast bought TSR. Birthright started as a deluxe boxed set. Szczudlo's cover is a masterpiece in its scope, color, and detail. It captures what so many of our D&D games tried to build to or include, these massed combats and castle sieges, the player characters doing their best to contribute to victory or just survive. In general, Szczudlo's painting style actually reminds me of Jeff Easley in terms of round, constrained forms, and blurred or impressionistic backgrounds. But Szczudlo's mid-grounds have so much more going on, and his foregrounds are so full of little details. Szczudlo's work is also much more visceral and horrifying. He love's the blood, the screams of pain and terror. Because of this, a lot of his paintings and drawings are not up my alley. I don't go in for horror, blood, and gore. But his Birthright paintings are awesome. It's a shame he worked for TSR as it was sinking under its own bloated weight of settings and splat books. I would have loved to see what else Szczudlo could have contributed to outside of Birthright.  Wizards didn't use him at all. Maybe Szczudlo's aesthetic was too disturbing to parents. I'll include one of the covers for another Birthright project he did to give a feel for it. 

(Actually, doing a little extra sifting through the internet shows that Szczudlo did paint for Wizards, but small pieces for card art, and nothing visceral.)Now, let's take a look, shall we? 

Tony Szczudlo painting his cover for Birthright. 

Detail of the corner Szczudlo is working on with the first photo.

Complete Birthright Painting by Tony Szczudlo. Scale here does not do it justice. 

Cover to a Birthright companion book Legends of the Hero King

And now some paintings that approach Szczudlo's Brightright painting, but are simply no match in scope and detail.

Jeff Easley comes closest, but for all that is going on here, for the most part it's dozens of figures with swords at the ready, Laurana the sole exception as she cuts down a draconian in the foreground. I believe this was the original cover art to Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis's first ever Dragonlance novel Dragons of Autumn Twilight. 

One of my favorite's from Keith Parkinson. I wish I knew the title. The idea here is similar to Szczudlo's Birthright painting, but the scale here is very personalized, only focused on the two figure's in the foreground. There is a sense of battle taking place in the background, just enough of a hint. This is the cover to an interior book in TSR's first boxed set for the AD&D Forgotten Realms setting.

A classic from Clyde Caldwell (I pulled this directly from his website), the cover to the first AD&D Dragonlance module, Dragons of Despair. This is the most action I've seen in a Caldwell painting, and the background of ruins and waterfalls is quite stunning. But in terms of scope, it's a far cry from Szczudlo's Birthright painting. 

This is the only Larry Elmore painting I can think of that works at a similar scale to Szczudlo's Birthright. I know its title as The Savage Frontier, the cover to a Forgotten Realms setting book. It may also be a cover to one of the AD&D high-level adventures for the Bloodstone Lands. I love this painting and we referenced it frequently as we thought of settings and what the composition might be to a dark army we would have to face off against. That said, Elmore has many nicely posed figures with little dynamism and no violence. 

Time Passes

 I'm sitting here with my daughter, Solvieg, who is now fourteen. She's sketching randomly in a school notebook. I write randomly, but she is very focused on what she is doing. This is one of her favorite things, just sketching. She's good, does mostly people. She works on heads and hands at various angles, tries to capture movement in the body.

 I'm looking out an apartment window at a rainwashed sky, vibrant green leaves with drops of water resting on them poetically before evaporating or blown away in a breeze. It's a temp apartment. We've been here seven months now while I'm in training for my next assignment, U.S. Embassy in Maputo, Mozambique. 

My younger daughter, Sage, is still at school finishing up a computer coding class. She's not much for computers, but because they are creating computer games she's stuck with it. Sage likes crafts; anything with paper, but also knitting, sewing, sculpting, whatever. Are we ready for this next big move? We only came back to the USA from Hanoi, Vietnam, last August after doing a three-year tour there. The girls made good friends and it was hard to leave. 

Shin is out shopping for items that we'll take to Mozambique, getting us ready. She will pick up Sage on the way home. Time Passes. It reminds me of a song I found on the internet by Jerry Ramsey called Time Marches on. I'm sure it's a cover. Yup. It's by Tracy Lawrence. Here's the lyrics:

Sister cries out from her baby bed
Brother runs in, feathers on his head
Mama's in her room learnin' how to sew
Daddy's drinkin' beer, listenin' to the radio

Hank Williams sings "Kaw Liga" and "Dear John"
And time marches on, time marches on

Sisters usin' rouge and clear complexion soap
Brothers wearin' beads and he smokes a lot of dope
Mama is depressed, barely makes a sound
Daddy's got a girlfriend in another town

Bob Dylan sings "Like A Rolling Stone"
And time marches on, time marches on

The south moves north, the north moves south
A star is born, a star burns out
The only thing that stays the same
Is everything changes, everything changes

Sister calls herself a sexy grandma
Brothers on a diet for high cholesterol
Mama's out of touch with reality
Daddy's in the ground beneath a maple tree

As the angels sing an old Hank Williams song
Time marches on, time marches on
Time marches on, time marches on
Time marches on, time marches on

Dungeons and Dragons Art Review - Trees and Parkinson

 I did it! I've finally found a decent copy of this Keith Parkinson's painting that graced the cover of AD&D's REF2. I have been looking for a copy on the internet for over 12 years and all I could find were little postage stamp sized thumbnails. Check it out in all its beauty.

A couple things of note here. My brother and I had a copy of REF 2 AD&D Character Record Sheets; I think we picked it up at a toy store at Crossroads Mall in Boulder, Colorado. But we never played AD&D. We played the basic, expert, and companion rules from D&D. It was Keith Parkinson's cover that drew us to buying this AD&D product. The character sheets were damn cool too, providing a tantalizing glimpse into the more complex, "adult" version of the game. This was almost like a Playboy magazine for us. For several years this was the only AD&D product we owned. To it we added the Wilderness Survival Guide and Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, two meaty rules and setting creation books with gorgeous cover paintings by Jeff Easley. But at that point we were playing David "Zeb" Cook's AD&D 2nd edition.  We never played Gary Gygax's advanced game. 

But back to Keith Parkinson and his art for D&D, or TSR at large. It's my understanding that Parkinson was one of four oil painters who TSR's Art Director, Jim Roslof, added to its art division ("The Pit") in the early 1980s as D&D took off into mainstream America. The other three oil painters were Jeff Easley, Larry Elmore, and Clyde Caldwell. To this list should be added Jim Holloway, but I'll save that for another post. 

Anyhow, these four guys provided the covers for the large majority of TSR books published in the 1980s and created the visual entrance for D&D. Their art grounded D&D in the 1980s,  in an esthetic that was more level with Tolkien and his knockoffs, such as Terry Brooks and his Shanara series, than what D&D had previously been, which was more a sword and sorcery idea set amid dungeon mazes; think Fritz Lieber's Fafherd and the Grey Mouser or Glen Cook's Black Company series, I guess. Probably you could just look at Gary Gygax's infamous Appendix N list of books to get a sense of what esthetic was driving D&D prior to it going mass market in the 1980s. The four greats from TRS's Pit took D&D out of the dungeon and into the light of a more real world. This was espacially the case with Parkinson and Elmore whose paintings so often feature landscapes, and trees. 

 Suffice to say that the four oil painters of TSR's Pit did some beautiful work that wouldn't put off parents by depicting demons, murder, and mayhem; all D&D staples before going mainstream. Parkinson and Elmore in particular did those landscapes that were just on the Frederick Remington side of a Thomas Kinkaid paining, or harkened back to N.C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle illustrations for Robin Hood, and King Arthur, etc., something that may have resonated positively with parents buying D&D books for their good kids. The look seems to have put off many old school D&D gamers, but I loved it!  Just look back to Parkinson's painting for REF 2, it's both gorgeous and evocative; hints at danger just off the edge of the canvas, while the horses with their gear and the distant mountain speak to a long journey into wild lands of adventure. 

Parkinson departed TSR's Pit to go freelance in the late 1980's, and later went into game design, including computer games as co-founder and art director for Sigil Games, which made Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. He continued to do oil paintings for book covers, individual commissions, personal work, and of course computer game covers, most famously for EverQuest. He passed away in 2005 at age 47 due to Leukemia. He was a giant in the fantasy art world and one of the four greats at TSR.  His esthetic is not for everyone. I see it as a beautiful realism with hints of the magical and fantastic. And trees. Here are two later Parkinson paintings with some amazing trees and foliage.

Return of the Banished. Well executed subject, and the finest of pine trees you will find in fantasy and sci-fi art. It reminds me that I read Keith Parkinson was a fan of Western oil paintings, or the Old West in general, and the landscape here speaks to that.

Demorgan's First Spell. This one one of my favorite Keith Parkinson paintings for sheer beauty. It also hints at a story, though not one of danger. The tree in the middle ground is classic Parkinson, and the foliage in the background is wonderfully lush and detailed. 

As a parting memory, one of my all-time favorite Parkinson works: The Flying citadel from his days in TSR's the Pit and Dragonlance. This is taken directly from Parkinson's website. 

The Little Brother of War

 I tried writing about this topic for over two decades; I failed again.  The Little Brother of War is the Choctaw's alternative name for their sport of stickball, which in their language is called kabocca towa, (chapucha toli). This translates literally to stickball in English. 

(Detail of George Carlin’s painting Ball Play of the Choctaw - Ball Up. The painting was done in Indian Territory around 1846.)

Some years ago I wrote a post about my friend Tom Deitz and mentioned stickball there, and intended then to do a follow-on about stickball, or toli as we called it for simplicity. We played toli at the University of Georgia in Athens as a club sport on the university's intermural fields. The team's founder was Greg Keyes, another author, and the idea of creating the team came to him in  a dream. Greg is one quarter Choctaw and hails from Meridian, Mississippi, not far from the Mississippi Band of Choctaw's reservation. Greg named the team the Flying Rats after a Choctaw story about the origin of the bat in an allegory of birds and mammals playing the first ball game. The Mississippi Choctaw called us the na holos, or white ghosts. Toli and the friends I made playing toli altered the trajectory of my life to a degree that I viewed us in mythic terms for many years. It's impossible for me to write about in a manner that  gives any justice to my feelings. 

                                            (Choctaw style kabocca and towa, sticks and ball)

The best I can do is this: My wife played stick ball for a year or so while we were still "just friends".  Back then she was very poetic, and described our toli this way: feel the earth, hit the sky. That captures it better than I can. We played barefoot in the traditional way, and our uniforms were shorts or pants and t-shirts, with shirts often shredded or gone after an intense game. 

(One of the few remain pictures I can find on the internet of the UGA Flying Rats playing a toli game against the Conehatta Skunks from Mississippi.) 

Toli as we played it was a rough and tumble game with few rules. As the Little Brother of War it was used as a method to resolve conflicts between communities rather than going to actual war. Toli remains an important, maybe integral, part of Choctaw identity today. Most Choctaw communities in Mississippi have a team made of of kid, adult, and old-timer squads, which today include girls and women's teams. (This was a development that the UGA Flying Rats take credit for due to our team always having women and insisting they play in games versus Conehatta. I'm not sure that the Flying Rats were directly responsible for the Choctaw women's teams, but it is part of our mythology.)

(Two opposing teams playing stickball at the Choctaw Fair. This contemporary style at the Fair is as structured as the sport gets. The author joined the Connehatta team at the Choctaw Fair on two occasions, and on a third occasion played with the mixed Choctaw and na holo, or white ghost, team called the Blood Brothers. Na hola is a term Choctaw use for European Americans.) 

God and Dungeons and Dragons

 Gasp! I started writing this in 2012? I guess I wrote myself out of the memory assault. Besides that I've exhausted myself with almost eight additional years of career drudgery. Work as a foreign service officer has actually been quite interesting, and I've had some assignments where the work was deeply important and meaningful to the welfare of American citizens, or even to people generally. But the 7am to 6pm daily grind, much of it in front of a computer, had the effect of dulling down memory. 

Assignments to date: Non-Immigrant Visas in Shanghai. American Citizen Services in Shanghai after a lengthy medical evacuation. Non-Immigrant Visas in Rio de Janeiro. Children's Issues - International Parental Child Abductions - in Washington DC. Non-Immigrant Visas in Hanoi. I am a Consular Officer after all. 

Getting back to the blog, it started as an exercise to get the upper hand on a deluge of memories and sentimentality, but even in the first post I said I'd have to write about D&D and role playing games to hold my interest. That is where I am at now. I can only keep this up if I write about RPGs. 

Tonight I turn to religion and D&D, specifically the character class of cleric. The D&D cleric is more or less a holly warrior, someone who has devoted life to upholding the tenants of her or his faith typically through martial means . In most D&D games this often mean fighting against the forces of darkness, evil, and chaos. The three other character classes in D&D are mage, thief, and fighter. None of those, come to think of it, are self-explanatory either. The different between a fighter and cleric though is the religious aspect. Clerics are warriors connected to their faith, god or gods, and this means they also have access to special holy powers, which in game terms manifest in protection and healing spells (plus others), and the ability to turn away undead creatures. In the basic rules of D&D that my twin brother and I started with there was not much explanation beyond this. However, it could beg the following questions: What faith, and what god or gods are cleric characters devoted to? Or are we talking about God? The basic D&D rules were purposefully ambiguous here, seeking the largest possible customer base. Advanced Dungeon's and Dragons, or AD&D, was not. 

The AD&D game had the book Deities & Demigods that detailed the pantheons of 15-17 different religions, depending on the printing. Some of these were "historical" such as the gods of ancient Egypt and Rome. Some were fanciful and copywritten, such as Cthulhu and Nehwon. Some were just legend, such as Arthurian. Then there were the handful of pantheons that were basically contemporary faiths, such as a collections of gods from Hinduism, and some Japanese and Chinese gods seem historical but are in fact still worshipped today after an Eastern fashion. One basic assumption of Deities and Demigods is that players may have their clerics devoted to these religions or gods. Not included in the book is God from the three monotheistic faiths of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. 

So when my twin brother and I got stated playing D&D in earnest  it was without the above Deities and Demigods, which we had never seen or heard of, and the friend who played with us, Casey, was a devout Mormon. Right off Casey wanted to play a cleric, and he was a holy warrior of God. This would have been about the time the big Satanic scare got started in the U.S. with regards to D&D, and I can remember Casey's mom, Elaine, grilling us on that, plus clerics. We made a good defense of the game  by saying that clerics were holy warriors devoted to God, fighting against evil everywhere. I had not thought at all about who clerics worshiped or where they got their powers until Casey started playing with us. When I did start to think about this it felt off somehow. I didn't invite God into my toys and hobbies and fun time, and it was a warren of a rabbit hole if you started to think seriously about how applying D&D rules to God and prayer might work. We later found that the D&D cleric and rules did work half decently if used with the ancient Greco-Roman cosmology and the like, but again, only if you didn't put too much thought into it. In the mid 1980's of rural Texas we never could have played D&D if we had gone the non-God route with Casey, so our clerics back then remained holy warriors of God, full stop. Don't think about it at all, just play the game and have fun.  If we had been aware of Deities and Demigods I wonder if we would have dropped the game altogether, at least until our next chapter in life.

Here is the first image of a cleric you see in the 1984 edition of  Dungeons and Dragons Basic Rules. It is an ink and pencil by Larry Elmore and a true beauty.  At some point I'll have to write about Elmore's contribution to the puberty years, but that is another story. 

This picture reminds me of a funny moment the first time Casey played D&D. He had armed his cleric character with a mace. Wielding it in combat the first time he said something along the lines of; "I pull out my mace and spray it right in the goblins eyes!" Damn dude, wrong century. I probably showed Casey this picture to get him on track with the older version of a mace. 

 

Introduction to Gary Gygax

 I've noted that I am not a game geek. That said, Dungeons and Dragons was my defining hobby through middle and high school. My twin brother and I bought and filched what what became a too large collection of D&D rule books, supplements, and settlings, much of which satisfied an itch to collect things and look at art work. Much of it went unused and little read. Essentially all of my allowance went to D&D, and if I could have played D&D every week I probably would have. But I couldn't quote a book, couldn't reference a rule beyond THAC0, was unaware of who the authors or game designers were, could not name a single RPG aside from D&D, never went to a gaming convention, had only a handful of Dragon magazines, and get this, was unaware of who Gary Gygax was. Never even heard the name until 1989 or 1990, seven or eight years into playing D&D.

Gary Gygax.  The first time I heard the name was from an odd encounter in my house with a visit from a friend of my Mom's which included her bringing over her son. I have no idea what the woman's name was, but I think his name was Troy. Mother and son were both fat and looked older than they probably were due to bad health. Apparently Troy wanted to meet us to talk D&D, and he was down in our Valdosta Georgia visiting from Atlanta.  I don't know if he was a college student, senior in high school, or what, but he impressed me as someone much older than myself. I guess maybe he was on a mission to recruit us to a gaming convention. Dragon Con remains huge in Atlanta, and I think Troy was involved in organizing Dragon Con somehow. The encounter took place when I was in 8th grade, 1989 or 1990. Leif and I were playing AD&D 2nd edition at that point. Troy looked at our books in disgust, and wanted to see our collection of Dragon magazines to reference a few points. We had only one, which had come out perhaps that month, or a month prior. He quizzed us about rules and personages and famous D&D titles and on and on. Leif and I have a way of shutting down when we don't know how to respond socially to a situation, and we did then. Most of his questions we met with silence, utter lack of eye contact, and exuding awkwardness so thick you could eat it with a spoon. Troy launched into a tirade against David "Zeb" Cook (whoever that was) and AD&D 2nd Edition, plus the Blume brothers (again, who the fuck?), and a frothy defense of Gary Gygax (again who? some guy akin to the right hand of God maybe?). It all went way over our heads. So now I knew the name Gary Gygax and that he had something to do with inventing D&D. And that was it for years to come. I could not have cared less. TSR painters Clyde Caldwell, Larry Elmore, Keith Parkinson, and Jeff Easley, sure I would have liked to know more about them if it didn't require too much energy on my part. Gary Gygax? No, I'm fine. 

Over a decade later I learned more about the guy. I remember when he passed away reading a headline "Gary Gygax failed his last saving Throw" and I thought, hey, that's the guy who started D&D. After that I started reading more about him and the origins of role playing games, but by then we had the internet and Wikipedia, so little effort required. 

To this day I 'm not concerned about Gary Gygax. I don't need to know about the man to have me one hell of a D&D session. But I am a father now and realize that we should give credit where credit is due. So thank you moms everywhere; thank you Jesus for being you; and somewhere down a long list I say thank you to Gary Gygax. Thank you for creating RPGs. 

And here is my first Dragon Magazine, issue #162.  I would have encountered Troy in the fall of 1990. I started playing D&D in 1982, at the age of six. I bought my first Dragon at the age of 15. That provides a sense of how disinterested in the details of the game I was and largely remain. 

End of August and off to China. On the 27th we leave Washington DC for a three day stay in San Francisco,  and then it is off to Shanghai, China, where we will live for two years. Where did the summer go? Not in this blog. It was quite pleasant and largely uneventful. Yesterday clouds rolled in overcast, carried by a cool wind that had leaves falling from the trees. It was a portent, autumn comes. Dad was here for five days, leaving yesterday in the wind and rain. I didn't tell him that he was my hero. Leif, my twin is here. We'll be together for two days still, as he's on the same flight to San Fran. Tor will meet us in San Fran for about a day. Shin and Solveig are asleep in bed because it is 6:30 in the morning. I could not sleep. Maybe the weight of the move to China has finally found me.