The landscape artist Larry Elmore

Still awash in memories, I've decided to tackle them from a more obtuse angle by getting back to thoughts on fantasy (make that D&D for now) art work. There is a newly dominant cadre of gamers that refers to themselves as the Old School Renaissance, or the OSR. Although newly emerged, these folks are all older, haven taken up Dungeons and Dragons in the 1970's and early 80's. They look back to the earlier years of role playing games as the best of times, a Golden Age of creativity that collapsed under the weight of its own success. Or, in simple terms, the OSR loves dungeon crawls without the story heavy and heroic plot elements of later years. They prefer more open ended play to the reams of structure that were progressively added to their games with hundreds of rule books and prefabricated settings. They prefer home grown business to the the more faceless corporations that bought up the most successful role playing games. One the standard bearers of the OSR is a blogger and game designer James Maliszewski, known as Grognardia. Mr. Maliszewski has envisioned a history of role playing games that he has so far divided into three: the Golden Age, the Silver Age, and the Age of Everything Thereafter. The OSR takes it's inspiration from the Golden Age, or the age when role playing games and Dungeons and Dragons were born. The age of Gary Gygax, and artists like Otis. Maliszewski harbors much ill will for the Silver Age of D&D, when Gygax was forced out of the company he created, and the popularity of the game reached its zenith.

I started playing D&D in this so called Silver Age. I loved it. The Silver Age took adventures from bleak and restricted confines of dungeons to the surface, where whole worlds of adventure on the grandest of scales awaited. The artist Larry Elmore captured this spirit more than anyone else doing fantasy artwork at the time.
As I wrote earlier, Elmore's style, grounded in the realist school of painting, carried a sense of the familiar and accessible with it. From his paintings, I could look around my own very real world and easily imagine signs of the fantastic.  Here is the perfect example of what I am referring to.



This is a fairly typical Elmore painting with its wide landscape, a rather humanistic (or naturalistic) take on a dragon, and a mundane group of adventures on the brink of of combat. Note the mountain in the background. It's Longs Peak on Colorado's Front Range. I've see this view a hundred times. The scenery in Elmore's paintings are strait from  my world. Hiking and climbing in the Rocky Mountains as teens, my twin brother and a friend or two would always brings along paper, pencil and dice, settling into a session of D&D if the opportunity presented itself. Even today, when I am outside in nature, I imagine elves behind the trees, spirits in the streams, dwarven caves in the mountains, and so on. Due to Elmore's paintings, when I am in the great out of doors, I am also almost always imaging the vaguely magical. In a way it's kind of fun, but it's also rather distracting and gets in the way of real beauty of nature that surrounds me.

Below I have included a few of Elmore's classics that defined the Silver Age of D&D. The first is, in my opinion, the very best of any Elmore painting that I have seen. None of his other works tells a story and displays as much mood and emotion as this one does. I believe it is called "The Death of Sturm". It comes from the Dragon Lance novels.

Next, another Dragon lance Painting. This one probably causes Mr. Maliszewski great pain as it represents the ascendance of Dragon Lance. This beauty is perhaps Elmore's most recognizable painting. Gracing the cover of the 1st Dragon Lance novel, "Dragons of Autumn Twilight", it helped to make the books a sensation. It also marked a very conscious turning point in the D&D brand to move into publishing novels, at the same time giving adventures and settings much more epic scale and plot. I'll always remember this cover in my cousin Eric's room. I was six. What else can I say?

 

Here is a painting that represents D&D as Leif and I played it; paired down, mostly simple adventures still lacking that epic scope. We never had a player character that advanced beyond 9th or 10th level. This is called "Dragon Slayers and Proud of It". It has a classical quality to it that none of Elmore's other paintings display, most especially seen in the muted tones of light and sky. I rather like this painting, mundane as it is.

 

Looking through Elmore's catalogue of work, I must add the final comment that he rarely depicts actual combat, and when he does, it tends to have a staged and wooden feel. Save for the covers on the Red, Blue ad Green D&D Basic boxed sets, his best works are more portrait like in their character.