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 difference 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 her son's 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. 

Away to China

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.

Solveig, and the American, and Tor in San Francisco, 2012, on route to Shanghai, China. 

Heroes

Beowulf. Arthur. Robin Hood. Bilbo, Thorin and The Fellowship of the Ring. The Companions of the Lance. Heroes of legend, fantasy, and D&D. As a child growing up, are we not asked by our teachers and elders; "Who is your hero?" Although I found a place for myself in reading legends from England and the North of Europe, in Tolkien, and in playing Dungeons and Dragons, my hero did not come from here. Nor did it come from comic book heroes (I did not read comics anyhow) athletes, presidents, great thinkers, spiritual leaders, etc.  As a youth I really didn't have an answer to the hero question.

Now, looking back, it is clear to see that as a youth my hero was my Dad. I did not worship the ground that he stood on. Mostly I did not enjoy his company and I often found him over serious. But here is where it dawned on me.  I recall a fierce argument with Casey Dickman, my best friend in Alpine, Texas, defending my Dad for not going to Vietnam. Casey said his dad didn't go because the military wouldn't take him for health reasons, but he believed in serving his country and wasn't a coward. Okay, but my Dad believed in peace and was brave enough to go to jail for his belief if it would have come to it. In the end my Dad had a teaching deferment from the draft, so it never came to deciding on jail or shipping out to the Vietnam War. At age 10 or 11, Casey and I did not understand the reasons behind war, but we could throw about the stock phrases and arguments like pros. Anyhow, that must have been the first time I thought about my Dad as someone worthy of defending. How to approach the subject of Dad as my hero? It's so easy to blandly list his traits of awesomeness and achievements. It's just as easy and more fun to list his flaws and very strange character traits. And then there is this. Although I  can now see my Dad was my hero, I didn't love him as I loved my Mom. My Mom and I had comfortable. In her presence I mostly felt normal and at ease with life. She was my rock. Dad was my hero.


Was it middle school or high school that we first studied the Renaissance?
That's when I decided (I want to write realized) that my Dad was a true Renaissance Man. A Leonardo da Vinci, a Michael Angelo.

From birth and for all my years of schooling, up through college at UGA, my Dad was an artist and an art teacher. He started teaching junior high school in Boulder, Colorado. Then there was the private boarding school called Colorado Rocky Mountain School, where Mom was also a teacher, counselor and dorm leader. This opened their married life together. Next came Alaska. Dad first taught junior high in Sitka, where Tor was born, then high school in Homer, where Leif and I were born. From there it was onto higher education. He taught at Blackhills State College in Spearfish, South Dakota, was the art department chair at Sol Ross University in Alpine, Texas, and then went back to complete teaching at Valdosta State University, in Valdosta, Georgia. In between there were teaching stints in Australia and England as a Fulbright Scholar.  So, obviously my Dad was a teacher and an artist. If that is all I saw him as, I don't think I could think of him as  my hero. Yet after he retired, my Dad changed. The luster of the academic, the leader, the organizer of artists and creative types was done. His drive and the object of all that serious attention transferred from the higher calling of education to the more self absorbed pursuits of building model railroads, perfecting ski turns,  and the like. 

                            Dad (Stephen Paul Andersen), Mom (Janet Diss Andersen) and Bob Farley                                                      (seated, my Dad's best friend and partner in all things done differently)

                                                            Alpine, Texas, around 1983


But I am straying from  my purpose. Before retirement, I saw my Dad as the true Renaissance Man. Simply as an artists, he was an accomplished potter, painter, sculptor, jewelry maker and so on. But then he also designed and built houses. He was a bit of a musician, playing drums or anything with rhythm, as well as singing in choruses. He was a mechanic and could fix anything in a house, was handy with a car, and a master with bicycles. He was a bit of a socialite and dominated gatherings and parties with his stories of adventure. Dad was an athlete. He was a true rock climber and mountaineer, and helped pioneer the sport of kayaking. He was an early spelunker, explorer of caverns. And in nature, whether on a mountain, drifting down a river, or walking through the desert, he was a philosopher. Finally, Dad, was a free thinker and an individualist who seemed to have had no fear of what other people thought of him. This could be very embarrassing to a teenager, but even as I blushed or hid behind my hands, I was still proud of him. And when Casey called my Dad a coward, it didn't bother me at all. I already knew firm as the Sun rises that he was not. He had seen friends die on mountains, in caves, and in white water. My Dad had hung from the end of a rope on the Matterhorn in a blizzard, and he was bold enough to wear red socks, sandals, short shorts, and a clay covered apron to business meetings that were strictly jacket and tie affairs.  

The musical life, or lack there of

Here's the scoop on a pair of albums that I enjoyed listening to as a youngster all the way through graduating from the University of Georgia in 1999. These were not my albums, but rather my Dad's. And technically one was just a tape recording of someone else's album, but the effect was still the same. For a kid my age and of my generation, listening to this music was a little odd. But I'll get back to this in a moment.


The albums are, Chuck Mangione's 1977 Feels So Good and Ry Cooder's 1986 soundtrack Crossroads.

 

"Feels So Good" is jazz, but with a lot of groove and disco added in. The title track went to the top of the charts back in the late 70's, but by the time I was a kid selecting my own tunes in the mid 80's, disco was dead and in small town America you just didn't find kids listening to jazz on every street corner. I was not then and am not now a big fan of jazz, but this album from start to finish transcends genres. It's got lots of driving drum and electric bass, very smooth electric guitar that lays down disco riffs when it's not doing gorgeous solos. Chuck Mangione himself plays the flugelhorn, but this band is tight and Mangione doesn't push his solos. Everyone shines.

 "Crossroads" was a movie soundtrack that Ry Cooder arranged, produced and played slide guitar over. It's basically Delta Blues. As the only other Ry Cooder album I heard was essentially old Southern minstrel music, for years I assumed Ry Cooder was a Black American from the South. Not until "Bueno Vista Social Club" came out did I realize otherwise. I suppose the music on "Crossroads" is a heavy, old style of blues. Although a soundtrack for a Hollywood film staring Ralph Machio, there's nothing mainstream about the music itself.

Some of my earliest memories of listening to music go back to "Feels So Good" when Dad was playing it on the record player in Spearfish, South Dakota. I would have been 4 years old. It left an impression on me, because I was brave enough to play if for friends in Alpine, Texas, the first year I started middle school. I was a John Denver fanatic at the time, but wouldn't dare play John Denver for my friends, who were all listening big hair rock like Bon Jovi and White Snake. But "Feels So Good" is just such an amazing album. When you hear it the music just lifts you up and takes you to the best of places. It taps into an undeniable human impulse to open up and smile, to feel good. My friends were amazed by this music. They said it was definitely weird, but damned good. Before moving on to another town, in another state, I was able to play the album a few more time for my friends, which in my mind is a testament to the albums staying power.

"Crossroads" is not such a different listening experience. Hearing the crazy vocals and lyrics here will automatically plaster a smile on your face, and the driving harmonica gets feet and fingers tapping in time. I believe my Dad got the tape from a friend, Allen, in when we all lived in Texas. Allen and my dad met at the University of Colorado as hiking buddies, and later in life our families' paths would occasionally follow similar trajectories. For example, our families all lived in the UK at the same time, and later in Texas at the same time. So, I recall this visit to Allen's house in Texas, somewhere Houston. The dude's marriage was falling apart. He was a physisist who worked in weapons development, or some career that sells the soul down the sewer. It was late at night and I think we were just couch crashing on the way to somewhere else. He played these Ry Cooder albums but, half drunk on wine, Allen was waxing nostalgiac talking about the the good times now past, and the Beatles in particular. I remember thinking right then that my Dad was not much a Beatles fan. The evening left an impression on me. Outside of movies, that was the first time I had seen someone stuck on memories of a past golden age. I was probably nine or ten at the time. Now, middle aged with a child of my own and married, it's routine to look back longing for those golden times.

My Dad played "Crossroads" in our old massive Chevy Van as we drove down from Oregon's Mount Hood in the summer of 1985. Our cousins Eric and Jen, plus their parents were packed in with our family of five. When Eric and Jen heard "Crossroads", starting with the tune, Down in Mississippi, they got those smiles plastered on their faces. Jen screamed out; "Holy Cow! What is this?" in disbelief. I think we got two or three songs into the tape before my Aunt Kathee screamed; "Turn it off! It's giving  me a headache!" Today I still here those gravely lyrics drawling out; "Down in Mississippi where I was born, down in Mississippi where I come from, way down." On the word "down", another vocal with a deep bass slides in with the deepest of downs. At that time on Mount Hood, cousin Jen, starting high school, was making it her goal in life to wear a different outfit every day of the year. She could sew her own clothes and was a strait A student, and my grandmother from the other side of the family called her the All American Girl. Eric, a full generation ahead of me, was nearing the end of high school. He was a star basketball and football player. He still had the same girlfriend he met in middle school (Kathy) and would later marry, and he was still playing role playing games, board games, war games. Aside from the role playing games (or maybe because of them) Eric was essentially the all American Guy. Eric and Jen were not sure what to do with "Crossroads", but it sure got that slapping time with the harmonica.

Looking back, I see that musically I was a more than a little off from my peers. The only album I ever recall buying before starting college was a Cheiftans tape, Ireland's ambassadors of traditional music.About the only place I went to for music was my Dad's record and tape collection. It was vast and pretty eclectic, abounding with folk and classical music, but also including jazz, rock, blues. Honestly I think I can say that his music included just about every musical trend to hit America prior to 1975. After that it slides off dramatically. I listened to pretty much everything in there once. The music I went back to time and again was John Denver. Before starting middle school I claimed not to listen to anything that had electric guitar. My older brother drove Lief and I into fits of rage and tears by blaring his AC/DC records when our parents were out of the house.

Seventh grade filed trip to Washington DC and New York City. On the long bus ride north, I have this memory. There is the dim cabin of the bus, classmates sprawled out, one student to two seats, mostly trying to sleep or play cards, most listening to the latest top 40 on their Walkmans. Me, I too am listening to my Walkman. It's Peter Paul and Merry's hit, Where Have All the Flowers Gone. I play it over and over again. I am pretending to fall asleep, singing softly, maybe not even audible over the drone of the bus engine. But I hope that Brandy or maybe Alison (but really Brandy) will hear the words of my song and be moved. She will understand my heart and want to become my girlfriend. A few days later we spend the night with several other student groups near Valley Forge. Our chaperones provide us a dance party. We walk in and the new rendition of Wild Thing is playing. Alison and Brandy scream wildly and bust out dancing. Moments like that bring a stark honesty to one's vision. In later years, preparing for those Friday night football games in that dingy Valwood locker room, I would play Andean flute music on a Walkman. This while my teammates thrashed to Motley Crew's Night Train. Again a moment of clarity.

The closest I came to reality in terms of music was the Beatles. I believe at age 17 my twin brother Leif took hold of the family VW van as his primary mode of transportation. Somehow we also came up with several Beatles' albums on tape. A few we may have recorded off of Dad's records, and a few our friends passed to us, and Leif may have even bought one. Anyhow, while driving the Pube Mobile, Leif (now the Great Pube) and I would play Beatles tunes, mostly from the "White Album". David Schert, our musically gifted best friend, bought a Canned Heat tape for us that I sorely miss now. Besides this purchase, he also expanded our collection of music with the selections from the following: Pink Floyd, Santana, Crosby Stills Nash, CCR and Almond Brothers. These we played in the Pube Mobile. At home I still listened to my Dad's records and tapes. And Dad's collection being what it was, it also included a few CCR and Crosby Stills Nash albums.

 I followed the beat of a different drummer. I know that for generations we Americans have defined ourselves through the music we choose to listen to, and the music we exclude. For some, music becomes a foundation of their identity. For me, music had a smaller role. I think I could have lived without it and just been content with my own humming and whistling, or my Mom's quiet singing and my Dad's drumming. 

Concerts. I've been to a few concerts in my life. The big ones I can list. David Schert and I went to a Who concert in Atlanta. I was completely underwhelmed. David, Mom and I went to an Greg Almond Band concert near Atlanta. We convinced Mom to take us by rattling off a few of their more famous tunes, like Rambling Man. The show was all acid induced groove jams. Mom was underwhelmed, I got a headache, but I think David enjoyed himself a bit. In Colorado's Red Rocks Ampetheater I saw three concerts, all with David Schert and Leif. We smuggled ourselves into the edge of a Dave Mathews Band show. We were more impressed by being tossed out by security than the show itself. Something similar happened at another concert, but I don't even recall who played. The third Red Rocks show was Sarah Mc with the Cheiftans. It's the only big concert where I actually felt a connection with the music and found myself transported. David too, I am happy to say. Near the end a thunderstorm hit. David recalled the old fiddler playing boldly against the wind and those few big drops of rain. Seven or eight years later I went to a U2 concert with cousin Jen in Denver's Pepsi Center.  This was shortly after September 11th. It was a huge concert. In part U2 were also  paying tribute to the victims of the attacks. I love U2's music, but at this concert I never felt like anything more than a spectator, floating harmlessly around the edge of something that I didn't understand and couldn't be a truly part of. 

To think that "Crossroads" and "Feels So Good" stand out as music that has touched me.....
I stop, blink, and wonder, what happened to me? At least these albums are so good that pretty much anyone who has a hankering to listen to music would say; "Well, yes, I can see why this music would leave an impression." 


I will pile on a few more thoughts here. As I was unpacking a load of airfreight this morning in Shanghai at our new abode, the Tuscan Tower, out came a little stereo system. I like to listen to music while packing and unpacking, so I plugged in the iPod and decided to play some Velvet Underground, their simplistic edge a needed counterbalance to our new overdone Shanghai neighborhood. As the Velvet Underground began to play, I was immediately taken back to Athens, Georgia, the year 1999, when I fell in love with Shin. She introduced me to the Velvet Underground. I had a simple life a that time. All my belongings fit into my car, I rented from friends without need of a lease, I worked in the UGA Library mail room. Falling in love with Shin was completely the opposite of simple ad turned my life upside down. Now, I am here in my Shanghai house, a very tall three story affair that truly evokes the image of a tower in Tuscany. I am a foreign service officer in the US Department of State. A few blocks away a tailor is making a custom fitted suit for me, plus two dress shirts with white collars. I never wanted a life as complex as this. Such are the compromises one makes for love. Shin's other strong musical influences on me - Cat Stevens, Bell and Sebastian, Silvio Rodrigez, and to take this full circle, The Bueno Vista Social Club.

Dungeons & Dragons Art review - The Landscapes of 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, took 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 businesses to the the faceless corporations that bought up the more successful role playing games. One standard bearer of the OSR is blogger and game designer James Maliszewski, known as Grognardia. Mr. Maliszewski envisioned a history of role playing games divided into three eras: the Golden Age, the Silver Age, and the Age of Everything Thereafter. The OSR takes its 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 a disdain 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 Maliszewski's 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. Artists like 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, carries 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 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 hundreds of times. The scenery in Elmore's paintings come straight 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 almost always imaging the vaguely magical. In a way it's fun, but it's also distracting and can get in the way of the 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 TSR painting Elmore did. 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 TSR's Dragonlance novels.

                Larry Elmore's Death of Sturm

Next, another Dragonlance Painting. This one probably causes Mr. Maliszewski great pain as it represents the ascendance of Dragonlance. This beauty is perhaps Elmore's most recognizable painting. Gracing the cover of the fist Dragonlance novel, "Dragons of Autumn Twilight", it helped to make the books a sensation. It also marked a very conscious turning point in TSR's 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?

Larry Elmore's Dragon of Autumn Twilight

Here is a painting that represents D&D as my twin brother and I played it; stripped 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 few 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. I suspect that the three bearded figures ere are modeled on three of the four four great oil painters from TSR's Pit, all peers of Elmore's: Keith Parkinson as cleric, Jeff Easley as fighter, and Clyde Caldwell as magic user. 

 

Dragon Slayers and Proud of It!

A solid collection of Larry Elmore's paintings and ink drawings is featured on his website, https://larryelmore.com. The website has the ability to zoom into his work in detail. It's worth the visit.  I wish there were dates on each work so we can get a better sense of his progression as an artist. I'll add two final pieces here both pulled from Elmore's website, both from the early to mid-1980s. They carry light watermarks of his signature, but are as close to the real deal as you can have on the internet. 

Paladin

"Paladin" is a promotional piece Elmore made in 1982 for TSR's AD&D game. It may have been issued as a poster, but was definitely featured in magazine adds. There is something about the angles of the composition that makes the heart soar, or skip a beat and then soar. The goblinoid figures feel stilted, but it doesn't matter as attention is immediately on the horse and rider, then next to mountains and sky.  Elmore tends to do better work with figures in a more portrait style, so this is one of his better action pieces. The mountains are probably not specific, yet they still transport me easily to the Rockies - Rampart Ridge leading to the Signal Peaks for instance.

Waiting for Shadamehr

The final painting here is "Ancients and Innocents - Waiting for Shadamehr". This is a private work Elmore did in the mid 1980s, saying that fellow TSR it artist Keith Parkinson proposed they each make a painting they could run prints off of and sell at GenCon, where they already had vendor tables for their TSR work. That Elmore put time and passion into it shows. That he lives in a world of imagination shows. For me this is Larry Elmore's finest work, or at the very least represents examples of his greatest strengths - scantily clad female. check. Touch of whimsy. check. Figures posed for portrait. check. Fantasy grounded in the familiar. check. Landscape with mountains. check. The female figure here is gorgeously painted, and the details on her fur boots and loin cloth, chainmail bikini top, sword and shield, bits of clothing are just right. That said, Elmore has dozens of works, mostly ink or pencil drawings, for which I could say the same. What sets this apart is the landscape; the narrow mountain vale, dried by summer now turned to autumn, it moves away to a river and wider valley, perhaps opening onto a plain. The painting carries a wonderful sense of distance, hints at the way forward after many miles already travelled. For anyone who has hiked up a long pass, reached the saddle, and paused to look at the other side, this painting resonates. 

Looking back at Mr. Maliszewski's division of D&D into the Golden and Silver Ages, Elmore and his landscapes are the standard bearers of Silver. Of his hundreds of works, I can think of three that depict scenes inside dungeons or caves. Most of Elmore's work is set out of doors and celebrates nature - sky, clouds, mountains, snow, trees, grass, earth. To a fair number of these he adds dragons, so we get the dragons rather than the dungeons of D&D. For most of Elmore's paintings the landscapes beckon powerfully so that even armchair gamers with beer bellies and gray beards would want to visit them. They tie directly to Tolkien's The Hobbit. Tolkien wrote of the the sedate Bilbo; "he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls..."  Indeed it is The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that D&D's Silver Age so freely draws inspiration. Elmore was a key contributor to the creation of AD&D's Dragonlance, which in so many ways are derivative of Tolkien's books. But that is a post for another day. 

End of May muse

May is gone. I cannot remember what I wanted to write about in May. It will catch me next month.

In other news, the once brown and gray, woods, having already taken on the green buds of springs, have now transformed into a lush, green, jungle.