Knights & Knaves Alehouse

It might of ended with GG's departure, but the harbinger of doom is when Larry Elmore became their main artist.

E.O. forever!

Mrk wrote:It might of ended with GG's departure, but the harbinger of doom is when Larry Elmore became their main artist.

E.O. forever!

Heh, you've just leep frogged over many others as one of my favorite K&K posters. I whole heartedly agree, LE was like a nuke going off. It marked the end of TSR right there on the cover, "you can kiss your ass goodbye".

Mrk wrote:It might of ended with GG's departure, but the harbinger of doom is when Larry Elmore became their main artist.

E.O. forever!

Completely disagree, but Otus doesn't excite me at all. De gustibus and all that.

In my opinion, TSR started going downhill in about 1983.

TSR's products steadily rose in quality from inception to about 1980, when it plateaued for two or three years. After that, there was a noticeable drop in quality of editing (although production values otherwise remained pretty high) while the number of products produced ballooned.

The type of product also changed from high-print volume general use products to lower print volume specific use products. TSR essentially began shooting with a rifle instead of a shot gun, trying to get smaller subsets of their audience to buy larger amounts of product. While it may have been short-term successful, I think anybody can see why it was a plan doomed to failure.

In continuing and exaggerating that marketing plan for over a decade, TSR basically turned its back on the potential for mass market popularity and tried to sell entirely to the hobbyists, whom they continued to cut up into smaller and more specific groups. They stopped selling at general purpose outlets and only sold at specialty stores. They stopped catering to the casual gamer, killing off their "low-impact" rpgs and board games. They relied more and more on an ever smaller group of core fans to purchase an ever greater amount of product.

I know from 1983 to 1996, TSR published more adventures every year for AD&D and D&D (with the exception of 1988, the year before 2e was published). I suspect, if you were to extend it to all products, you'd see the same trend. But where the TSR of 1981 had a nice balance of products out there, including a number of rpgs in addition to (A)D&D. By 1996, TSR had killed off D&D, MA/GW, SF, MSHRPG, TS, and most all of their other longstanding rpgs, and basically had just 2e and its book publishing wing left pumping an enormous amount of product for just these two things.

Flambeaux wrote:

Mrk wrote:It might of ended with GG's departure, but the harbinger of doom is when Larry Elmore became their main artist.

E.O. forever!

Completely disagree, but Otus doesn't excite me at all. De gustibus and all that.

Otus was the tomb stone then, perhaps the body already died and had been burried.

AxeMental wrote:

Flambeaux wrote:
Completely disagree, but Otus doesn't excite me at all. De gustibus and all that.

Otus was the tomb stone then, perhaps the body already died and had been burried.

Hold on now. Otus was doing art between 78-82 which were the glory years for AD&D: Tomb of Horror, Barrier Peaks, Hidden Shrine,ect,ect,ect. By 85' Gary was pretty much done with TSR and in 86' he was starting his new company.

You can hate Otus, Dee, Williamson all you want but they were doing art at the peak of the best in AD&D material. I'm not saying Elmore had anything to do with Gary's departure, but certainly the writing on the wall (written by the people who took control) and Elmor'e art was a vehicle for that change. Everything after 86' never felt the same and it hasn't since and from the look of the new crap it never will again.

FWIW, Elmore's first Dragon cover was #62 in June 1982, so while he does come on-scene at the end of the late-classic TSR era, he's still there in that timeframe.



Snarfquest (began July 1983), however, was certainly an omen of doom....

OK so Otus was around and capable of preducing kick ass covers. But that looks like a different Otus (above) then the later one (I recall American Indian looking chicks with feathers on magical staffs, and heavily posed adventuring groups etc. etc. So Otus was a prostitute? Or maybe that was his thing all along...who knows.

Rog, that was a good summary. Its curious that TSR turned their back on the mass market so completely (as you mentioned). I wonder if this was by design, or just something that evolved without their planning it.

If the former, that was pretty bone headed (to go after small pockets of players rather then going after young adult board game general market (Monopoly, Risk, Pictionary etc.). I always figured it was how things naturally evolved (a combination of extreme greed, lack of talent, and no longer sharing the vision of Gygax (which was more mainstream than the tooty-fruity idioticness of late 1E adn 2Es product lines).

AxeMental wrote:OK so Otus was around and capable of preducing kick ass covers. But that looks like a different Otus (above) then the later one (I recall American Indian looking chicks with feathers on magical staffs, and heavily posed adventuring groups etc. etc. So Otus was a prostitute? Or maybe that was his thing all along...who knows.

Emphasis mine. You meant to say 'Elmore', Axe.

- Wheggi

Wheggi wrote:

AxeMental wrote:OK so Otus was around and capable of preducing kick ass covers. But that looks like a different Otus (above) then the later one (I recall American Indian looking chicks with feathers on magical staffs, and heavily posed adventuring groups etc. etc. So Otus was a prostitute? Or maybe that was his thing all along...who knows.

Emphasis mine. You meant to say 'Elmore', Axe.

- Wheggi

Thanks for clearing that up, Wheggi.

grodog wrote:
Snarfquest (began July 1983), however, was certainly an omen of doom....

Your certainly right about that. In fact, if you look ay Elmore's credits on Pen and Paper you can see that he wasn't doing much work for TSR in the early 80's and then after 85 -WHAM!!! He was all over from the Red Box to Dragon: everywhere you looked there was old Larry waving at you.


Otus, Dee,Willingham,Roslof, the great Trampier and even poor old Sutherland. They defined an era and when you look at there work you think of those glorious days when Gygax was the King and could write what ever he wanted an didn't have some wretched corporate, non gamers telling him what he couldn't do. That's why I like those guys soo dam much. Not just because they were there for the golden years, but D&D wouldn't of been a quarter as fun to play without their illustrations at hand when you were going through the Spaceship of the Barrier Peaks or Looking through Deities & Demigods.

E.O. forever!

I don't mind that Dragon #62 cover, or the covers for the 1983 Basic & Expert sets, or the first few Endless Quest covers he did in 1982, because they actually seem to have some movement and vitality, but his style quickly began to feel like a bland cliche (especially once every picture started being of the same busty, pouty-lipped Brigitte Bardot-lookalike in different poses). I like Elmore better than Caldwell (who's an inferior Boris Vallejo clone and just total shit) and better than Easley's airbrush "swirling clouds" stuff (though his pen & ink full-pager of Drelzna in S4 is a classic), but for my money by far the best of that era was Parkinson (though, ironically, he's responsible for two of the very worst pieces of TSR art -- the covers of the GDQ1-7 supermodule and FR1 -- so nobody of that era has an unblemished record).

grodog wrote:FWIW, Elmore's first Dragon cover was #62 in June 1982...

I remember that issue; the cover of #62 was one of his better pieces.

l'll take E.O. basic and expert covers any day over Larry's.

While I think Elmore is technically a better artist, Otus' covers for B/X certainly make me want to play that game very badly. That's actually the first exposure I ever had to D&D and it set the tone for the way I play now.