You Have My Heartfelt Thanks, Dave.

David A. Trampier, known to a generation of d20-rollers as DAT, died last week. He was 59, but most of us who keep up with such things assumed he'd been dead for years. He literally dropped off the radar after an ugly spat with TSR back in the 80's, only resurfacing recently by accident, star of a college newspaper's drive-along with local cab drivers. Yep, David Trampier, he who formed my vision of Greyhawk, was driving a cab in an Illinois suburb.
That kind of sucks, but I respect his decision. I'll never understand it, but I respect it. I owe him that much; he gave me Emirikol the Chaotic, back in the day.

Is the a Ray of Frost or a Magic Missile he's shooting at the hapless town militia? Who knows? Who gives a shit? He's kicking major ass. Is he evil? All we know is that he's not only chaotic, he's totally the chaotic.

I guess I'm bummed about Trampier's passing because so much of what sucked me into AD&D was the illustrations. Seeing his work, or Jeff Dee's iconic bell-bottomed badasses, or Errol Otus's strangely helmeted characters, they all immediately put me back in seventh grade, sucking down Mountain Dew and eating Twizzlers and burning through page after page of graph paper and #2 pencils. These guys supplied visions of another world, and their visions were the springboard for my own imagination.


So here's my question: how much of a game's impact is flavored by the art? Would I still look back on the original Tunnels & Trolls with such affection if it weren't for Liz Danforth's art? How much of Steve Jackson's early success was based on Denis Loubet's art? I can tell you for a no-shit, I loved TSR's Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and Queen of the Demonweb Pits in large part for the separate books of illustrations. Would Tomb of Horrors suffer if you didn't have an illustration of a leering, open-mouthed demon to show your players right before they died without even getting a saving throw? I'm thinking not.


Conversely, sometimes no art makes a game. I was a HUGE fan of the old GDW Traveler, the famous Little Black Books. They were practically devoid of art. Even the books themselves were plain black books. Occasionally you'd get a single illustration, usually of some mundane object like a laser rifle or the ubiquitous grav sled. You never got pictures of aliens, or space battles. And maybe that was part of the draw. Traveler was written by Marc Miller, son of an admiral, and was grounded in engineering as much as it was science fiction. I mean, we're talking about a game that used hexadecimal notation for character stats and ship ratings. Miller threw out displacement tonnage like it was common knowledge, and be damned if you had to look the terms up. God knows I did, back in 1982.


Okay, end of rambling reminiscence. I guess I just wanted to draw some attention to the impact that art has on our hobby, and how maybe, sometimes, we take for granted the doors these people open in our collective imagination. Now I'm bummed out, and I'm going to have to drink beer and read some old AD&D modules until I get over my funk. But I'll leave you with something upbeat, something from one of my favorite artists of the era (and still kicking ass these days), the incomparable Phil Foglio: