{"id":1649,"date":"2012-09-19T15:50:09","date_gmt":"2012-09-19T19:50:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/?p=1649"},"modified":"2012-09-19T15:50:09","modified_gmt":"2012-09-19T19:50:09","slug":"mornos-dice-of-fate-calendar-art-from-the-early-days-of-fantasy-role-playing-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/2012\/09\/19\/mornos-dice-of-fate-calendar-art-from-the-early-days-of-fantasy-role-playing-games\/","title":{"rendered":"Morno’s Dice of Fate Calendar: Art from the Early Days of Fantasy Role-Playing Games"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Morno<\/a>\nSo if it’s 1975, and you hand a teenager a woodgrain boxed edition of Dungeons & Dragons<\/em> along with a stack of paper and some pens, well, you just sit back and see what happens. Here’s what happened to me<\/a>. I turned into Morno.<\/p>\n

From right around 1975 to sometime in 1978 I drew illustrations for some of the earliest D&D supplements, modules and fanzines, and even had one cover and two illustrated stories in TSR’s own The Dragon<\/em> magazine. I also did some of the covers and illustrations for Dave Hargrave’s Arduin <\/em>rules sets and for a great many products, some peculiar in retrospect, for Wee Warriors; that included the first commercial D&D character sheets and the very first module for the game (Palace of the Vampire Queen<\/em>). There’s a huge, long and complex history of those products that I frankly don’t remember very well after all this time. But in this age of eBay and the Web it’s not too hard to ferret that history out.\n<\/p>\n

People actually collect <\/em>these things now, and you have no idea how old and crotchety that makes me feel.<\/p>\n

\"Fantasy<\/a><\/p>\n

If you want to understand how I feel about all of that… well, imagine that something you did when you were seventeen was remembered, resold, and talked about decades later. Yeah, pick<\/em> a thing you did when you were seventeen. I dare you. Chances are you’d rather the world just forgot about the things you did at that age, and I wouldn’t blame you. So I can’t forget that I was just a kid, doing the kinds of things that kids do, and that even five years later I had a much more respectable set of tools and experiences and was making art that was a lot more accomplished; and for many years I’ve been glad that I did all of this<\/em> work under an alias. So that, you know, it couldn’t find me.\n<\/p>\n

\"Farmer<\/a><\/em>Like I said, though: age of eBay, age of Web. People tracked me down.<\/p>\n

So I’ve tried to make some kind of peace with the fact that I was<\/em> once a kid with a woodgrain D&D set and some pens and paper. It hasn’t killed me.\n<\/p>\n

Part of that inner peace has led me to put together a little retrospective of that very, very, very early work in the form of this calendar<\/a>, featuring acts of drawing that I committed between 1975 and 1978 when I was using the “Morno” signature. A couple of these will be new to everyone but me. Because even if I tried to get away from the kid I couldn’t entirely cut him – or his old drawings – loose. It was something about his eyes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So if it’s 1975, and you hand a teenager a woodgrain boxed edition of Dungeons & Dragons along with a stack of paper and some pens, well, you just sit back and see what happens. Here’s what happened to me. I turned into Morno. From right around 1975 to sometime in 1978 I drew illustrations […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-works-in-progress"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1649\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}