u/Sean_Aaberg

Back in 2007 I was thinking about what i wanted to do as far as my art career went & i realized that i really wanted to do some art for role playing games. At the time i had no idea about the state of the hobby but my friend Clint Marsh over who does Fiddler’s Green @fiddlersgreenzine now was doing a newsletter called “the Shrieker”. (Clint has supplied some invaluable editing help with my TTRPG LowLife which is currently live on Kickstarter.) The Shrieker was a way for Clint to dig up those old RPG memories & I was there for it. I drew a Shrieker for it & I contributed some other things (if I’m remembering correctly). So, as part of my original return to this stuff I drew these DUNGEON DEGENERATES characters which were originally going to be a card series to go with my Monsters, Weirdos & Creeps cards… but it took them another decade to emerge in the Hand of Doom boardgame & now the LowLife RPG. If you’re counting along, that’s 20 years. I based the color scheme off of old Colorforms kits, i loved that you could achieve definition with only two colors (plus black) & I had card & sticker vending machines & counter boxes thoroughly infesting Eugene & Portland. (I think I had some down in the Bay too.) It would have been interesting to see where DUNGEON DEGENERATES would have gone if it developed into a card series… my vision was to make it a sticker & toy series with a playable game on the cards… something I still might do! Anyhow, enjoy these & back the LowLife Kickstarter & help my bring another crazy project to life!

Yesterday was David “DAT” “Tramp” Trampier’s birthday, I thought I would share some of his art & speak on his legacy even though I’m a day late! Trampier was the best & most prolific original Dungeons & Dragons artist. His early work showed that he was still learning & using all sorts of techniques to communicate the things in his head or the Omni-head of D&D. In the 80s he settled into the very 70s style Wormy comic that he did for Dragon magazine. He disappeared from public view & was presumed dead in 1988. In truth he had become a recluse & was discovered driving cab in Carbondale, Illinois in 2002. He didn’t want anything to do with his old life.. we can only speculate on why he walked away from all that… but now it kind of doesn’t matter. He showed that you could make impactful, evocative, compelling work amongst the amateurish works of early RPG art & that was more than enough.

Part of the magic of presentation is building anticipation. There was no way that old video games could match the graphics found in their loading screens, however they could help our brains fill in the gaps in the limited imagery. I can remember guessing what a movie would have in it based on what I saw in the movie poster the last time I was at the movie theatre. There was so much time spent waiting for games to load, just staring at the loading screen. Sometimes our Commodore 64 would load a game for like a half hour & then just stop, the dreaded blinking red light on the disk drive would flash. In this age of weaponized impatience, getting to use our brains to fill in empty space is a luxury, something that I’ve managed to rebuild. Very deliberately in my life.