David A. Trampier, 1954 - 2014

The news came out last week that one of the cornerstone artists who defined the tone of the original Dungeons & Dragons game, David A. Trampier, passed away on March 24, 2014, at the Helia Healthcare facility in Carbondale, IL. He would have turned 50 on April 22.


There have been a huge number of obituaries published online in the interim by far more important figures than me. Bill Coffin, who has worked extensively for Palladium, wrote:
"Tonight is a quiet night in Toad Town. Emirkol (sic) the Chaotic will not ride. The Lizard Man of the Monster Manual will menace no adventurers. The heroes of the D.M.’s Guide will close their glowing chest of treasure in a moment of silence. And the magic mouth at the dungeon’s bend will whisper an elegy in alien tongue to the wizard who granted it life."
This nicely encapsulates a number of references to Tramp's work. Emirikol the Chaotic* was a character from a full-page illustration in the first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) Dungeon Master's Guide:


The Lizard Man was one of many monsters illustrated by Tramp in the AD&D Monster Manual (MM):


The "heroes of the D.M.'s Guide" refers to the following iconic image in the 1st edition book:

And the "magic mouth" refers to Dave's redeeming image of possibly one of the silliest spells from the original books, Magic Mouth:


Similarly, Jerry Stratton wrote in his post to the Biblyon Broadsides blog:
"The wyvern howls, and the dragon sits forlornly at the window of a deserted house."
 These refer to two of the iconic Monster Manual images, both linked in the blog post: the Wyvern and (my favorite of the Tramp MM illustrations) the Pseudo-Dragon:
All of this points out how influential Tramp was. Practically every illustration he ever did has appeared online, with fans pointing out one or another which fired their passion for gaming and/or illustration. Many have independently described it as "ripping the lid off" of their imaginations. For one man to have had such an impact on a legion of passionate gamers is surely the best testament to the raw talent Tramp possessed.

Which makes his loss to us all the more devastating. Personally, my favorite of his many contributions was the old Wormy comic strip in the back of 80s Dragon magazines. During its run, it featured a wild plotline that was involved and rich. Tramp's sense of continuity was astounding, and his attention to detail incredible. Not only were his characters real people with real motivations, but the fantastic lines and rich hues drew you in to the world of Wormy; I have no idea how he got such vibrant colors with ordinary pens.

What will aggrieve me the most from this loss is the fact that I will never know how the story ends. Tramp had a falling out with TSR that apparently soured him on the entire field of illustration; he ended up working as a taxi driver in Carbondale, IL. When he left, the Wormy strip was in the middle of an engaging story involving a group of dragon-hunting Giants, magical globes that contained demons, and a wargaming wager between the green dragon Wormy and a group of troll-slave-trading Ogres. There were so many elements being expertly handled, I would love to know how it all ends.

Our storytellers are leaving us, and they're leaving us wanting more. RIP David A. Trampier.

* Emirikol the Chaotic was such a popular image, several artists have extended the storyline of what happens on his wild ride. Artist David O. Miller had him encounter some resistance, while Rob Conley traced out his path, since the area details were taken from the Street of the Knights in Rhodes.In the 4th edition Hackmaster book, Emirikol got killed by a dagger. Jeff Easley showed us how Lokerimon the Lawful brought Emirikol's rampage up short in the Dungeon Crawl Classics book; DCC #73 Emirikol Was Framed is a further homage, including a piece by Doug Kovacs further extending his adventures.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fantasy Friday: Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy Races (OSE)

Image
 So, one of the many games I've backed on Kickstarter is Old School Essentials , which is a cleaned-up, streamlined, and corrected version of the B/X version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons (Moldvay/Cook) rules. Gavin Norman (who posts as Necrotic Gnome) does an incredible job editing and collating info into a super-easy-to-read format. One of the modifications to the B/X rules introduced in the OSE Advanced Fantasy book is separating race from class. In original B/X, the races are represented as classes, with the idea that, if you're playing an elf, that should be special enough in-and-of-itself. If you allowed non-human races to take classes, then players will play the non-humans because their innate abilities make them better than equal-leveled human characters. Separating race from class, the default introduced in AD&D, caused huge flamewars and continues to do so today. The Advanced Fantasy book has reasonable versions of the races so that, if it's your preferen...
Read more

Eberron 5E: Race -- Shifter

With shifters, the problem is the new edition's focus on simplicity. Shifting changed your characteristics, and if you wanted your shifting to become really good, you had to take a tree of shifter feats. There were builds focusing entirely on maximizing your shifter advantages. The new edition doesn't really do temporary ability score changes in the same way -- the barbarian's rage, for example, gives a boost to damage and hit points, but doesn't require recalculating your character's abilities. Similarly, the gauntlets of ogre power / amulet of health / headband of intellect change the impacted ability score to a flat 19 -- a +5 bonus that's easy to plug in, and lasts indefinitely as long as you leave the item on. So I decided that 5E shifters should get their +1 stat bump from their trait, and tried to make the traits (which I had to rename "legacies" because "trait" in 5E is a very specific thing) almost as powerful as a feat, ...
Read more

Monstrous Monday: Blink Wooly Mammoth (D&D5E)

Image
Another creature adapted from Dragon issue #156, "Not Necessarily the Monstrous Compendium" -- the feared Blink Wooly Mammoth! It probably would have been even more thematically appropriate to have worked up the werelagomorph (were-hare) but I only thought of that last night. Ancient people, accompanied by the first domesticated dogs, hunted mammoths during the Endless Winter at the beginning of the world. Some mammoths developed a strange magical ability to escape their pursuers – the ability to teleport short distances. While the vast herds of mammoths were eventually greatly reduced through hunting, these blink wooly mammoths proved tricky and many herds survive at the outskirts of civilization, especially in areas that border frozen climates. Some sages believe that some ancient hunters may have bred their dogs in an attempt to create a hunting companion that was a match for these mammoths; these sages believe that this is the origin of the blink dog species. Blink Wooly ...
Read more