ICE MERP Layouts and OSR Recaps at Tales from the Tower Blog...

[DC]

I've been a member of Enworld for quite a while but rarely post. I've recently been posting recaps from various old school RPGs that I've been playing in for the last year and game art from my days of working for ICE as a freelance cartographer/artist back in the mid to late nineties at my blog Tales from the Tower if you guys want to check it out:

Tales from the Tower

Tales from the Tower: Game Art

Module Specific Posts:

Tales from the Tower: ICE Merp Layouts from the Palantir Quest and Minas Tirith Modules

Tales from the Tower: ICE MERP Towers from Dol Guldur Module

Tales from the Tower: ICE MERP Layout Illustrations from the Lake Town Module

Tales from the Tower: ICE MERP Illustrations from the Kin Strife Module

Tales from the Tower: ICE MERP Layout Illustrations from the Moria Module

Tales from the Tower: ICE MERP Layouts from the Mirkwood Module

Dan

 

[Mark CMG]

This is a style of B&W cartography work I absolutely love! If I can ever get even halfway close to this level of artistry, I will be a happy gamer indeed!

 

[JeffB]

This is a style of B&W cartography work I absolutely love!

Me three. I'd like to see it make a comeback.

Thanks for sharing DC! I was heartbroken when I had to sell off all my old MERP materials several years ago.

 

[DC]

This is a style of B&W cartography work I absolutely love! If I can ever get even halfway close to this level of artistry, I will be a happy gamer indeed!

I'm actually an architectural designer with an undergraduate degree in architecture and a minor in architectural history. I started working on these drawings in 1994 which was six years after receiving my design degree. While you don't need a degree in architecture to draw like this, it certainly helps and has a lot to do with the style. Some people say my drawings have a wood cut print look to them but that's just the way they teach you to draw in architecture school (usually light angled crosshatching and/or black fill poche with technical pens on vellum using standard drafting equipment).

I prefer high contrast black and white work like this because of my background and usually use ink on vellum when drawing by hand so I can trace over sketches or whatever. Tracing over sketches to refine the design and produce the final presentation drawings is a big part of how they teach you to design and present drawings in architecture school even today. I design houses now and still design them by hand and only draw them on the computer with a CAD program when the design has progressed to a certain stage.

I too would love to see more game companies going back to black and white cartographic layouts which I prefer over color. Back in the nineties before 3.X D&D and d20 color layouts were the norm, nobody did color layouts except for the covers and the occasional foldout maps due to the printing costs - it was prohibitively expensive. Even my B&W map of Mirkwood was done because ICE didn't want to have have to incur the expense of producing the color fold out map again with this product. While I can do color work, I would much rather do B&W layouts because that's what I enjoy drawing and even using if I was to GM a game. Color can be spectacular when done well but it just adds another level of complexity and requires more time to draw layouts that you don't get payed very much to draw to begin with.

 

[Mark CMG]

(snip)

Thanks for the extra detail on your background and process. Your professionalism shows in every bit of work you do. It's a pleasure to behold.