DUNGEON DEGENERATES

CONAN ACTION FIGURES - REMCO 1982 - HASBRO 1992 - It’s a confusing, mixed up world when the original gets turned into a sub-par IP & can’t even hold a flame to the clear dominator, that is clearly based off of it - yes, I’m talking about Conan Vs. He-Man. I’d never even seen these Conan toys growing up OR in the wilds of collector markets. But here they are, looking like some Spanish MOTU bootlegs, but then branded with this huge IP & made by industry giants. There’s a lesson in here somewhere but I’m not sure what it is!?

Spooky season is around the bend. Lurking in the shadows with a poisoned apple & switchblade. It arrives when the sky turns yellow & outside smells like the stale room of a cigarette smoker. The grass is dry & dead. The apples are getting fat on the trees. Soon, it will be pumpkin season.

TOON - STEVE JACKSON GAMES - 1984 - My friends & I never got into Toon unfortunately, by the time I discovered it, I was trying to leave that childish world of Loony Tunes behind me. Roger Rabbit was kind of closure for that place of rubber hose limbs & stretch & squash bodies. That said, this is a great idea for a game & I brought back & was open about my love of cartoons when i ran cartoons at Eugene’s Bijou theater on Sunday mornings in the early 2000s. I’d show the older, weirder cartoons, Toon RPG feels like 1950s & 1960s Loony Tunes. That said, i feel like cartoons carry the true culture of a society in them. Cartoons show that resilience & a sense of humor are inecessary for life in this world.

RICHARD CORBEN - AMERICAN ILLUSTRATOR - 1940-2020 - Richard Corben was probably the most representative artist of Heavy Metal magazine. His style was hyperreal, over sexed, like Frazetta on lots of drugs lurid. When you stop to really see his work, he has a an understanding of three dimensional form & shading that has not been met by any artist I’ve observed. His actual painting style is evocative of Maxfield Parrish (& Hannes Bok by extension). But it’s applying those Golden Age of illustration methodologies to 70s sleazy themes that really created a unique artist in Richard Corben.

RUSSIAN CRIMINAL TATTOOS - SOVIET 70s-80s - The Russian Criminal Tattoo encyclopedias were a total revelation to me & a fascinating look into a world so alien, so unAmerican. I love visual systems & the tattoos of Russian criminals had (I say had because so much of this comes from the Soviet era & the social taboos of that period). Prison culture is interesting how it is obsessed with societal pressures that come out antisocial & crazed through the lens of the jail bird. I am fascinated how Prisons create their own culture (one of my early commercial gigs was drawing daily life in Nazi POW camps for a documentary)… growing up in Oakland, CA I saw firsthand how Jail culture bled out into the civilian culture. Anyhow, i know this imagery is full of sexism, antisemitism & Neo-Naziism, the point isn’t to spread that obviously, the point is to observe a visual language from an isolated, marginalized group.

Some new DUNGEON DEGENERATES t-shirts are up at GOBLINKO. This Orc & Ettin join the Fighting Fortress & Nackt Drek rider.

ANGUS MCBRIDE - ENGLISH ILLUSTRATOR - 1931-2007 - I was first introduced to the work of Angus McBride by his covers for the Middle Earth Role Playing books, what i didn’t know was that he was also the illustrator for the Men-At-Arms series of books that every old wargamer had. He had a more sober art style that fit Tolkien (even though i prefer the acid-drenched depictions from the 70s) & his paintings captured a violent energy in them similar to Frazetta. He painted mostly in gouache, common to commercial illustrators of his age.

WARHAMMER FANTASY BATTLE, FIRST EDITION - BRIAN ANSELL, RICHARD HALLIWELL, RICK PRIESTLY - 1983 - Warhammer Fantasy Battle was originally released as a hybrid role playing & war game. The game was released in the height of the first role playing boom & war gaming was a hobby for the old guys who wanted to push Napoleonic troops or WWII tanks around the table or as chits on a hex map, It was a wildly different time - Warhammer hadn’t become the face of wargaming as it now is. Warhammer was originally designed to use all of collector’s models & encourage players to buy more Citadel miniatures to add to their armies. Warhammer was the first war game to release it’s own proprietary miniatures, something which has become the industry standard, although seems to be unwinding as 3D printing decentralizes wargaming again. The central elements that made Warhammer stand out (from Dungeons & Dragons especially) was that it had an implied setting (which grew into the Old World) & it had a level of humor that was influenced by Monty Python that gave it a cleverer tone than how D&D presented itself. D&D always felt like there was a lot of Bronze Age, Sword & Sandals material lurking under the surface, while Warhammer felt like it was directly dealing with Medieval Europe, in a more gritty way that emphasized the slog of progress that Europe had made as it trudged on from the Dark Ages into the Renaissance.

Life in the Würstreich is a constant struggle for survival among the crooked cops, desperate adventurers, half-starved monsters, insane wizards, grotesque ghosts, obnoxious goblins, deranged demons & the like. Living is made more difficult because everyone is jostling for position like crabs in a bucket. Trying to eke out a living as an adventurer is even more challenging, the lows are far lower & the highs, though infrequent, are much higher. Most don’t have the wits, cunning & lack of boundaries to succeed in this flea-ridden, dog-eat-dog world & stick to the relative safety of the known. To endure & thrive in this level of struggle one must be ready to take on any number of Dirty Deeds. An expansion box for your Hand of Doom game.

CHRONO TRIGGER - “: YUJI HORII (Dragon Quest), HIRONOBU SAKAGUCHI (Final Fantasy) & AKIRA TORIYAMA (Dragon Ball) - 1995 - By 1995, I had just graduated from highschool & I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life, games werent big on my list of priorities but my little brother @dannyjamesband got really into this game & it was amazing. Having a more involved plot than any game we had played prior. I think the best JRPG prior was probably the Secret of Mana… the genre was growing wings & was hitting the sweet spot that would lead up to Final Fantasy 7, but not into the games that got so complicated that we would forget the story mid way! Chrono Trigger s as lso had memorable characters that could have been pulled from the pages of the Oz books! Also, alternating between goofy, sweet, epic, terrifying, it showed that there was a range of possibilities to explore in these games.

DRAGON WARRIORS/DRAGON QUEST - YUJI HORII, AKIRA TORIYAMA & KOICHI SUGIYAMA - 1986 - released as Dragon Warrior (for some reason & not running with the fact that it was designed by one of the best & most popular illustrators of all time: Akira Toriyama, which is really emblematic of how wrongly American business viewed Japanese imports until recently.) the series is correctly titled Dragon Quest. The game was heavily inspired by both Wizardry & Ultima, but it was given the weird, light-hearted spin that set it apart & has made it a giant success in Japan. JRPGs like this & similarly Akira Toriyama designed Chrono Trigger were a huge inspiration on me when I was building the elements that went into DUNGEON DEGENERATES - i like how light-hearted & goofy these games could be, while dealing with topics like most games wouldn’t until much later.

ARTIST MID FROM ENGLISH CRUST PUNK BAND DEVIATED INSTINCT - MID 80S - I interviewed Mid for my zine Die Wurst a few years back - (issue is sold out but I’ll post the interview on the GOBLINKO site today. I feel like Crust Punk followed the lines of Punk (this is all following English Punk) being the apocalypse, UK/82 continuing that & then crust being the post-apocalypse. While there are many who just saw Punk as dead so they did the Post-Punk thing, there were many who continued on as if Punk hadn’t died, because it hadn’t, it just changed, got scruffier, smellier, crustier. At the same time, English Metal was going through the same muck which produced bands that would eventually become Grindcore - but they emerged from the same muddy fields of some music festival for people who like their music loud, fast & distorted. But, this music also played with the contrast & slowed it way down. I asked Mid about if gaming played into Deviated Instinct. Mid - Yeah, back in the early-mid 80’s I was quite into the original Dungeons and Dragons games, I had the classic blue & red box’s. An old school friend was really into being a dungeon master and would plan out games for 3 or 4 of us to play. I was also really into painting little figures, especially the old metal ones, I had quite a large collection of Orcs that were all super detailed painted up. I have no idea what happened to all those, I don’t know if they just got lost between house moves over the decades or if I gave them away. As I mentioned before, all that imagery definitely fed into my art back then. It really only lasted a few years though &!I’ve not played anything like that since. I don’t have the patience. Sometimes I feel like it would be great to really get into RPG computer games or something.

PROTEUS MAGAZINE - MIKE KENWARD EDITOR - 1984-1988 - Proteus was a UK magazine that published an entire paragraph picking game book in each issue. Being English it was directly inspired by the Fighting Fantasy series however, it seemed to run at the same time & for longer than Fighting Fantasy’s Warlock magazine. Each issue is full of uninspired, not-great, black & white art & included a full color poster. For the issue I have it’s by Les Edwards. I’m just stoked that something like this existed. I love magazines & game books! Imagine getting a big stack of magazines every month & just digging through them. I don’t have to imagine it - I used to do it. We need to build the audience & infrastructure for magazines & other cultural frameworks we’ve lost to the big digital turnover. But look, if the people are sold on magazines again - that builds up a part of what we’ve lost & is part of the necessary reconstruction of humanity that needs to be done.

DRAGONS & MONSTERS - ARCO - 1982 - I got a bunch of these in a big bag of DFC fantasy figures I got from Toy Go Round (used toy store in Albany, CA) in probably 1984. I didn’t know what they were, but I’ve come to figure out that they used a bunch of Grenadier Dungeons & Dragons miniatures sculpts to make these small, solid-color plastic miniatures. These were rack toys sold cheaply in grocery & department stores.The Figures we: A set of eight 45mm plastic mini-figures directly sculpted from vintage D&D metal miniatures. The roster included an Ogre, Cyclops, Birdman, Lizardman, Jinn, Brawn Hulk, and two distinct dragons.Plastic Style: They were carded with plastic fortresses (giving them a Crossbows & Catapults feel) called the Skull Turret & Headsgone Tower.

WIZARDRY - SIR-TECH - 1981- All the earliest video role playing games were attempts to make everything you COULD automate in a Dungeons & Dragons game. MOST jrpgs were influenced by Wizardry directly & indirectly through the big games it directly influenced like Dragon Quest & Final Fantasy. The initial release of Wizardry in 1981 coincided with the first big boom of D&D, so effectively in the public mind the way that these old video games & the original tabletop games handled things were not so far apart.

GARY CHALK- ENGLISH ILLUSTRATOR - Gary Chalk was the face of English fantasy in the 80s, he produced the majority of illustrations for Games Workshop including art for both Talisman & Heroquest - as well as the Lone Wolf series & Redwall. His chunky, cartoony figures matched the Citadel house style of the time, & they created a synergy that i haven’t seen pop up except in my own projects. His work black & white interior illustrations for Redwall were especially great, i really like how he rendered everything & didn’t get too loose.

BLOOD BATH AT ORC’S DRIFT - GARY CHALK, JOE DEVER & IAN PAGE FOR GAMES WORKSHOP - 1985 - This was the first expansion for Warhammer Fantasy Battle i remember seeing. Featuring the same dream team that brought the world the Lone Wolf books, it’s fun to remember that Gary Chalk’s style was basically the Games Workshop’s house style for a while, basically during their entire “Golden Age”. His boldness & clarity, but with a cheeky sense of humor was the perfect balance for the Grim Dark of Blanche & the howling insanity of Miller. Also, gotta dig them orange skies!