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Friday, July 27, 2012

Obscure Art Friday: "Chainmail" by Gary Gygax




Today is Gary Gygax Day (his birthday), so here's an extremely obscure artwork by the Dungeon Master himself. It's his (signed) version of the cover of Chainmail (first published in 1971), which was illustrated by Don Lowry. Gygax's art is from his Diplomacy variant "Crusadomacy"; a link to this was recently posted on the Acaeum by Lurker Below. The date of this article is not clear. The document is a scan of a photocopy, and is annotated as being from "PZFST 5.7" (Panzerfaust). The text of article indicates it was originally published in Domesday Book #5 (~July 1970), which is confirmed by the Acaeum's description of its contents. The map in the Crusdomacy scan is also drawn by Gygax and is dated 1970. 

10/24/12 Update: Per the Jon at Playing at the World, "The original appeared on page 114 of Jack Coggins's self-illustrated The Fighting Man (1966), at the start of the chapter "Crescent and Cross" about the Crusades."

Bonus Gygax: Wizards still has available a page to download a four-page pdf of Gygax's Appendix A: Random Dungeon Generation from the reprint of the original Dungeon Master's Guide. This is essentially a stand-alone section that could be used with any version of D&D. The reprints were released last week, and purchase supports the Gygax Memorial Fund. I haven't purchased them since I have 2+ copies of each of the originals, but at least two members of my gaming group have each bought the full set. Since Wizards spent so much time retyping the entire the text, I'm hoping they will make the full pdfs of each book available for purchase in the future.