Artistic Arcana: Greg Bell Before TSR

It is no exaggeration to say that Greg Bell was effectively the first staff artist of Tactical Studies Rules. Not only did he famously draw the cover of the Dungeons & Dragons box set, as well as around twenty-five more internal illustrations, but he illustrated the company's first release, Cavaliers and Roundheads (1973), as well as key titles like Warriors of Mars (1974). Though he was never formally on staff at TSR, his fingerprints are all over their earliest work. Which is why it is so interesting to peer back in time a little before TSR, when he was drawing covers like the one above for the fanzine Drum Call of the "Blackhawk Militaria Society," a group in Rockford, IL.

Subterranean Chainmail: Mines and Countermines

Before any daring cartographer mapped underground dungeons in pursuit of fantastic adventure, Chainmail described a system for subterranean tunnels on paper. It needed these rules to simulate the discipline of the mines, a siege operation that involved tunneling under castle walls in order to, well, undermine them, destabilizing the walls to the point of collapse, after which invading troops could surge through the breach and storm the castle. These rules were a fairly late addition to the medieval system practiced in Lake Geneva, and they likely owe a debt to an earlier system blurb that Jack Scruby appended to Newell Chamberlin's rules in a 1965 issue of Table Top Talk.

Artistic Arcana: The Impostor Lizardman

Old school Dungeons & Dragons fans know that Greg Bell's beloved lizardman from the inside cover of Greyhawk (1975) served as the logo of TSR Hobbies up until it was replaced by the wizard logo in 1978. But when you get out a magnifying glass and take a closer look at the miniaturized lizardmen on TSR products, especially toward the end of those three years, you might spot a doppelganger at work.