Jim Roslof is gone
Posted: March 21, 2011 Filed under: art, Dungeons and Dragons Leave a commentI’m sure everyone has heard it by now. Jim Roslof, noted TSR artist(also worked forGoodman Games and others) died the other day. Roslof was an artist whose work I always enjoyed, but he wasn’t as much of an ‘iconic’ artist for me simply because Jim Roslof started working for TSR around the time that I stopped buying TSR products (which was 1982 — I think at that point Roslof had been working at TSR only a couple of years and had done things like the cover of Queen of the Demonweb Pits and a lot of illustrations inside ‘Deities and Demigods’ (both of which I had) as well as a lot of stuff for the ‘basic’ game (most of which I didn’t have since I was playing AD&D at that point)).
Everything he did that I saw, I liked. Unfortunately, I just didn’t see that much of it back in the day because I decided to try to concentrate on girls for a while instead of D&D (I soon discovered that I was a lot ‘better’ at D&D)… and by the time I came back to D&D many years later, Roslof no longer worked at TS (although neither did Gygax or anyone else whose name I probably would have recognized). I ended up getting a lot of the books that had his artwork in them by buying up second hand 1e stuff.
I did, however, have the honor of getting a few interior illustrations into Goodman Game’s DCC #28 (Into The Wilds) which was graced by a Roslof painting on the cover (see above right). So although I never met Roslof, I did at least share a publishing credit.
One of the things I really like about Roslof is that his artwork usually featured a lot of interactions between the different creatures and characters portrayed, as if each picture was telling the story of interactions (which is a nice metaphor for the way in which the game is played).