Early life
Darlene, the third of seven children, [1] grew up on a farm near Elkhorn, Wisconsin. [2] Her mother was an artist, [3] and Darlene followed in her footsteps, becoming a member of the Geneva Lake Arts Association at a young age. [1] She made her first professional gallery sale before the age of 16. [3] After graduating from Elkhorn High School in 1972, she enrolled at Beloit College and majored in art. [3] In 1975, as part of her studies, she spent a term in London, England, where she also studied calligraphy. [1] She graduated cum laude in 1976 with a B.A. in Studio Art, [1] and moved to Lake Geneva, where she eked out a living as a graphic artist by holding down three part-time jobs simultaneously. In 1979, she helped co-found The Wisconsin Calligrapher's Guild and served as the first editor of its newsletter. [1]
Freelance fantasy artist
In 1977, Mike Carr, one of the first employees of TSR, met Darlene, when he went to a local graphics shop to order brochures for Gen Con. He and Darlene started dating, and Carr used his influence at TSR to get her some freelance art assignments. One of her first assignments was to design and produce an outdoor sign for TSR's building in Lake Geneva. She made the sign in the shape of a medieval shield and painted a dragon on one side and the TSR logo on the reverse. [4]
In 1979 and 1980, she received many freelance art and calligraphy assignments, including artwork for:
Map of the Flanaess
In 1980, she was given the opportunity to create the piece of art for which she is best known, the full-colour map of the Flanaess that accompanied Gary Gygax’s folio edition of the World of Greyhawk Fantasy Game Setting. [7] Gygax was busy transforming his home D&D campaign called "Greyhawk" into a publishable form. His long-range plan - left incomplete when he was ousted from TSR in 1985 - was to create an entire fantasy world; however when he asked TSR's printing house about the maximum size of paper they could handle, the answer was just 34" x 22" (86 cm x 56 cm). He found that, using the scale he desired, he could only fit the northeast corner of one continent on two of those sheets. [8] [9] He placed the city and castle of Greyhawk roughly in the centre of the map, in an area that would have about the same temperate climate as his home in Lake Geneva, and made a rough sketch of the rest of the map, an area he called the "Flanaess". Darlene was given the assignment of developing a full color map on a hex grid from Gygax's prototype map. [10]
Jasmine
Shortly before World of Greyhawk was published, Darlene created the cover art for Dragon magazine issue 37. [11] This issue also carried the first episode of "Jasmine", her color comic strip about a princess whose realm was coveted by an evil prince. The strip ran for 12 issues before being cancelled for not appealing to the magazine's mostly male readers. Darlene tried to a promote a petition at Origins '81 to have the comic strip brought back, but it gathered few signatures. [12] Shortly after this, she designed and produced the card game Jasmine: The Battle for the Mid-Realm . Although reviews in Gameplay [13] and The Dragon were good - Merle Rasmussen wrote, "Jasmine incorporates a few old ideas with many new ones to create a fresh approach in card gaming." [14] - an expected expansion deck never materialized.
Further freelance assignments
She continued to take assignments from TSR, and between 1981 and 1984, her work appeared in White Plume Mountain , Investigation of Hydell, Monster Cards Set 3, [5] : 106 the boxed set of the updated and expanded World of Greyhawk Fantasy Setting, and Legends & Lore .
Darlene drew the cover art for the KABAL role-playing game (1982). [5] : 188
Post-fantasy career
In 1984, she legally changed her name to just Darlene, dropping her surname Pekul as well as legally changing the typography of her name to a capital and small capitals. [1] That same year, she left the world of fantasy artwork to enroll in Graphic Design at Indiana University, and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in 1987. After graduation, she and her first husband, Michael Price, moved to Plainville, Connecticut, where she was a freelance graphic artist and taught calligraphy and art classes. She developed an interest in Native American spirituality and art, and later an interest in Egyptian art. [1]
She briefly returned to the fantasy art world in 2003, when she was approached by Gary Gygax to again create maps for a project of his. When Gygax had been ousted from TSR in 1985, he had lost creative rights to all of his published Greyhawk material. However, he still had all of his own notes from his Greyhawk home campaign, and decided to publish details of the original castle and city in six volumes. [15] Since Wizards of the Coast (WotC) still owned the rights to the name Greyhawk, Gygax changed the name of the castle to Castle Zagyg - the reverse homophone of his own name. Gygax also changed the name of the nearby city to "Yggsburgh", a play on his initials E.G.G. In 2005, Troll Lord Games published Volume I, Castle Zagyg: Yggsburgh. This 256-page hardcover book contained details of Gygax's original city, its personalities and politics, as well as a two-part fold out map of the area rendered by Darlene.
Personal life
After the end of her first marriage, Darlene began a relationship with occult author Vincent Bridges, and for many years they lived in Mount Gilead, North Carolina. [1] Together they founded Aethyrea Books and published several books about the occult.
After over twenty years in Mount Gilead, Bridges moved to Prague so that he could produce a play, "The Donkey and the Cradle", in a historic residence of occultist Edward Kelley, but Bridges died on July 25, 2014, the very day the play was to premiere. [16]
Ernest Gary Gygax was an American game designer and author best known for co-creating the pioneering tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) with Dave Arneson.
Greyhawk, also known as the World of Greyhawk, is a fictional world designed as a campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy roleplaying game. Although not the first campaign world developed for Dungeons & Dragons—Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign predated it by about a year—the world of Greyhawk closely identified with early development of the game beginning in 1972, and after being published it remained associated with Dungeons & Dragons publications until 2008. The world itself started as a simple dungeon under a castle designed by Gary Gygax for the amusement of his children and friends, but it was rapidly expanded to include not only a complex multi-layered dungeon environment, but also the nearby city of Greyhawk, and eventually an entire world. In addition to the campaign world, which was published in several editions over twenty years, Greyhawk was also used as the setting for many adventures published in support of the game, as well as for RPGA's massively shared Living Greyhawk campaign from 2000–2008.
Gord the Rogue is the protagonist in a series of fantasy novels and short stories written by Gary Gygax. Gygax originally wrote the novels and short stories to promote his World of Greyhawk campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. After he left TSR, Gygax continued to write Gord the Rogue novels for several years. In all of these works, the plot revolves around the adventures of a young man named Gord who rises from humble origins in the slums of a large city on the planet Oerth to become a powerful force trying to stave off the takeover of Oerth by demons.
Mordenkainen is a fictional wizard from the World of Greyhawk campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game. He was created by Gary Gygax as a player character, only months after the start of Gygax's Greyhawk campaign and is therefore one of the oldest characters continuously associated with Dungeons & Dragons.
In the World of Greyhawk campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, Tenser is an archmage who strives to rid the Flanaess of evil. Tenser is a former member of both the Citadel of Eight and the Circle of Eight.
Castle Greyhawk is one of the central dungeon settings in the fictional World of Greyhawk campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game. The Castle was originally developed by Gary Gygax, for his own campaign and later detailed for publication. Castle Greyhawk is also the name of a 1988 Dungeons & Dragons adventure module that created a treatment of the Castle for the public to use. In 2005, Gygax announced the release of "Castle Zagyg," his new treatment of the dungeon.
The Free City of Greyhawk, also known as Greyhawk City and the "Gem of the Flanaess," is a fictional city-state in the World of Greyhawk campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy roleplaying game. Since the setting was originally published in a folio and then again in a boxed set that were both titled World of Greyhawk, the word "Greyhawk" is often used to describe the entire campaign world setting, although the proper name for that part of the world is the Flanaess. Sometimes the lands controlled by the Free City are also referred to as Greyhawk, though the proper term for the region is the Domain of Greyhawk.
David C. Sutherland III was an early Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) artist whose work influenced the early development of D&D.
Isle of the Ape is an adventure module for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game World of Greyhawk campaign setting, in which the events occur in a magical demiplane of the same name created by the mad archmage Zagyg Yragerne.
Iggwilv is a fictional wizard from the Greyhawk campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game. She was created by Gary Gygax.
Jacob Franklin Mentzer III is an American fantasy author and game designer who worked on early materials for the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy role-playing game. He was an employee of TSR, Inc. from 1980 to 1986, spending part of that time as creative advisor to the chairman of the board, Gary Gygax. He also founded the Role-Playing Games Association (RPGA) during his time with TSR.
Robert J. Kuntz is a game designer and author of role-playing game publications. He is best known for his contributions to various Dungeons & Dragons-related materials.
The legion of fictional deities in the World of Greyhawk campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy roleplaying game covers an extensive range of spheres of influence, allowing players to customize the spiritual beliefs and powers of their characters, and as well as giving Dungeon Masters a long list of gods from which to design evil temples and minions. Although the Greyhawk campaign world, when it was merely a home game, started with no specific gods, the value of having deities available for both players and game plot purposes was quickly realized. The number of deities has varied with each version of the campaign world that has been published, but for many years numbered a few dozen. It has only been since 1999 that the number of gods increased dramatically to almost 200, due to the volume of newly published material that was subsequently integrated into the campaign world.
Castle Greyhawk is a comedic adventure module for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy roleplaying game set in the World of Greyhawk campaign setting. The module bears the code WG7 and was published by TSR, Inc. in 1988 for the first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules.
The World of Greyhawk Fantasy Game Setting and the World of Greyhawk Fantasy World Setting are two closely related publications from TSR, Inc. that detail the fictional World of Greyhawk campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy roleplaying game. Both publications were authored by Gary Gygax, and they were the first stand-alone offerings to provide detailed, comprehensive information regarding a D&D campaign setting.
Donald R. Kaye was the co-founder of Tactical Studies Rules (TSR), the game publishing company best known for their Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) role-playing game. He and TSR co-founder Gary Gygax had been friends since childhood, sharing an interest in miniature war games. In 1972, Kaye created Murlynd, one of the first D&D characters, and play-tested him in Gygax's Castle Greyhawk campaign. Kaye and Gygax were convinced that D&D and similar games were an excellent business opportunity, and together they founded Tactical Studies Rules in 1973. However, only two years later, just as sales of D&D started to rise, Kaye unexpectedly died of a heart attack at age 36.
Greyhawk is a supplementary rulebook written by Gary Gygax and Robert J. Kuntz for the original edition of the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy role-playing game. It has been called "the first and most important supplement" to the original D&D rules. Although the name of the book was taken from the home campaign supervised by Gygax and Kuntz based on Gygax's imagined Castle Greyhawk and the lands surrounding it, Greyhawk did not give any details of the castle or the campaign world; instead, it explained the rules that Gygax and Kuntz used in their home campaign, and introduced a number of character classes, spells, concepts and monsters used in all subsequent editions of D&D.
Troll Lord Games is an American publisher of role-playing games, The Crusader magazine and other board/dice/card games.
