When England’s economy was extremely slow to recover after WWII, he found it necessary to move to Cape Town, South Africa and pursue a career in art. Still, he managed his way through school, joined the Royal Fusiliers, and then went into advertising. To do this, Art Director Rick Britton, went for the Osprey Publishing mainstay Angus McBride and the rest is history.Īngus was born of Highland Scot parentage and orphaned at an early age when his mother died at 5 and his father was killed in World War II when Angus was 12. Success, however, brings money, and money turned Iron Crown Enterprises, the gaming company who produced MERP, from a local sourcing gaming start-up to a world recruiting entity with the bank account to pick any artist they wanted for their line. After beginning play, I often went out looking for more information and adventures on the haunts of the Fellowship of the Ring and Bilbo Baggins, with the bulk of the supplementation during that early 80s timeline being covered by artist Gail B. This first introduction to the game didn’t include either of the two pillars of the MERP genre where art was concerned, but it was more than enough to get me hooked. So, today I bring you the next part of my argument as to why the Middle-Earth Role Playing game is the most beautiful RPG ever made.Īs I stated in my first piece, Middle-Earth Role Playing, or MERP, was a lofty success in the 1980s, and with a world as rich with history as the one created by Tolkien, it’s no wonder that the game helped capture the imagination of so many gamers during that decade.Īt its height, it could be found alongside AD&D at bookstores nationwide, and I got my first ‘red box’ copy of the game at Waldenbooks in Lafayette, Indiana sometime around 1984. This gift of nature, and having shared his life between England and Africa, helped shape an artist who transitioned from full-time historical military drawer to the role of visionary painter in J.R.R. It’s a stirring event, these migrations, and as I went home I couldn’t help but think about my next article and how the artist I’d be featuring had first seen and been moved by similar events, this time humpbacks, off the western cape of South Africa.
Gray’s this time of year, majestic and high breaching, they spew mist into the air in pods traveling south, their monstrous tales fully lifted from the waves before plunging down once more into the depths. If you look down into the kelp fields further out from the breakers you can spy the blazing orange Garibaldi, the state fish of California, as they shine under the waves amid the deep green strands, and further out into the endless blue go the whales.
Still, what strikes a writer’s soul is often the movement of it all, the flights of pelicans looking like pteranodons sailing at eye level as you walk atop the hundred foot bluffs that drop into the whitewater curls of water churning below. With a cloudless azure sky, and a tranquil ocean all the way to the mountainous shadows of Catalina Island, the channel is was an epic vista. This walk, in seventy degree temperatures with a slight easterly breeze and done in shorts and a T-shirt, held an immense amount of physical beauty.
Perhaps it was because yesterday, after a wonderful feast of turkey, potatoes, and all the fixings, I took a walk with the family three miles from my home out onto the Palos Verdes peninsula. as I write this, the office quiet, but I felt like going in anyway and getting some work done. It’s the day after Christmas here in L.A.
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