#Angus McBride

[pulpsandcomics2]

Galadriel

[oldschoolfrp]

Saruman the White ponders his palantír. "You are the trusted apprentice to one of the greatest Wizards in all Middle-earth" in A Spy in Isengard (Angus McBride cover art for Middle-earth Quest gamebook #1 by Terry K Amthor, Iron Crown Enterprises, 1988). McBride has been memed more than once.

[gilgalahad]

Angus McBride

[doomreturn]

Minas Tirith, by Angus Mcbride (1931 - 2007)

[dark-art-666]

[70sscifiart]

Angus McBride

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

The Nazgûl aka Ringwraiths from The Lord of the Rings by Angus McBride

[midcenturymorbid]

Illustration by Angus McBride. From Ladybird Horror Classics Dracula, 1984. A children's abridged version of the classic by Bram Stoker.

[sandmandaddy69]

Angus McBride

[illustratus]

British and German soldiers hold a Christmas truce during the Great War, 1914

by Angus McBride

[dresdencodak]

Angus McBride Tolkien art appreciation thread. I especially love his Nazgul, and there's a lady one!

[pulpsandcomics2]

Nazgul

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

Middle Earth Role Playing - Moria Cover Art by Angus McBride

[gilgalahad]

[oldschoolfrp]

“There was a blow on the door that made it quiver; and then it began to grind slowly open, driving back the wedges.”  (Angus McBride cover for Moria, Middle Earth Citadel supplement for MERP, Rolemaster, and the Lord of the Rings Adventure Game, 2nd ed, 1994)

[open-hearth-rpg]

#RPGCovers Week Ten Rolemaster series (1985 on) Angus McBride

In my youth, there was a cohort of players about five years older than me, some of them part of my sister’s crew and others just among the rabble at the game shop. There was a certain kind of “elitism” to what folks played. When Champions came along, Villains & Vigilantes became passe for example. Rolemaster, in its original incarnation of heavy stock parchment booklets and glossy magazine-style supplements, was one of those. It was the fantasy rpg the cool, older kids played. 

And throughout high school it was what I gravitated towards, giving up on AD&D entirely for the more rarified air of RM (ironically paired with Harn, but that’s another story). Rolemaster at that point was a weird set of printings and editions, a mess which looked incoherent and made it hard to tell folks exactly what they actually needed to buy.

Then in 1985 Iron Crown Enterprises consolidated everything into a set of books with a standard cover design and unified art. These became the standard for years (if you ignore the layout and design of the weird Rolemaster Companions). What really pull them together, beyond the book design, was McBride. 

Angus McBride had already been doing Middle Earth RPG covers for years. They were all great. Before that he’d been an illustrator for various Osprey Men-at-Arms series, bridging that gap between wargaming grognards and role-players. These RM were great because we got to see repeating, iconic characters– kind of a first I think. I don’t know that we’d had other games with recurring figures and an implied story. 

The first three books: Character Law & Campaign Law, Arms Law & Claw Law, and Spell Law used them effectively. Plus you could now buy a box that had all of them bundled together. Ten years later, ICE would reuse these images with a new cover design for their Rolemaster Standard System, with a few new books with new illustrations by McBride that sort of fit in with the existing story and sort of didn’t make any sense (see Creatures & Monsters). But as Rolemaster began to crash and go through multiple editions and changes, they lost control of their cover designs, leading to an absolute chaos that, ironically, felt more like first edition’s mess.