u/Sean_Aaberg

I got this castle not too long after it came out, i remember building it in my room. The yellow bricks & the yellow mini-figs bothered me as a kid because I wanted realistic coloring in any representative work (ironic, given my adult coloring sensibilities, but I went through an intense color theory moment when I hit 22 or so). Of course now it’s obvious that the yellow castle is iconic & the yellow mini-figure is moreso! When I was writing about Playmobil yesterday, I was going to say how this sort of modern, abstract, populism or universalism or socialism of both LEGO & PLAYMOBIL is interesting & seems attached to how abstract Euro style board games are. I think going through WWI & WWII on home turf forced a lot of “growing up” on Europeans that Americans are just now going through. In our Yellow Castle! Makes me wonder if the Yellow Submarine is connected in some esoteric way.

The knights were one of the first themes explored by the German toy company immediately after founding in 1974. I always felt like there was an attempt at creating universality with the Playmobil guys - they have the feeling of transportation sign figures - simple, straightforward & abstract. Unlike their major competitor LEGO (at least it felt that way in the 80s. LEGO has since grown into the biggest toy company in the world), they came mostly pre-constructed & had more of a devotion to realism because they weren’t forced to render everything in bricks.

It was a magical time when the dime stores would pull out their Halloween selection from storage & the entire shop would be taken over by walls of the weird & morbid. I always wanted to get a new rubber mask on Halloween but I hated wearing them for trick or treating because I’d just be sweating & then the sweat would cool almost immediately making for a uniquely clammy experience. Further, my vision would be limited by the mask & I’d be so freaked out/excited about trick or treating that I’d want the full range of motion in case I was attacked. When my kids were growing up, we had a couple costume boxes & they could assemble costumes out of the many masks, shrouds & creepy monster gloves we collected over the years.

Back in 1983, Ralph Bakshi was working on his movíe Fire & Ice with Frank Frazetta. A young Thomas Kinkade (along with James Gurney) was hired to paint the backgrounds for the film, this was Thomas’s first commercial gig. kinkade would go on to paint the soft, idyllic, cottage scenes & develop a massive following in the Evangelical Christian world. Kincade had an amazing business sense & made billions (fleecing the rubes). However, his own golden hand cuffs drove him to an early alcoholic death in 2012. He had a hidden cache of personal work that was significantly darker & apocalyptic, elements that were repressed from the propagandistic world he built for his evangelical customers.

When i started to discover how much merch (or rather, the variety of, given the rarity, not a lot of each was produced) i was blown away that such an obviously non-commercially viable movie like Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings (or ANY of his movies for that matter - just so you understand, he’s in my top five of directors). This line of Knickerbocker action figures really surprised me just in the fact that they existed! Knickerbocker started selling Raggedy Anne dolls in 1869 but really gained strength from the 1930s until they were acquired by Hasbro in 1983. It looks like the main thing they produced were the rubber-faced, soft-bodied dolls that creeped me out as a kid. Their LOTR figures were uninspired, if not outright goofy looking, however, I want them all! To Mordor we will take you!

In sixth grade we were supposed to stay inside during lunch break if it was raining. It rained a lot that year, so I played a lot of Castle Risk which was the best board game in the classroom. Castle Risk is a Napoleonic variation of Risk - you move troops around on a big map of Europe, fight & raise troops as you attempt to dominate the region. It’s interesting that Parker Brothers has bought Avalon Hill as this is essentially a “junior wargame”… an introductory version of the kinds of games Avalon Hill was making. I tried playing lots of proper wargames with chits & hex maps & they never caught my imagination & were always too rules heavy for the level that I’m comfortable with. Castle Risk hit that spot & we could play a game during our lunch break!

I think we got this at a garage sale, my little brothers are 3 & 6 years younger than me so i had access to things that i didn’t immediately get when i was a kid, so I remember this coming into my life after Castle Grayskull but i still loved it. Fisher Price Little People were a mainstay of any 70s/early 80s toy boxes - the line was a mix of Mr. Roger’s safe whimsy, Richard Scarry’s all-encompassing Golden Book populism & a sort of McDonalds modernism. As far as design stuff goes, it’s objectively perfect. The castle was perfection. It featured a working drawbridge, a trap door, a dungeon & a secret compartment for the pink dragon (which had the same hook hands as the Fisher Price monkey). This, along with the LEGO yellow castle & the PlayMobil castle gave us kids our first look at medievalalim not through the lens of sword & sorcery but from the safety of the nursery.

It’s a confusing, mixed up world when the original gets turned into a sub-par IP & can’t even hold a flame to the clear dominator, that is clearly based off of it - yes, I’m talking about Conan Vs. He-Man. I’d never even seen these Conan toys growing up OR in the wilds of collector markets. But here they are, looking like some Spanish MOTU bootlegs, but then branded with this huge IP & made by industry giants. There’s a lesson in here somewhere but I’m not sure what it is!?

My friends & I never got into Toon unfortunately, by the time I discovered it, I was trying to leave that childish world of Loony Tunes behind me. Roger Rabbit was kind of closure for that place of rubber hose limbs & stretch & squash bodies. That said, this is a great idea for a game & I brought back & was open about my love of cartoons when i ran cartoons at Eugene’s Bijou theater on Sunday mornings in the early 2000s. I’d show the older, weirder cartoons, Toon RPG feels like 1950s & 1960s Loony Tunes. That said, i feel like cartoons carry the true culture of a society in them. Cartoons show that resilience & a sense of humor are inecessary for life in this world.

Richard Corben was probably the most representative artist of Heavy Metal magazine. His style was hyperreal, over sexed, like Frazetta on lots of drugs lurid. When you stop to really see his work, he has a an understanding of three dimensional form & shading that has not been met by any artist I’ve observed. His actual painting style is evocative of Maxfield Parrish (& Hannes Bok by extension). But it’s applying those Golden Age of illustration methodologies to 70s sleazy themes that really created a unique artist in Richard Corben.

I was first introduced to the work of Angus McBride by his covers for the Middle Earth Role Playing books, what i didn’t know was that he was also the illustrator for the Men-At-Arms series of books that every old wargamer had. He had a more sober art style that fit Tolkien (even though i prefer the acid-drenched depictions from the 70s) & his paintings captured a violent energy in them similar to Frazetta. He painted mostly in gouache, common to commercial illustrators of his age.

Fantasy Battle was originally released as a hybrid role playing & war game. The game was released in the height of the first role playing boom & war gaming was a hobby for the old guys who wanted to push Napoleonic troops or WWII tanks around the table or as chits on a hex map, It was a wildly different time - Warhammer hadn’t become the face of wargaming as it now is. Warhammer was originally designed to use all of collector’s models & encourage players to buy more Citadel miniatures to add to their armies. Warhammer was the first war game to release it’s own proprietary miniatures, something which has become the industry standard, although seems to be unwinding as 3D printing decentralizes wargaming again. The central elements that made Warhammer stand out (from Dungeons & Dragons especially) was that it had an implied setting (which grew into the Old World) & it had a level of humor that was influenced by Monty Python that gave it a cleverer tone than how D&D presented itself. D&D always felt like there was a lot of Bronze Age, Sword & Sandals material lurking under the surface, while Warhammer felt like it was directly dealing with Medieval Europe, in a more gritty way that emphasized the slog of progress that Europe had made as it trudged on from the Dark Ages into the Renaissance.

Released as Dragon Warrior (for some reason & not running with the fact that it was designed by one of the best & most popular illustrators of all time: Akira Toriyama, which is really emblematic of how wrongly American business viewed Japanese imports until recently.) the series is correctly titled Dragon Quest. The game was heavily inspired by both Wizardry & Ultima, but it was given the weird, light-hearted spin that set it apart & has made it a giant success in Japan. JRPGs like this & similarly Akira Toriyama designed Chrono Trigger were a huge inspiration on me when I was building the elements that went into DUNGEON DEGENERATES - i like how light-hearted & goofy these games could be, while dealing with topics like most games wouldn’t until much later.

I interviewed Mid for my zine Die Wurst a few years back - (issue is sold out but I’ll post the interview on the GOBLINKO site today. I feel like Crust Punk followed the lines of Punk (this is all following English Punk) being the apocalypse, UK/82 continuing that & then crust being the post-apocalypse. While there are many who just saw Punk as dead so they did the Post-Punk thing, there were many who continued on as if Punk hadn’t died, because it hadn’t, it just changed, got scruffier, smellier, crustier. At the same time, English Metal was going through the same muck which produced bands that would eventually become Grindcore - but they emerged from the same muddy fields of some music festival for people who like their music loud, fast & distorted. But, this music also played with the contrast & slowed it way down. I asked Mid about if gaming played into Deviated Instinct. Mid - Yeah, back in the early-mid 80’s I was quite into the original Dungeons and Dragons games, I had the classic blue & red box’s. An old school friend was really into being a dungeon master and would plan out games for 3 or 4 of us to play. I was also really into painting little figures, especially the old metal ones, I had quite a large collection of Orcs that were all super detailed painted up. I have no idea what happened to all those, I don’t know if they just got lost between house moves over the decades or if I gave them away. As I mentioned before, all that imagery definitely fed into my art back then. It really only lasted a few years though &!I’ve not played anything like that since. I don’t have the patience. Sometimes I feel like it would be great to really get into RPG computer games or something.

Proteus was a UK magazine that published an entire paragraph picking game book in each issue. Being English it was directly inspired by the Fighting Fantasy series however, it seemed to run at the same time & for longer than Fighting Fantasy’s Warlock magazine. Each issue is full of uninspired, not-great, black & white art & included a full color poster. For the issue I have it’s by Les Edwards. I’m just stoked that something like this existed. I love magazines & game books! Imagine getting a big stack of magazines every month & just digging through them. I don’t have to imagine it - I used to do it. We need to build the audience & infrastructure for magazines & other cultural frameworks we’ve lost to the big digital turnover. But look, if the people are sold on magazines again - that builds up a part of what we’ve lost & is part of the necessary reconstruction of humanity that needs to be done.

I got a bunch of these in a big bag of DFC fantasy figures I got from Toy Go Round (used toy store in Albany, CA) in probably 1984. I didn’t know what they were, but I’ve come to figure out that they used a bunch of Grenadier Dungeons & Dragons miniatures sculpts to make these small, solid-color plastic miniatures. These were rack toys sold cheaply in grocery & department stores.The Figures we: A set of eight 45mm plastic mini-figures directly sculpted from vintage D&D metal miniatures. The roster included an Ogre, Cyclops, Birdman, Lizardman, Jinn, Brawn Hulk, and two distinct dragons.Plastic Style: They were carded with plastic fortresses (giving them a Crossbows & Catapults feel) called the Skull Turret & Headsgone Tower.

All the earliest video role playing games were attempts to make everything you COULD automate in a Dungeons & Dragons game. MOST jrpgs were influenced by Wizardry directly & indirectly through the big games it directly influenced like Dragon Quest & Final Fantasy. The initial release of Wizardry in 1981 coincided with the first big boom of D&D, so effectively in the public mind the way that these old video games & the original tabletop games handled things were not so far apart.

Gary Chalk was the face of English fantasy in the 80s, he produced the majority of illustrations for Games Workshop including art for both Talisman & Heroquest - as well as the Lone Wolf series & Redwall. His chunky, cartoony figures matched the Citadel house style of the time, & they created a synergy that i haven’t seen pop up except in my own projects. His work black & white interior illustrations for Redwall were especially great, i really like how he rendered everything & didn’t get too loose.

This was the first expansion for Warhammer Fantasy Battle i remember seeing. Featuring the same dream team that brought the world the Lone Wolf books, it’s fun to remember that Gary Chalk’s style was basically the Games Workshop’s house style for a while, basically during their entire “Golden Age”. His boldness & clarity, but with a cheeky sense of humor was the perfect balance for the Grim Dark of Blanche & the howling insanity of Miller. Also, gotta dig them orange skies!

This was the first expansion for Warhammer Fantasy Battle i remember seeing. Featuring the same dream team that brought the world the Lone Wolf books, it’s fun to remember that Gary Chalk’s style was basically the Games Workshop’s house style for a while, basically during their entire “Golden Age”. His boldness & clarity, but with a cheeky sense of humor was the perfect balance for the Grim Dark of Blanche & the howling insanity of Miller. Also, gotta dig them orange skies!