This is the first picture I drew that was worth a damn. It was the summer of 1980, and my friend Scott Perzan had just purchased a fantasy role-playing game called The Fantasy Trip: In The Labyrinth by Metagaming. I had played D&D, but only for one or two sessions. This was my first campaign with ongoing characters.
The Fantasy Trip began as two games published by Metagaming: Melee and Wizard, both designed by Steve Jackson, who would later create GURPS. Melee simulated man-to-man combat with ancient weapons. It was simple, fast, and deadly. Wizard was a game of magical combat and could be played on its own or combined with Melee for swords & sorcery action. They were called "microgames," because they were small enough to fit in your back pocket. They sold for about three bucks. In The Labyrinth provided rules for a full-scale fantasy campaign set in the other-dimensional world of Cidri. I was delighted to discover that characters in ITL were not limited to the boring humans, elves, dwarves and halflings found in D&D. When I learned you could play a Reptile Man, I had my first character, Ssard.
The game inspired me to draw this picture. It's done in a combination of colored pencils and magic marker. Apart from Ssard, who you can see dead center, there's also Triblin, a halfling wizard; Shena, an elf archer; Steele, a human fighter (the guy in gray); Roka, another human fighter (in the horned helmet); and Solomon Kane (in the Pilgrim hat). How Robert E. Howard's Puritan swashbuckler ended up in our game was we bought some lead figures at War and Pieces (a game shop in West Hartford, CT) and one of the figures was named Solomon Kane. At the time, we had no idea who Solomon Kane was, since we were only kids, but we thought it sounded cool, so Scott based a character on it. I also got a pack of a dozen orcs, who are also in this picture. Ssard, Triblin, Roka, and Steele show up in later pictures and saw action in other campaigns and game systems.