Cover I Love: Jean McGuire Edition

The cover I love most is actually two covers. And my love is not just for art, but also for nostalgia.

 

Specifically, it's the cover for The Fantasy Trip.

 

The nostalgia part is simple: I bought Melee when it came out in a zip bag, from a long-defunct company called Metagaming. Then Wizard. Then the MicroQuests. Then they came out with something bigger: letter-sized booklets for Advanced Melee, Advanced Wizard, and In the Labyrinth. Together, they made up a game called The Fantasy Trip, and I was hooked. Aside from the wonders of this incredible game system that wasn't anything like D&D, the cover (all three used the same cover art) was beautiful: Instead of the busy, complicated, and frankly generally bad covers of most RPG products at the time, the art was clean, sophisticated, and it looked like it was done with an airbrush, not a crayon. While the color palette leaned heavily on purple and green, it was nothing like the (to me) hideous Erol Otus art that was gaining traction. It was probably the first cover art I actually liked, and it was on the cover of the most awesome game.

 

Decades later, Steve Jackson had recovered the copyright to TFT, and there was (after ~40 years) a new edition. I'll admit I didn't like the cover art quite as much, mostly because it depicted a fight in progress, rather than that moment of anticipation before everything goes south; tension was replaced by action. But it kept the same color palette, the same basic layout, and the female character had clothes now! And perhaps more important is what it signified: This is The Fantasy Trip! I was 18 again, standing in my FLGS (creatively named "The Game Store") and scraping my pennies together to buy it. The cover was a callback to that very first TFT cover. For those of us who were there for the first one, the new edition was a must-have. And it was, to a large extent, because of that cover. This was The Fantasy Trip.

 

Decades after that cover first saw the light, I still think it's one of the best FRPG covers ever drawn. It would still stand out in the market today. And they did it twice.