Anyway, the second Visions of the Hawk piece was pegged to my first exposure to Roper’s art, which was not his cover to Sleep’s Dopesmoker, but rather, this book, Mushroom Magick (2009), found in a box of review copies at the New York Daily News left up for grabs circa 2010. While I did not get to keep the book (another photo editor had dibs), I got to flip through it that evening, and I was impressed. But shit was going down in real life in 2010, so I entirely forgot about it until I saw the extracts from it in Vision of the Hawk. Me being me, I tried to find a copy, but it took a while, because it’s sort of expensive and scarce. But now I have one, and am showing it to you!

This is a 144-page collection of paintings of mushrooms. And, well, not just any mushrooms, obviously. There are some field notes on the specific types, generally with an eye towards the level of psylocybin they contain, but for the most part, just paintings of mushrooms. Imagine if Fungi of the Far Realms was entirely dedicated to naturally-occurring mushrooms and contained no game mechanics. That’s this. It’s a really lovely book and I think it is testament to Roper’s powers as an illustrator that it never gets boring. He achieves this, I think, by tweaking elements of his style as he goes. Here, a bit of text, next some bold line work, here water color, here a curious crop, and so on. Theme and variation, to an almost mesmerizing degree.

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Taken together, I was surprised at how quickly I stopped thinking of Roper’s art in the context of metal and started engaging with it as pure fantasy, and part of that genre’s larger illustrative tradition. I don’t know quite how to say it — it’s like his work has always been in the back of my head somehow. Page after page, I feel like I’m scraping past decades to the ur-source somehow. How does it seem so 21st century while also seeming to have been around since the ’70s? Is that the psychedelics making me feel that way? He’s out of time in the very best ways and while I bet most folks talk about Frazetta and Jone in the same breath, there’s a gnarliness here that reminds me a lot Bernie Wrightson, or at least reminds me of flipping through Wrightson’s A Look Back, where lurid color butts up against incredibly ink work. Unlike that tome, though, Vision of the Hawk is a gorgeously produced book. You really need to hold it in your hand to appreciate it — the matte paper gives Roper’s art a real richness that you lose in my copyphotos. A must own book for fantasy connoisseurs, no doubt.

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Worlds Beyond Time is available via Barnes & Noble (and Amazon, but ugh).Your best bet for getting Spell Bound is to follow Bibliomancers on Instagram – they regularly post stock and shop links in their stories.The offset printed edition of 50 Years of Text Games is sold out, but you can still get print-on-demand editions.The best bet for Talking Miniatures, in the US at least, is probably Amazon (sign).In the US, you can get Vision of the Hawk through MIT Press. In the UK, buy direct from Strange Attractor.

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Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!Available on iTunes, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Spotify, YouTube and your favorite podcast clients.Send questions, comments or corrections to info@vintagerpg.com.The Vintage RPG illustration is by Shafer Brown. Follow him on Twitter.Tune in next week for the next episode. Until then, may the dice always roll in your favor!

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