#tim sell

[oldschoolfrp]

Flight to the rocs' nest -- This adventure begins with the party being stashed in the mountaintop aerie, far from their destination on the Serpent River (Tim Sell, AD&D module UK5: Eye of the Serpent by Graeme Morris, TSR, 1984)

[all-action-all-picture]

House of Hell by Steve Jackson. Fighting Fantasy Gamebook No. 10 from 1984. Cover by Ian Miller, interior illustrations by Tim Sell. A short version of this adventure was first published in Warlock magazine.

[omnimic]

For the tenth book in the series, Steve Jackson created the only Fighting Fantasy book set on present day Earth. The result – in which the reader must survive a night in an evil house full of devil worshippers, ghosts, and assorted demonic activity – is one of the scariest and most challenging (and puzzling!) of all the gamebooks.

The cover by Ian Miller is fantastic and suitably evil, but Tim Sell’s interior art is somewhat of a mixed bag. Certain illustrations – notably the iconic zombie featured on the frontispiece – are incredible, but in places, the art has a kind of cartoonish feel (viz. the skeleton with his jaunty hat or the somewhat silly Hell Demon). The slightly childish feel to some of the art (I didn’t include, for example, the illustration of the painting of the old woman) is jarring when compared to some of the more gory illustrations – not to mention the picture of the sacrificial victim, which is quite risqué indeed for a book published by Puffin (and was thus excised from later editions)!

[oldschoolfrp]

"The skeleton is that of a large mammoth; the skull lies on the eastern side but the tusks were removed long ago. Two large spiders live inside the ribcage." (Tim Sell, AD&D module UK5: Eye of the Serpent by Graeme Morris, TSR, 1984)

[oldschoolfrp]

I wish to register a complaint.

Encounter: 10 zombie pirates and an ex-parrot (Tim Sell illustration from Mike Brunton's AD&D adventure "The Great Paladin Hunt," Imagine 26, TSR UK, May 1985)

This was the GamesFair '85 AD&D Team Competition Module. It combines two classic D&D themes: the party are prisoners trying to escape without most of their gear, plus silly humorous references. Before walking into Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch, they can meet Orbil and Wilva, wights, who crash their flying contraption.

[oldschoolfrp]

Casually perched on the edge of my throne with my scythe (Tim Sell, Warlock 3, 1984)

[oldschoolfrp]

Well, either it allows a magic-user to throw the various Bigby’s hand spells, or it’s a +2 backscratcher (Warlock: The Fighting Fantasy Magazine 3, 1984; art credited to Tim Sell and Dave Eastbury)

[oldschoolfrp]

Necromancer’s personal effects (”House of Hell”, Warlock: The Fighting Fantasy Magazine 3, 1984; art credited to Tim Sell and Dave Eastbury)