Darlene Pekul

Darlene (born Darlene Jean Pekul in 1954) is an American artist and calligrapher whose artwork appeared in early Dungeons & Dragons works published by TSR. Her best-known piece, the full-color map of the Flanaess that accompanied the 1980 folio edition of the World of Greyhawk by Gary Gygax, was used as the basis of all subsequent Greyhawk publications and maps until Greyhawk publications were discontinued by Wizards of the Coast in 2008.

Early life Darlene was born in Wisconsin. The third of seven children, she grew up on a farm near Elkhorn, Wisconsin. Her mother was an artist, and Darlene followed in her footsteps, becoming a member of the Geneva Lake Arts Association at a young age.

In 1979 and 1980, she received many freelance art and calligraphy assignments, including artwork for: Dungeon Master's Guide Deities & Demigods an accessory book called The Rogues Gallery. cover art for the adventure In Search of the Unknown

Map of the Flanaess In 1980, she was given the opportunity to create the piece of art for which she is best known, the full-colour map of the Flanaess that accompanied Gary Gygax's folio edition of the World of Greyhawk Fantasy Game Setting. Gygax was busy transforming his home D&D campaign called "Greyhawk" into a publishable form. His long-range plan - left incomplete when he was ousted from TSR in 1985 - was to create an entire fantasy world; however when he asked TSR's printing house about the maximum size of paper they could handle, the answer was just . He found that, using the scale he desired, he could only fit the northeast corner of one continent on two of those sheets. He placed the city and castle of Greyhawk roughly in the centre of the map, in an area that would have about the same temperate climate as his home in Lake Geneva, and made a rough sketch of the rest of the map, an area he called the "Flanaess". Darlene was given the assignment of developing a full color map on a hex grid from Gygax's prototype map.

Jasmine Shortly before World of Greyhawk was published, Darlene created the cover art for Dragon magazine issue 37. This issue also carried the first episode of "Jasmine", her color comic strip about a princess whose realm was coveted by an evil prince. The strip ran for 12 issues before being cancelled for not appealing to the magazine's mostly male readers. Darlene tried to a promote a petition at Origins '81 to have the comic strip brought back, but it gathered few signatures. Shortly after this, she designed and produced the card game Jasmine: The Battle for the Mid-Realm. Although reviews in Gameplay and The Dragon were good - Merle Rasmussen wrote, "Jasmine incorporates a few old ideas with many new ones to create a fresh approach in card gaming." - an expected expansion deck never materialized.

Further freelance assignments Darlene continued to take assignments from TSR, and between 1981 and 1984, her work appeared in White Plume Mountain, Investigation of Hydell, Monster Cards Set 3, In 1984, she returned to the U.S., enrolling in Graphic Design at Indiana University Bloomington. She also legally changed her name to just Darlene, dropping her surname Pekul as well as legally changing the typography of her name to a capital and small capitals. Since Wizards of the Coast (WotC) still owned the rights to the name Greyhawk, Gygax changed the name of the castle to Castle Zagyg - the reverse homophone of his own name. Gygax also changed the name of the nearby city to "Yggsburgh", a play on his initials E.G.G. In 2005, Troll Lord Games published Volume I, Castle Zagyg: Yggsburgh. This 256-page hardcover book contained details of Gygax's original city, as well as its personalities and politics.

Gygax had gotten in touch with Darlene at this time, and she agreed to create a two-part fold out map of the Yggsburgh environs. She said in an interview, "I accepted the cartography assignment cheerfully because it appealed to the poet within me. Since I created the original Greyhawk map, it seemed only fitting to also create this new world of Gary's as well."

Legacy The map Darlene had created for the original World of Greyhawk Fantasy Game Setting in 1980 continued to be the basis of all future Greyhawk maps, adventures and campaigns created by both TSR and WotC for the next 38 years - including the massively shared Living Greyhawk campaign (2000–2008). However, when Wizards of the Coast introduced the fourth edition of D&D in 2008, publication of new Greyhawk material was discontinued.