GOR, WITHOUT ALL THOSE PESKY WORDS IN THE WAY

Gor has never been an understated place.

Huge predatory animals.

Walled cities.

Armoured warriors.

Slave markets.

Nomads, pirates, assassins and merchant princes.

Alien Priest-Kings manipulating civilisation from the Sardar Mountains while the Kurii pursue their own plans from beyond the world.

Steel, silk, blood, chains and enough complicated social ritual to make arriving at somebody’s house for dinner potentially hazardous.

When Tales of Gor: Gorean Roleplaying and World of Gor were created, artist Michael Manning was commissioned to give all of that a visual identity.

The problem with putting art into a roleplaying book is that books insist on containing other things.

Rules.

Tables.

Captions.

Columns.

Page furniture.

Words everywhere.

The Art of Gor gets rid of them.

This digital art book collects Manning’s illustrations from the two principal Gorean roleplaying volumes and presents them at a larger scale, allowing his linework, detail and composition to stand on their own.

No combat modifiers.

No caste descriptions.

No four-paragraph explanation of exactly how a particular Gorean beverage ought to be served.

Just Gor.

MICHAEL MANNING WAS A RATHER OBVIOUS CHOICE

There are probably artists for whom Gor would constitute a difficult career adjustment.

Michael Manning is not one of them.

A comic-book artist, illustrator, writer, tattoo designer and traditionally trained animator, Manning is particularly associated with erotic and fetish art, fantasy, mythology and elaborate invented societies built around power, sexuality and hierarchy.

His best-known works include The Spider Garden, Tranceptor, Inamorata and Lumenagerie. He has also illustrated adaptations of writers including Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft and Alexandre Dumas.

Then somebody asked him to draw Gor.

Sometimes the universe gets the casting right.

John Norman’s Counter-Earth needs an artist who can move comfortably between beauty and menace, eroticism and violence, human bodies and genuinely peculiar monsters.

Manning already spoke the language.

NOT GENERIC FANTASY WITH MORE COLLARS

One of the dangers in illustrating Gor is making it look like every other sword-and-sandals fantasy setting.

Put a muscular bloke in leather on one side.

Put a mostly naked woman on the other.

Add a vaguely classical column behind them.

Congratulations.

You have produced the cover of approximately seven thousand forgotten paperback novels.

Manning’s work is more distinctive.

His heavy blacks, fine linework and sharp contrasts give the illustrations something of the quality of decadent book illustration filtered through underground and independent comics.

One contemporary reviewer described the result particularly well as “a comic book take on Aubrey Beardsley”.

That comparison makes sense.

There is elegance in the figures, but also severity.

Ornament sits beside violence.

Sensuality can become grotesque remarkably quickly.

Black areas do real compositional work rather than merely filling space.

The world feels designed rather than assembled from standard fantasy parts.

Which is important because Gor is strange.

THE COUNTER-EARTH NEEDS DRAWING

The popular caricature of Gor consists almost entirely of kajirae.

There are certainly kajirae in here.

Nobody has been hidden behind a tasteful vase.

But Gorean visual culture includes considerably more than slave silks.

There are warriors and travellers, castes and cultures, Gorean animals, intelligent non-human creatures, ships, settlements, wilderness, captivity, violence and scenes from ordinary and distinctly non-ordinary Gorean life.

Manning had to turn Norman’s descriptions into things that actually looked as though they belonged in the same world.

That is harder than it sounds.

The setting combines planetary romance, sword-and-sandal adventure, science fiction, anthropology, BDSM erotica and pulp fantasy.

A Gorean warrior must look plausible beside a gigantic alien beast.

A primitive city has to belong to the same setting as a silver spacecraft.

The Priest-Kings cannot simply look like somebody wandered in from another science-fiction property.

And the Kurii need to be something rather more interesting than Big Hairy Monster Number Four.

The resulting illustrations help make those contradictions coherent.

THE ART THAT PEOPLE NOTICED

Reviews of Tales of Gor and World of Gor did not merely mention that the books had pictures.

Manning’s contribution kept being singled out.

One reviewer described the black-and-white illustrations as bespoke work which, with very few exceptions, evoked the complexity of Gor extremely well. That was the reviewer who reached for the Aubrey Beardsley comparison and later described two pieces as “just sublime” and worth the price of admission by themselves.

Another reviewer took a different route and said the artwork reminded them of the old Gor paperback covers by Boris Vallejo, adding that the images “scream GOR!”

Those are very different artistic comparisons.

That is interesting in itself.

Manning is not impersonating either artist.

What the reactions have in common is recognition.

The pictures look like they belong to Gor.

For an illustrator working on a setting with half a century of existing imagery, fan expectations and some extremely firm ideas about what things ought to look like, that is no small achievement.

OUT OF THE RULEBOOK

Artwork behaves differently when you remove it from the page it was commissioned to illustrate.

Inside Tales of Gor, an image may have to share a spread with character rules, equipment or an explanation of OpenD6 mechanics.

Inside World of Gor, it might sit beside an encyclopaedia entry about a creature, culture or Gorean institution.

That gives the picture context.

It also limits it.

Reduce an illustration to half a column and suddenly a great deal of the work the artist put into it becomes texture.

The face gets smaller.

Fine marks disappear.

The balance of blacks and whites changes.

Background details become things you vaguely remember seeing.

The Art of Gor restores the illustrations as images in their own right.

The rules have gone home.

The encyclopaedia is shut.

The art gets the page.

This is therefore partly a collection and partly a chance to properly see work you may technically have owned for years without ever having seen at its intended scale.

BEAUTIFUL, UGLY AND PECULIAR

Gor should not be pretty all the time.

That would rather miss the point.

Manning’s drawings can be sensual, and some are overtly erotic, but other pieces are harsh, unsettling or deliberately strange.

The Counter-Earth contains beautiful people because Norman writes a great many beautiful people.

It also contains predators, monsters, alien intelligences, brutality and cultures whose idea of acceptable behaviour would make most modern workplaces reach for the emergency HR number.

That range suits Manning.

His human figures can be graceful without becoming soft.

Bodies look physical.

Bondage looks like bondage rather than decorative ribbon.

Dangerous animals appear capable of being dangerous.

The grotesque elements are allowed to remain grotesque.

The result does not sanitise Gor into conventional fantasy illustration.

Nor does it reduce the entire setting to fetish pin-ups.

It occupies the much more interesting space where those things coexist.

YES, THERE IS NUDITY

Rather obviously.

The Art of Gor is an adult art book based on John Norman’s Gor and illustrated by an artist internationally known for erotic and fetish work.

Expecting everyone to remain fully dressed would indicate a serious failure somewhere in the purchasing process.

The collection contains artistic nudity, fetish imagery, bondage, slavery, violence and other adult Gorean themes.

These are presented as part of the fictional setting and Manning’s interpretation of it.

There has been no attempt to retrofit the images with strategically positioned smoke, furniture or exceptionally vigorous shrubbery.

Adults only.

The foliage has been spared.

WHAT IS ACTUALLY IN IT?

The collection brings together:

• Michael Manning’s artwork created for Tales of Gor: Gorean Roleplaying; his illustrations for the World of Gor encyclopaedia; depictions of Gorean warriors, slaves, travellers, cultures and societies; animals, monsters and intelligent non-human inhabitants of Counter-Earth; scenes of combat, travel, captivity and Gorean life; and larger presentations of images previously constrained by game-book layouts.

This is an art book, not another rules supplement.

You do not need OpenD6.

You do not need dice.

You do not need a character sheet.

Nobody will ask you to make a Strength roll to turn the page.

Readers of the novels can enjoy it as an interpretation of Norman’s setting.

Players and Games Masters can use it as visual reference.

Artists can study Manning’s approach to the material.

People who simply like beautifully executed black-and-white fantasy and fetish illustration can ignore the gaming connection entirely.

GOR SEEN RATHER THAN EXPLAINED

The two main Gorean roleplaying books are necessarily concerned with explaining the place.

World of Gor has to tell you what the things are.

Tales of Gor has to tell you what you can do with them.

An art collection has a different job.

It can simply show you.

That changes the way the setting comes across.

Remove the explanatory text and Gor becomes less an intellectual exercise in reconstructing Norman’s worldbuilding and more immediate.

The costumes matter.

Scale matters.

Body language matters.

The relationship between captor and captive matters before anybody explains it.

A creature’s anatomy can tell you more in three seconds than an encyclopaedia entry manages in three paragraphs.

This is particularly useful for a setting which exists primarily in prose.

Norman has supplied the nouns.

Manning has had to decide what they look like.

FROM THE RPG TO THE WALL

This collection originally appeared in July 2017, a few months after the release of Tales of Gor and World of Gor.

The stated purpose was simple: gather Manning’s artwork and let people see the pieces in their “full-size glory”.

That is still the best description.

It also makes the book an interesting artefact from the development of the Gorean RPG line.

The illustrations were not produced years later as fan art inspired by the game.

They were part of defining its visual identity from the beginning.

If Tales of Gor is how the roleplaying game mechanically interprets Counter-Earth, Manning’s drawings are how that edition sees it.

DIGITAL EDITION

This product is the digital PDF edition of The Art of Gor.

The current electronic edition collects the Michael Manning artwork from Tales of Gor: Gorean Roleplaying and World of Gor: Gorean Encyclopaedia, presenting it independently of the text and game layouts in which it originally appeared.

It is intended for adult readers.

That bears repeating because somebody will otherwise complain.

FULL-COLOUR A4 PAPERBACK

There is also a physical edition, Art of Gor: Michael Manning’s Vision.

The paperback runs to 92 pages, is printed in A4 format (210 × 297 mm) with a colour interior and perfect binding, giving the artwork considerably more physical room than it received in the original gaming books.

It is currently available directly from Postmortem Studios:

Buy Art of Gor: Michael Manning’s Vision – Print Edition

The original Lulu edition also remains available:

Buy Art of Gor: Michael Manning’s Vision from Lulu

This listing is for the PDF edition. No paperback will materialise through your monitor however persuasively you address the Priest-Kings.

THE REST OF THE WORLD

The artwork was originally commissioned for two books.

If the pictures make you curious about what any of this is supposed to mean, both remain available.

Tales of Gor: Gorean Roleplaying is the roleplaying game itself, using OpenD6 to let players create characters and adventure across Counter-Earth.

World of Gor: Gorean Encyclopaedia is the large reference work covering the people, places, castes, customs, animals, cultures and accumulated terminology of the novels.

The books explain the world.

This one lets Manning loose on it.

TAKE ANOTHER LOOK

Roleplaying artwork is often treated as disposable decoration.

You see it once while looking for the initiative rules.

Perhaps you notice it again when somebody asks which page contains the equipment list.

Eventually it becomes part of the page rather than something you consciously look at.

The Art of Gor asks you to look again.

At the linework.

At the compositions.

At the monsters.

At the bodies.

At the ugliness and elegance sitting next to one another.

At Michael Manning’s particular interpretation of a world where swords and spaceships, slaves and alien conspiracies, brutality and beauty have somehow coexisted for more than half a century of novels.

No statistics.

No tables.

No rules.

No encyclopaedia entries.

Just the Counter-Earth through Michael Manning’s eyes.

Some of it is beautiful.

Some of it is disturbing.

Some of it is naked.

Quite a lot of it is all three.