My Top 5 FRPG Artists – Number 4 – Peter Fenlon

I started a countdown of my ‘top-5’ FRPG artists in May, with Russ Nicholson at #5. Unfortunately, I subsequently dropped the ball on this series. Time to change that!

So here is some work from my fourth all-time favourite FRPG artist, Peter Fenlon.

Yes, Fenlon’s works are maps – specifically, maps from ICE’s Middle-earth campaign modules. Yet they also are works of art. I believe that they do an excellent job in capturing the ‘spirit’ or ‘ethos’ of Tolkien’s creation (even if other aspects of ICE’s Middle-earth series failed to do so).

This is an ‘artist’s interpretation’ of the continent of Endor, of which only the north-western corner will be familiar to readers of Tolkien’s works. The entire map is beautiful, and the ‘unexplored’ areas to the east and south really helped to fire my imagination as a young lad.

Here is a close-up of North-western Middle-earth, the regions famously covered in Tolkien’s novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Here is a map that depicts the region around Bree, including Fornost Erain and part of the Shire. Like all of the ‘detailed’ Middle-earth maps, the scale is 1 inch = 20 miles. I loved that all of ICE’s detailed maps fitted together in order to create an amazing, massive, and beautiful map of Middle-earth!

And here is one of the earliest maps for ICE’s Middle-earth series (I believe that Umbar was either the first or second to be published). It depicts the bay around the city of Umbar, Haven of the Corsairs.

Well, that’s it for this instalment of this series. I hope to post the work of my #3 favourite FRPG artist sometime in August.

(Oh yes, if you are interested in maps of parts of Middle-earth, I should mention that Daniel Cruger has made some of his own superb work for ICE from the mid-1990s available at his blog ‘Tales from the Tower’!)