Talk:David S. LaForce

Date of birth

An editor has added a cn tag to his date of birth. I have checked biographies of several other living persons and do not see their birth dates sourced. Admittedly I took this date off of the subject's Facebook page, so he could be totally making this up. However, the date works with independently known facts, especially that he was in his late teens when he was hired by TSR in 1978 (which would be age 19 if his birth date is correct.) A more experienced editor may be able to help out with this subject. Guinness323 (talk) 18:47, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

For some reason known only to them, there's a category of vandals that like to fudge people's birth date info. This is subtle enough that it can unnoticed for a while, especially on more obscure bio pages, which is why sources are useful. For basic, non-controversial/non-promotional info like this, self published sources are acceptable. Facebook is sub-optimal even for a WP:SPS, but it's usable. LaForce is the expert on himself, so citing his Facebook page would be okay for this, assuming it's public and reasonably clear that it's him and not a fan-page or hoax. Grayfell (talk) 22:31, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Select Bibliography

The "Select bibliography" could use as a source LaForce's Pen & Paper RPG Database entry (archived in 2007) but this is already included under "External Links". Pen & Paper's listing also includes a much larger quantity of LaForce's cartographical work, none of which has been included in the "Select bibliography". Perhaps a small sample of these should be added? Another issue is that the inclusion of The World of Greyhawk is contradicted by Pen & Paper's entry on LaForce and also its entry on the Greyhawk campaign setting. I'm inclined to think that The World of Greyhawk should therefore be removed from the "Select bibliography", unless a better source than Pen & Paper would indicate otherwise. Any thoughts?--GrizzlyG (talk) 04:15, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Which ones should be included, though? 207.229.139.154 (talk) 05:02, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

I've been wondering about that too! I don't have copies of all of his work but I can review what I have and make some suggestions.--GrizzlyG (talk) 15:28, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Having read through "Warduke"'s 2011 interview with LaForce on Nerd Trek (which now only survives as an archived document), I think I've found an answer to deciding on a sample of cartographical works to list. It seems that there are three phases to LaForce's work on stylistic grounds. His earlier maps tend to be simpler and functional (e.g. in the first few years of Dungeon magazine - these were issues 2-51, but I don't have a secondary source that specifically states this) and LaForce himself describes them as "very sterile and blocky". Subsequently inspired by historical maps, he decided to illustrate the maps he drew for the DragonLance books, but by the time he came to work on maps for Planescape, LaForce describes them as "quite free form ... artpieces".

Incidentally, there is a site (aanarchive) that hosts freely downloadable PDF copies of the first 150 issues of Dungeon - I'm presuming without permission from the publishers, but this site has been up for some time (it hasn't been updated since 2016), which suggests that they're not concerned about it. Anyway, using this "resource", I am able to confirm that while LaForce was credited for the cartography on the title page of virtually all the scenarios appearing in the magazine from issues #2 to #12, he was credited as the magazine's cartographer from #13 to #51 (1988-1995). It would be nice to be able to say this in the article, but I haven't yet found a secondary source that gives this information.--GrizzlyG (talk) 04:27, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

I've found that the Internet Archive has a special collection of Dungeon PDFs also, so this may help explain the persistence of aanarchive's own collection.--GrizzlyG (talk) 16:28, 30 January 2022 (UTC)