In 1990, John Tynes founded Pagan Publishing as a vehicle for material related generally to the works of H.P. Lovecraft, and specifically to the horror role-playing gameCall of Cthulhu. The company's first publication was the photocopied digest-sized fanzine The Unspeakable Oath. The black & whitecover art was by 26-year-old artist Blair Reynolds, who also contributed some of the interior art. As the magazine developed into a professionally printed magazine, Reynolds continued to produce the cover art, which reviewer Allen Varney called "unsettling". In Issues #2 and #4 of The Unspeakable Oath, Reynolds also contributed the first two installments of a serial graphic novel, "Remnant", which editor John Tynes later called, "a wonderful graphic novel the artwork was stunning and the story very intriguing." However, Reynolds abandoned the story after the first two installments. Reynolds also contributed a written piece to Issue #4, "From the Investigative Journals of Mikhail Aksakov", but it was his cover art that was notable, featuring a topless multi-armed female god. In 1994, editor John Tyne commented that frontal nudity at the time was "a real taboo in gaming". Despite this, Pagan Publishing did not suffer any serious repercussions. However, there were repercussions the following year when Pagan Publishing released Courting Madness, an anthology of pieces from The Unspeakable Oath. The cover art by Reynolds featured a nude Rubenesque woman who seemed to be performing a sexual act on a Cthulhu Mythos creature. TSR, Inc., which at the time owned the popular Gencon annual gaming convention, banned Pagan Press from selling copies of the anthology at Gencon 25.
Reynolds also did art for DGP, but when the company began to fail, some contributors, including Reynolds, were either paid late or never paid. This exacerbated the discontent that Reynolds was beginning to feel about the games industry, which he felt was limiting his ability to explore the erotic and perverse boundaries of the Cthulhu mythos. In 1994, he stopped providing artwork and prose to industry publications in order to focus on his own personal projects via his own company, Games 208. Reynolds wanted to publish edgy Cthulhu mythos materials, and the first work was the sexually explicit horror graphic novel Black Sands. However, that was the last publication of Games 308 until The Mysteries of Mesoamerica appeared in 2008.
Return to games industry
Following the publication of Black Sands, Reynolds returned to the games industry to illustrate The Unspeakable Oath, now a professionally printed full-sized and full-colour publication. Reynolds also found work illustrating various pieces for MegaTraveller by Games Designers Workshop, and Blue Planet by Biohazard Games. He also provided artwork for Pagan Publishing's Call of Cthulhu campaign The Realm of Shadows, which elicited special comment from reviewer Ray Winninger, who called his reaction to the illustrations "a uniquely Lovecraftian and unsettling experience the first time I flipped through this booklet I stumbled over Reynolds' drawings of horrifying ghouls and monstrosities, all executed in the same photorealistic style." When Pagan Publishing released a new present-day military setting for Call of Cthulhu called Delta Green, Reynolds provided the sexually explicit story "Operation Looking Glass" for the companion fiction anthology Delta Green: Alien Intelligence, and created the cover art for the sourcebook Delta Green: Countdown.
