Mörk Borg just had a free version hit DTRPG a few weeks ago. No art. Just the tables. I can run it from those, and knowing that the name is vaguely "murky woods".... but not everyone can.
Dark Castle, actually.
Let's take AD&D (1E and 2E) core books as examples. Both have covers which depict rather epic individuals (wizards wielding magic, dungeon-crawlers removing torso-sized jewel-eyes from giant statues, etc.), but once you look inside, the have decidedly different tones of artwork.
- 1E includes a lot more depictions of incredibly scared-looking adventurers meekly sneaking through dungeons like the next turn probably will be their doom. Also lots more comedic depictions of characters slipping on banana peels or sneaking past giant rats while wearing mouse costumes saying 'this had better work.' Also lots of depictions of the world of 1E being Conan/Fafhrd&Grey Mouser-esque shadowy back alleys full of cutpurses and seedy taverns.
- 2E instead includes lots of depictions of epic characters kicking in dungeon doors and laying waste to their enemies. Adventuring parties in power-poses. Individual mages standing there crackling with energy. Domestic/urban scenes hew more towards friendly inns with roaring hearthfires, market scenes, and so forth. Excluding an unfortunate penchant for fainted-women-in-peril* art, most of the people in the scenes are being victorious. And often epically so (fighting the truly powerful beasts of the game). The most grounded picture I can think of from 2e is a party of adventurers with a defeated dragon hanging from a tree, and the only constrain there is that it is clearly a very small dragon. *and these are typically unarmored women most-likely not part of the party so much as someone the party has to rescue.
These two different framings support (or honestly reflect, since the change happened in late 1E) that 1E and 2E had a change in how the game was generally perceived (and oftentimes played. And this is with rulesets that were* largely the same.
And with 3e, we got more art focusing on individual elements. 3e had more art than 2e, but almost all of that art was focusing on a particular thing and not a scene. Each class has its iconic as an illustration, you have illustrations of individual items, feats, spells, and such, but there's almost never any
context to these illustrations. For example, there's a pair of pictures showing Lidda dodging a ray spell cast by an evil cleric, but we only see Lidda herself, the cleric in question (from behind), and the ray. Nothing about where they are when the spell is cast or anything like that. The most background we get are pictures like this, where we see an adventuring party emerging from a doorway, but no context about where that doorway is or anything of the sort:
At the same time, this was when I first started seeing people talking about "builds", where people would theorycraft characters with little regard to their connection to the world they would in theory be playing them in. I wonder if this has any connection to the art also being disjoint from the place the characters are in. Compare this to something like this:
This doesn't just show a nasty creature as the picture's focus, but you also see the desert landscape below the belgoi, with a wagon being drawn by a mekillot (giant lizard), as well as the world's two moons hanging large just above the horizon. And even the more low-effort black/white internal illustration oozes feel:
So to be clear, you're saying hand-drawn art cannot be good?
I'm not the one the comment is addressed to, and I would certainly not say any such thing. However, good hand-drawn art isn't
cheap. While my insight into RPG art and the art world in general is limited, I would suspect both that the equipment needed for digital art is cheaper than a fully equipped art studio (I mean, I don't even want to think about how much money I've sunk into mini painting, and I would guess that someone like Elmore or Caldwell has/had gear that was significantly better and more pricey than that), and that digital art can speed the process up by a significant amount, particularly in the sense of providing alternatives or alterations.
I also wonder if the existence of Magic (and to some extent other CCGs) create a bigger ecosystem where you have a larger number of skilled fantasy artists available, which would make it easier to commission high-quality art for your game.