D&D 5E (2024) Here's The New 2024 Player's Handbook Wizard Art

 

[Reynard]

There are a lot of other images, but they vary wildly in tone, like here's another classic:

View attachment 354291

Which certainly exemplifies an era of D&D, even if killing barely-out-of-the-egg baby dragons who weight maybe 200lbs soaking wet is no longer considered terribly sporting.

There are a lot of great images associated with D&D, and many that are better than this one from a technical or dramatic standpoint, but none of them beat this one for telling you what D&D adventurers DO (for the era it was made, anyway).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

There are a lot of great images associated with D&D, and many that are better than this one from a technical or dramatic standpoint, but none of them beat this one for telling you what D&D adventurers DO (for the era it was made, anyway).

Yeah low-level ones in like late 1E, early 2E, absolutely.

That is one thing I feel like art from 3E onwards has slightly suffered from, which is not showing adventurers doing adventurer stuff unless it's being in a dungeon, or maybe if we're very lucky, sitting in a pub/inn. But like just living the life? Enjoy the loot? Not so much. Not that all the art needs to be that way, but I dunno, I don't think 4E/5E particularly have done as well with that - even a lot of the 5E pieces which do depict something like that, you can tell they paid the artist for X amount of time/effort and no more, like:

Like this:

Like this - is it bad? No. Is it finished? No. It's nowhere near finished, it's like, you gave the guy X hours of work on it, and if you'd given him X*1.5, he could have made this piece look great and really pop, made the for example, the materials actually look like the materials they are. Made the lighting drastically more convincing. Made the elf not look like he's just an unfinished cut-out.

The perils of a limited art budget. I don't think an '80s art director would even tell Larry Elmore or Keith Parkinson, "only spend X hours on it, that's all we pay for", or if they did, I think it was a lot higher number of hours. I'm not saying they're better people or better artists, but they were working in a very different artistic environment.

 

[Guest 7037866]

There are a lot of great images associated with D&D, and many that are better than this one from a technical or dramatic standpoint, but none of them beat this one for telling you what D&D adventurers DO (for the era it was made, anyway).

Just asking to be clear:

So, in our current "era":
Paladin's doing fight devils (fiends) in Hell?
PCs don't kill dragons (for treasure, protect the area, or whatever reason)?
Warriors don't charge into battle against enormous ancient dragons?

Seems like all that happens more in todays games than whatever is happening in this image.

 

[Hussar]

I find the “I’m flying” pose criticism a bit weird. How many ways are there to draw someone flying without wings? I posted the cover of the 2e Tome of Magic which shows a woman flying in exactly the same pose and that’s about thirty five years old.

That flying pose - on leg bent, arms out, Jesus on a cross pose is pretty much the default depiction of a flyer without wings since, like, forever.

Calling it a “Marvel” pose seems very weird. The reason Scarlet Witch looks like a DnD wizard flying is because that’s exactly what she looks like.

It’s putting the cart before the horse to say that the pose comes from Marvel.

 

[mamba]

I find the “I’m flying” pose criticism a bit weird. How many ways are there to draw someone flying without wings?

at least as many as with wings, since you can ignore physics

I don’t like that this is just a show-off power pose with no context / story.

If it has one then it is nepo-baby at a 200k a semester wizarding college strikes a power pose for her Tik Tok followers, which is pretty far removed from D&D

 

[cbwjm]

The 2014 PHB wizard also had no context or story, it's just some dude standing there leaning on a staff. If you came across him you might not even know he has any magical ability.

 

[Yaarel]

The 2014 PHB wizard also had no context or story, it's just some dude standing there leaning on a staff. If you came across him you might not even know he has any magical ability.

True.

But note in the 2014 Players Handbook Wizard illustration, the (irrelevant) stereotype of ... long-beard, long-hair, long-robe.

The kind of stereotype that many (most?) Wizard players never play.

The stereotype is suffocating. The smaller image several pages afterward is the same stereotype and same problem.

I think it is a good idea to have one image that looks like this, because the Gandalf/Dumbledore look is recognizable. But most Wizard males dont look like this, especially when youthful.

 

[mamba]

The 2014 PHB wizard also had no context or story, it's just some dude standing there leaning on a staff. If you came across him you might not even know he has any magical ability.

agreed, I would like the pictures to tell more of a story, that is not limited to the 2024 Wizard one

 

[Reynard]

agreed, I would like the pictures to tell more of a story, that is not limited to the 2024 Wizard one

It feels like they used to, that art that suggested story used to be the standard. But memory and nostalgia are terribly unreliable, so I could easily be wrong.

 

[Tonguez]

agreed, I would like the pictures to tell more of a story, that is not limited to the 2024 Wizard one

In my mind thats the image of a court mage, rising up to make a display of power. Maybe she is at a diplomatic function (hence the fancy outfit) and is casting shield due to an assassin entering the grand hall.

That said she does remind me of Storm from the X-Men lol