Hm, that wasn't meant as a joke, but people are haha-ing it. Oh well!
Hi Niklinna, I can't speak for others, but I thought you were being funny because, in my experience, the cartoon was never meant to be taken seriously. I was ten years old when it first came out and I had already been playing D&D for three years. I watched it every Saturday because it was so difficult back then to see fantasy at the theater, let alone TV. But, even at ten, I knew it was a shallow advertisement for D&D and not an accurate depiction of a D&D adventure. I mean, this was a couple years
before the barbarian class or thief-acrobat classes were published in hard back...and why didn't Eric have a sword, and why doesn't the girl with the invisible cloak pick herself up a weapon?...and none of the D&D games I was a player in featured transportation from the real world to a fantasy world, etc. But seeing "Dungeons & Dragons" on a title screen every Saturday was a thrill. Just as it was a thrill to watch Thundarr the Barbarian with his sun sword, which replicated Luke's lightsaber. I mean, even when Star Wars came to TV, it was an Ewok adventure or a droid cartoon...EVERYTHING was lame.
I could care less if Venger is on the cover...actually, unless the cover is bad, as a kid or young adult playing D&D, I was never a critic of the various covers of the books. I guess I thought the front of the first
Monstrous Manual binder in 1989 was cool, but that was about it. Oh, and the cover of
Unearthed Arcana was always cool. I think younger people might be thinking that those of us who are old enough to have watched the cartoon really care about this -- and who can blame them given how some people are reacting here by saying as much. To me, the paintings seem very D&D; learning that they include depictions of some Skylla character that I had never heard of in addition to the more well-known Warduke belongs to the realm of easter egg land.
Having now raised a family and taught my own child to role-play and watched my nephew not only grow into a terrific DM, but also someone who has made (good) Youtube videos on D&D & role-playing, my interest is that
D&D is in good hands.
And, from what I have observed over the years, it now is: watching how TSR under Gary Gygax (who I met and had a wonderful conversation with and whom I loved dearly) attempted to sue the pants off imitators, watching how Lorraine Williams oversaw D&D during her stint, watching how Wizards of the Coast under Peter Adkison saved D&D from a destiny as a niche memory, observing how Wizards then turned a good revision of the game (3.0 and 3.5) into a rules factory that catered to warring nerds obsessed with game design and then endless iteration for iteration's sake (4th edition...which I purchased and played a bit and always tried to enjoy for what it offered), and then how Wizards pulled back and declared that it would create an edition for all lovers of all editions of D&D -- clearly an impossible task...and then
pulled it off, and watching here on ENWorld as D&D grew to be a strikingly popular phenomenon that brought in all kinds of new players, only to be attempted to exploited by its Hasbro corporate overlord in ways that -- to my perspective -- were
fairly benign compared to how D&D had been treated by TSR in the past, only to [vitally important]
pull back before actually rescinding the OGL, give the pampered gaming community
almost everything it wanted and then some, only to be insulted and mocked by people who likely have no clue about what it means to run a successful business in a fickle market and answer to shareholders and all that crap (no doubt there are some irate competent and ethical business people here...my apologies).
Emerging out of this narrative -- and I have been listening as Jeremy Crawford over the years on
Dragon Talk would mention that he kept a Google Document of ideas of how an updated approach to the rulebooks could improve the super successful 5th edition core books, even saying this at the height of 5th edition's popularity with its (sometimes) fickle audience -- I have now observed the D&D team commit itself to this wonderful proposition: keeping the 5th edition engine under the hood and making adjustments to improve subclasses, game play, the presentation for the game for beginners, and the organization of the game for those who consult the books...and to totally eschew all the immature siloing and narrow thinking of "edition wars" and "let's rank the best of this and that" mentality.
Having had the foresight to publish the 5th edition adventures and supplements in such a way that did not include page numbers or stats for spells or monsters published in the core books, a revised approach to those three books can be accomplished without invalidating the 5th edition adventures and supplements, and yet the increasing number of people complaining about 5th edition being "long in the tooth" (a direct quote from Jim Davis of WebDM...a Youtuber I really enjoy) might possibly be given new options and books with better layouts. Further, this task can be done by a team that includes Crawford and Perkins (I miss Mearls and Rodney Thompson -- the person who gave us the brilliant addition of advantage and disadvantage if I remember correctly), so that those involved in 5th edition can actually tweak what they had wrought after more than a decade of game play and the accumulation of data.
Having observed all this, to see people become disappointed at a cover -- or misread what is an easter egg as some kind of important cultural allusion -- I thought was a good-intentioned joke.
Cheers, everyone, and keep role-playing...it is such a fecund playground for the mind and exercises so many wonderful imaginative and puzzle-solving and social skills. I for one, am grateful that in 2024 -- 50 years after the first box sets were assembled in a basement in Lake Geneva -- the game is thriving and so many people care and are invested that we can have a robust forum here on ENWorld to argue about book covers. It's all grand.
