D&D 5E Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft Art Preview

SageAdvice.eu has compiled a bunch of art shots from the upcoming Ravenloft setting book. I've featured a handful below, but click through to the link for the full set of nearly 30 pieces.

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ART Van Richtens Guide to Ravenloft26

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Morrus is the owner of EN World and EN Publishing, creator of the ENnies, creator of the What's OLD is NEW (WOIN), Simply6, and Awfully Cheerful Engine game systems, publisher of Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition, and co-host of the weekly Morrus' Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk podcast. He has been a game publisher and RPG community administrator for over 20 years, and has been reporting on TTRPG and D&D news for over two decades. He is also on the socials.

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Aaron L said:
I much, much, much prefer the way Tieflings were originally portrayed, as unique individual descendants of fiendish ancestors, each with their own unique individual deformity.

Seeing as how the idea behind Tieflings came from the Medieval idea that birth deformities were caused by the sins of the child's parents and/or ancestors, it makes a whole Hell of a lot more sense that they would each have unique deformities, rather than being a full race of uniformly red-skinned, goat-horned, and lizard-tailed Devilpeople. I just cannot stand that massive alteration. It just makes them... flatter and less interesting.
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Totally agree. On a player level, I want the latitude to make a tiefling look like hellboy, some black skinned green eyed six fingered freak grazzt ripoff, a slightly off human with small horns and creepy eyes or whatever.

in mordenkainen’s we get all different tiefling except that all look the same? Despite different ancestry? Missed opportunity.
 

TheSword said:
Kinda gobsmacked by people knocking the art. I think it is amazing.

A lot of D’Terlizzi’s work was monochrome sketches. Bron created the art for Dark Sun but it ironically made the non-Bron stuff look jarring. Not to mention the fact that only really his amazing front covers were full colour.

Yes Darksun had this...

View attachment 136277

But remember, 90% of the art was this...

View attachment 136282

Here in Van Richten’s Guide we have dozens of amazing full colour artworks. Throughout the book. They are dramatically better than the art for Tasha’s. That actually made me cringe...

View attachment 136275
Compared to...

View attachment 136276
No contest!
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That last pic is great. But I would never say no to brom, ever.

I like the last pic’s arrangement. Dynamic brutal battle...

I liked Elmore all these years but not a big fan of subjects statically posed for the camera...
 


Warpiglet-7 said:
Totally agree. On a player level, I want the latitude to make a tiefling look like hellboy, some black skinned green eyed six fingered freak grazzt ripoff, a slightly off human with small horns and creepy eyes or whatever.

in mordenkainen’s we get all different tiefling except that all look the same? Despite different ancestry? Missed opportunity.
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shrug I don't give a damn what the books say, in my games tiefling players can make their characters look however they wish, as long as the fiendish attributes are pronounced enough to be visible unless painstakingly concealed.
 

TheIdeaOfGood said:
shrug I don't give a damn what the books say, in my games tiefling players can make their characters look however they wish, as long as the fiendish attributes are pronounced enough to be visible unless painstakingly concealed.
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Sure. Applied more broadly, does flavor ever matter in books? Or art? You can always change it and imagine what you want.

If I pay for the book, I usually want it to show some options I like or create inspiration for things I alter later.

carbon copy tiefling art and descriptions is a disappointment (I.e. not my preference). It’s cool that it doesn’t bother you. Doesn’t change my view that it could have been cooler.
 


TheSword said:
Let’s be honest Brom made dark sun.
Everything he did was inherently cool.
View attachment 136456
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I never played dark sun. But the art was so cool it really sunk in! When art is so evocative and good, it actually aids my immersion as it seems this other place has a basis in reality. I mean, I am looking at it. It’s alien but has a reality to it!

i don’t judge a book or boxed set by the cover, but it helps me to enjoy the contents even more
 

Charlaquin said:
Now, 5e moved away from the 4e assumed setting, so there’s no Bael Turath and no cursed bloodline, but for some reason they kept the appearance of 4e Tieflings despite not keeping the lore behind them. So, I agree that in the context of 5e where Tieflings are back to being people with fiendish heritage, the uniform appearance doesn’t make sense. But it did make sense in the context of their 4e lore, which is where the uniform appearance originated from.
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I recently sprang for the Feral Tiefling race on D&D Beyond for this reason. Uniform tieflings are, frankly, boring, unless there's a setting-specific reason for them. I want a whole gamut, which the incredibly poorly named "feral" tieflings give us.
 


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