Artworks in an RPG

Fee points about art. You don’t need computers to do realistic art (plenty of photo realistic art is handraen). I think computers can actually make some art worse. Not all art needs to be photorealistic to be good. There were ample photorealistic art covers for fantasy novels from the 80s on that looked realistic but failed to inspire or lacked a distinct style.

Personally, and this is just taste, I prefer a lot of older gaming art: Brom, Caldwell, Fabian, pre-2000. Nothing wrong with new art or art that uses new tech logo. Great new stuff too but I am a little baffled by the claim that there wasn’t any good art prior to 2000 or so (and I am assuming this argument applies only to gaming art because if it doesn’t the claim is utterly absurd)

aramis erak said:

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.

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Dark Castle, actually.

Willie the Duck said:

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.

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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:

Sacrosanct said:

So to be clear, you're saying hand-drawn art cannot be good?

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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.

Jd Smith1 said:

Lets come at it from another direction. The original computer games were text-based. The instant images were available, they transitioned in that direction. Text-based games still exist, but the industry is dominated by graphics.

The same is true in RPGs: art dominates.

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There were still text based games out in the 80s. I was playing Kings Quest and Hitchhikers guided to he galaxy at the same time. But I do think it is true there was strong graphic improvement over time with video games. One difference though is video games as a medium, were one where there was a built in expectation of improved visuals over time as technology got better. I think that was a very different thing than RPGs, which are still fundamentally the same game, no matter what art you have in the books (and even extras like miniatures, terrain, maps, grids, etc have been around from the beginning because it came out of war gaming). With art inside books I think there have been a few key things going on over time: changes in aesthetics and style (and sometimes I think in these discussions people confuse style with quality), changes in technology available to artists (clearly we have more computer rendered art, more digital tools and programs for making art, etc), increased emphasis on lots of full color interior art. I think this latter part is the key.

Black and White, I think, is viewed as lesser these days. But in the 80s and 90s, even though it still could a decision based on budget alone (something was black and white to keep the costs down), black and white was also a viable style on its own. My dad was an amateur black and white photographer and he used to talk about the aesthetics of black and white when I was a kid, and that rubbed off on me. By the time I got into gaming, I vastly preferred lines that had interior black and white images to lines with color images (in particular I really loved the work of Stephen Fabian in RPG books, but there were plenty of other great artists doing black and white interiors at that time). Obviously a lot of smaller publishers, myself included, do do black and white out of necessity (the cost of art and POD can be more manageable if you are using black and white), but I would love to see something on the level of a WOTC book with glossy pages done intentionally in black and white.

In terms of should books have art, lots of art, little art, or no art. I think it is a big enough hobby that you can have a range. Illustrations obviously help with certain things. But illustrations are also expensive and this is still a game of imagination, so there is plenty of room for publishers who can't afford art, turning that into a strength. At the same time, I like a beautifully illustrated RPG book as much as the next person. I just don't think it is the only way to make an RPG.

Bilharzia said:

You mean this impossible RuneQuest art? Presumably this is Lisa A Free painting is terrible,

This watercolour painting in particular repulses me

Both date from the early 1980s, RuneQuest.

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See I actually quite like this art. It is distinct, it has a clear character and it helped give the brand a clear visual identity. And they both have nice color choices. This was also at a time when lots of games and toys had art in this style.

Bedrockgames said:

Black and White, I think, is viewed as lesser these days.

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I wish it weren't. There are some things b/w can do that color can't.

Rogerd1 said:

Artwork can show you better than a 1,000 words sometimes and evokes atmosphere, feel and tone. Back in the days when good art was impossible, and you only had hand drawn - but now so many talented artists many of whom will do requests.

It makes sense to include.

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Bernie Wrightson's Frankenstein book came out in 1983. It wasn't in gaming but was handrawn and was awesome:




And you had lots of great stuff in gaming prior to the 2000s:











The resolution on some of these images isn't so great because I had to find them online, but if you google them you can see how nice they look with better resolution.

Sacrosanct said:

I wish it weren't. There are some things b/w can do that color can't.

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I agree. I posted the Bernie Wrightson book above and that is a perfect example in my opinion. And same can be said of Fabian's stuff. If it is high quality printing especially, you can get lots of interesting contrast with the different tones and shades.

Staffan said:

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.

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I've worked with well over a hundred artists in a professional capacity over the past 2 decades, and I'm an artist myself. Good digital art isn't cheap either, nor should it be. I'm not saying you're saying this, but the implication that digital art should be cheaper than manually drawn art is a theory that really needs to die in fire. Artists are generally underpaid as is, and you're paying for the product, not the process.

For example, if I make you a chessboard out of wood using only a few tools and someone else makes it using templates, top-of-the-line saws, etc., you shouldn't expect to pay less for the latter just because it was done faster.

Sacrosanct said:

I've worked with well over a hundred artists in a professional capacity over the past 2 decades, and I'm an artist myself. Good digital art isn't cheap either, nor should it be. I'm not saying you're saying this, but the implication that digital art should be cheaper than manually drawn art is a theory that really needs to die in fire. Artists are generally underpaid as is, and you're paying for the product, not the process.

For example, if I make you a chessboard out of wood using only a few tools and someone else makes it using templates, top-of-the-line saws, etc., you shouldn't expect to pay less for the latter just because it was done faster.

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Digital art also requires a lot of additional technical skill in terms of using programs and understanding formatting. I've worked with artists who do both, and most seem to do a combination of handrawn and digital. Which I think works well. Also many seem to choose whether to go hand drawn or lean on digital based on the needs to the project (digital will work better for certain things, but hand drawn will work better for others).

Also something to be said about black and white art is the beauty of the different shading techniques. I am no artist, but I used to imitate Fabian when I was in class, trying to smudge my pencil or pen drawings to get that shading effect he had in so many of his images. The shading alone was fascinating to look at.