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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Artamo" data-source="post: 9835742" data-attributes="member: 7046798">First off, I just want to get this out of the way: I miss the days of Tomb of Horror and Barrier Peaks style illustration books and wish more games used them as tools.Moving right along…Artwork has always been a big factor for me in my overall enjoyment of the game, dating back to the early drawings of Emerikol the Chaotic riding out of town blasting magic along the way, to the Larry Elmore fighter lunging at the red dragon Basic Cover, to the unique belts, buckles and spikes style of 3e artwork. They’re engrained in my memory now; an important sticking point for anyone’s TTRPG product. Sure, I can read cold text and rules but it’s certainly not going to capture my imagination.It’s not strictly limited to the rulebooks either. I played Gradient Descent for Mothership and our GM showed us the amazing map that came with the game. Simplistic in design, the feel was a 1970s computer system diagram that was clearly an artistic choice rather than a functional one at times, but incredibly evocative of the adventure we were getting killed in…I mean, playing. <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="😁" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f601.png" title="Beaming face with smiling eyes    :grin:" data-shortname=":grin:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />Art denotes a finished TTRPG product in my opinion, and not a manuscript or first draft. I wouldn’t read a screenplay when expecting a movie. I wouldn’t listen strictly to its soundtrack either. You can enjoy those things individually but they’re vital to the greater whole. The artwork doesn’t even need to be professionally done. There’s a certain fun that comes from the more basic, amateurish art that was often seen in early books like the 1e books or Arduin Grimoire that made it seem, at least to me, like this was another kid at the time creating something cool and showing their friends. I’d miss it incredibly if the artwork became second fiddle or non-existent compared to the actual writing in TTRPGs.Edit: I realize this feels like an old man’s post given the constant references to 1e and OSR, but I also recently picked up the new 2024 PHB and I’m blown away by the full page artwork in this book, and the way they use those big, glorious artwork to section the book and break up the text. The dwarf fighter they have as the front piece for the Fighter class is just chef’s kiss</blockquote>

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