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Message: <blockquote data-quote="earthsea_wizard" data-source="post: 9750520" data-attributes="member: 7049259">Thanks, I will look at it! I am afraid I won't like the art, I was already very luke-warm on half the art in the 3.5 books. Really love the sketched concept art linked in my OP, though! I just had a look at the new book coming out and can't say I enjoy the changing aesthetic. They seem to be doubling down on the 1920s thing when before that came through more in the lore than the aesthetic, and even then only in certain areas (Sharn, mainly).As mentioned in my OP, I also grew up playing the Final Fantasy games and just about every other JRPG that was released in the states, starting on SNES and then moving to Playstation in 1995. But I was simultaneously reading Tolkien and Dragonlance and playing Magic: the Gathering (which back then had a far more tarditional fantasy aesthetic). When D&D hit for me it connected to that half of the equation for me. And from there I really dove in to D&D history and art and so forth and it stuck. Even with the JRPG stuff, despite loving the later Final Fantasy games, Xenogears and similar, I was always pleased when a game was more fully medieval (FF1-5, Tactics and 9, Dragon Quest, Lunar, Breath of Fire and so forth). However, I am coming back around now and can see how the Chrono Trigger aesthetic, for example, is pretty great when applied to D&D (and Eberron, as they even have dinosaurs in CT!). It helps that I have always thought that the early FF and DQ games are the most old school expression of D&D outside of tabletop games. Interesting that the OSR never jumped on this with essays on their blogs. Perhaps relating D&D to a video game in any way is too unpure (much like Eberron) for that scene though <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Of course, the earliest of those games were straight knockoffs. I have a Yoshitaka Amanao monster art book from the late 80s titled the monstrous manual that is all of his monster drawings for Final Fantasy I, all of which can also be found in the AD&D monster manual. The spells, items, armor etc in the early games are of course also pulled straight from AD&D, often without a name change, and the combat system is an extrapolation of how AD&D combat worked. Then of course there is the random encounters, experience and leveling system, hit points and so forth. It's all there from 1987 onward.</blockquote>

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