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Sunday, August 4, 2024

RPG a Day Catch Up: RPG with great art

This is an interesting question because of the purpose of the art in an RPG - it's supposed to help design the world, set the stage, evoke the setting, and bring you into play. And I'm not sure a lot of them do that. 

I'm gonna make a couple of off beat suggestions, but remember, again, old. 

V&V 2E: I've commented on the art for this before, and but the advantage of having one of the game designers also being a top not RPG artist of the time, and having them be the sole artist on the book, gave everything a unified feel. All of the characters shown are well designed, some are downright iconic (Darkstorm and Gauntlet just look GREAT and could easily have been heroes of their own 1970s-80's comics). The back cover art with the author talking to the players about game play is just so full of energy. 

So Much Fun!
Next up, AD&D 1E. OSR people have spent enormous amounts of ink and treasure talking about the glories of the early game art in its ragged, shaggy state, but there's something to be said for the art in the Players Handbook but more importantly the DMG. Why the latter? Because it moves from some deeply evocative pieces of fantasy to pulp sword and sorcery to JOKES ABOUT PEOPLE PLAYING THE GAME AND THEIR STUPID IDEAS. That's just huge. No where else are you going to see the fighter and magic user wearing mickey mouse ears and paper rat noses trying to sneak into the lair of the rat god. Or the troll rolling up the adventurer's labyrinth-defeating string. It shows you EXACTLY what sort of shenanigans you can expect your players to get up to. 

Last one - Vampire: the Masquerade 2E. Man was that stuff mood setting. Just wonderful work. 

1 comment:

  1. For 1EAD&D it could be the shenanigans the DM could be getting up to. although maybe not as adversarial as some of Gary's Writing.

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