Tag: Art of D&D

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Editorial

The Art of D&D (Part 3)

a-to-z-letters-aRole-playing games like D&D are the theater of the mind. The characters and events are only as real as the participants imagine them. For new players this can be overwhelming. After all, in a fantasy setting there are going to be a lot of things that your character should be familiar with but you, as an inexperienced player, have never heard of. This includes everything from exotic weapons to strange monsters. This is why the D&D books have always been rich with art.

The covers of most D&D books depict scenes where heroes battle monsters in some lavish and clearly fantastic setting. This draws you in and gets you to pick the book up (an important first step), but the interior art plays a very important role as well. It’s the interior art that’s going to fill in those blanks we’re talking about. In the original AD&D hard cover rule books the interior art did an amazing job of unlocking the imagination and guiding new players towards the world of Dungeons & Dragons.

Throughout April Dungeon’s Master is participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. The challenge is to write a new article ever day in April, excluding Sundays. That’s 26 articles over the course of the month. To make things even more interesting the title of each article will begin with a different letter of the alphabet. In today’s article we return to a popular subject and one we’ve written on before: The Art of D&D, our “A” topic to kick off the month.

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DM Resources

Only Ten – Ameron’s List

“If you could only keep ten of your printed RPG books, which would you pick?”

This is the question Brendan from the gaming blog Untimately asked on Monday. He then proceeded to share his ten. Many of his readers shared their list in the comments section of the original post and I’ve seen more than a few bloggers post their essential ten list around the blogosphere. Today it’s my turn to join in this show and tell exercise and share my list.

Yesterday I looked around my gaming room to try to narrow it down to just ten books. After giving it some consideration I finally narrowed it down to just ten (which was a lot harder than I thought it would be). I’ve actually cheated in a few instances and grouped a few books together as one entry, but the reasons will be apparent as you read through my list.

You’ll notice the absence of any PHB, DMG and MM from my list. This was a deliberate choice. In my opinion some iteration of these books should be on everyone’s list; after all they’re called core books for a reason. I approached this task with the assumption that the core books were a given and these were the next ten I’d choose after those.

Rather than struggle with ranking, I decided instead to list the books alphabetically. I want you to see my list as a collection. Theses all made my list and that’s all that should matter, not which one is more important or useful that the next.

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Editorial

The Art of D&D (Part 2)

Many artists have contributed to D&D over the years, but only the greatest left a lasting impression on the game and its fans. In The Art of D&D (Part 1)we looked at five of the greatest artists ever associated with D&D: Caldwell, Elmore, Easley, Fields and Parkinson. These five set the bar for style and quality in the art of D&D throughout the 1980s. As D&D expanded in the years and decades to come, new artists stepped in to fill the giant shoes left behind by these masters. Today we look at three of them.

One of the smartest decisions Wizards of the Coast (TSR at the time) ever did was to make the artwork of one artist exclusive to a particular campaign line. It was marketing genius. The art was so distinct and so good that you immediately knew, just by looking at the advertisement or book cover, which campaign setting it was for. There was a direct correlation between the popularity and success of these product lines with the brand recognition the artists created.

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Categories
Editorial

The Art of D&D (Part 1)

Do you recognize these names: Caldwell, Elmore, Easley, Fields, and Parkinson? If not, I’ll bet you’d recognize their work. These were arguably the most prolific and popular artists in D&D during the 1980s and 90s. Most of the D&D manuals, source books, adventures, novels and magazines of the 80s and early 90s featured the works of one of these five artists on their covers.

Each edition of D&D had a different type of art that was unique to that version of the game. Art of the original D&D consisted of a lot of line drawings. They were two dimensional and simple. With AD&D, the art was taken to a whole new level. It took on a realism that was, until then, uncharacteristic in role-playing games. Artists working to illustrate AD&D understood that just because dragons don’t really exist doesn’t mean they can’t be depicted as if they do.

This realistic approach was applied to more than the monsters. The heroes of various races and classes were shown battling these monsters of fantasy. You believed that this scene could really exist. The details were exquisite. The weapons and armor were authentic and accurate. With these works gracing the covers for D&D rule books, modules, magazines and novels it made you want to buy these books.

Continue reading “The Art of D&D (Part 1)”