Ron Cobb: Implied Storytelling in Concept Art

Ron Cobb is a name to conjure with in the art world, and his work as the  concept artist for the ‘82 Conan the Barbarian movie is well known to me.  At least, I thought it was! 

I came across the official Ron Cobb website and was blown away by the work he did on this movie.  There’s this chonkiness full of soft curves, hints of brutalism in the bones of it all, but softened by earthy silhouettes.  An almost welcoming chthonian quality.  

But what’s even cooler, to my mind, is the implications of a lost age, a more advanced before-time that’s best seen in the castle of King Osric.

I love the mix of heavy timber and almost delicate stone.  It gives the piece a lot of visual interest, but more than that, there’s this implication that the folks who built the timber part couldn’t do the stone part.  And that’s emphasized by this illustration of Zamora’s Gate, not used in the movie.

Or maybe this is just the implication that Osric is an usurper, that he conquered Zamora and hasn’t done a great job of putting it back together again?  Or both?  In any case, lovely work, and effective storytelling that makes the world of the movie feel grounded in a past through implication rather than exposition.  

Myths of the Rakshasa

So this is apparently a thing. 

First, no, Gygax wasn't the one who said rakshasa's had backwards hands. There's no mention of backwards hands in the 1e Monster Manual entry for the rakshasa. And a bit of experimentation with your own hands will reveal that Trampier's amazing art doesn't have backwards hands either. 

So where did that come from? The first reference I've been able to find to the rakshasa having backwards hands is from DRAGON magazine #84, from April 1984 (the not-foolin' issue that included the last Phil & Dixie comic until years later). Opening an article about rakshasa is a full-page illustration by Jim Holloway:

This illustration is accompanied by the following text: The rakshasa pictured above... resembles the creature described in Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend. This version of the rakshasa has a big belly, fingers that curve away from the palms of its hands, and claws that are said to be poisonous.

Funk and Wagnalls appears to have been a exactly what it says on the tin, and I can totally see such a book floating around the old offices of TSR.  Near as I can tell, this is the origin of the backwards fingers of the rakshasa in D&D.  The 2e Monstrous Compendium solidified the backwards hands thing and the feline thing (rather than the orangutan-looking thing created by Holloway).  I suspect that's due in large part to just how cool the Trampier art from the original Monster Manual was.

Daniel Horne Looking to Return to Fantasy Art

And he's started a gofundme towards that end:

Although I feel that my skills as a classically trained and apprenticed Brandywine School artist are sharper than they have ever been, I've found that there is little engagement among art directors to work with me and thus the ability to inspire fantasy enthusiasts has become nearly impossible. It is my hope that with the support of the fans of fantasy art that I've built up over the past four decades, I can have the opportunity to paint a piece, or even pieces, of art that might reopen doors to various publishing houses. But as I live paycheck to paycheck, like most artists, having the time and piece of mind to take on an inspirational cover isn't something I'm allowed.

This isn't a Patreon or anything like that, nor is it kickstarter with a specific product at the far end; it does appear, however, to be an excellent opportunity to say "Thank you!" to a great of the you-are-there school of fantasy art and hopefully get him back in that game.

Visual Summary of Hesep

This looks like a fun idea. So here we go...

From my current weekly campaign, I'm picking the city-state of Hesep. It's location, where a major river meets the ocean, makes it analogous to New Orleans in the US and Rotterdam in western Europe. Further adding to its cachet as a trading city are permanently open portals to the Elemental Planes of Earth, Water, and Air. It did not exist before the Wizards' War, but sits on a spit of the Dry Land, terrain raised from the ocean floor during the Siege of Port Entldon. It is currently ruled by a council of nine archons; six are shaitan (aka dao), two are marids (one of whom lives in an undersea palace guarding the gate to Water) and one djinni (who lives in a floating citadel above the city guarding the portal to Air). It's a massive place, home to nearly a million living beings. So let's start with the pictures!

PEOPLE

The majority of the citizens are humans, but they wield little political or economic power in the city. While skilled craftsmen and merchants can do quite well for themselves, they are shut out of any direct political power by the genie folk.

MEN

WOMEN

CHILDREN

SOCIETY

FARMER
Most farmers are slaves working on massive genie-owned plantations and truck farms.

WARRIOR
Most of the city's soldiers and guards (which also operate as a police force) are mamluks, slave-soldiers, most of whom are hobgoblins.

SAGE

PRIEST of Abzu

PRIESTESS of Tiamat

PRIESTESS of Ahmayru

MERCHANT

NOBLE
Proper shaitan ladies, of course, never appear in public unveiled.

I'm going to stop here for now because I've already spent too much time on this. More later!

Two Years of A5t!

So 5e’s been out for a few years now, two this January to be exact (counting the DMG), and it’s finally been graced with its own general-purpose rules addition in Volo’s Guide to Monsters. (I’m not counting Sword Coast because it’s very setting-specific and, frankly, appears to go largely overlooked, at least in my neck of the woods.) Now seems to be a good time to look back at the evolution of the art of 5e’s hardbacks.

The first thing that’s obviously different is the utter disappearance of the Robert-Howard-esque, checklist multi-culturalism that was everywhere in the PHB and largely gone by the DMG. It’s still gone. Instead, D&D art direction appears to have fully embraced the post LotR-movies “generic gamest fantasy” trappings you see just about everywhere these days. We’re a far cry from the Dungeonpunk look of 3e; weapons are armor look serviceable and realistic (except for dwarven armor which apparently revolves around sculptural paldron ornaments). The clothing and gear looks worn, sometimes even stained or tattered around hems. The further you get from the PHB, the more careworn the look and feel is. Also, the more practical it looks, with pockets, pouches, straps and hanging gear, without going full Wayne-Reynolds-kitchen-sink, and certainly not like the pants-made-of-belts Dungeonpunk of 3e.

Still, we’re not seeing a resurgence of ‘80’s you-are-there, either. What we’ve got now is a very digital look with a soft focus and lots of color effects, clearly inspired by Frazetta but with the heroics tamed down. The proportions are strictly human, the heroics more Aragron-with-his-feet-planted-on-the-earth than Legolas-leaping-through-the-air. It’s kinda reminiscent of the reskinned 2e with Jane and Bob from accounting, but instead of a near-photorealistic painting of them in their late-‘90’s renfest garb, the wardrobe’s up to Weta Workshop standards now.

Nor are we seeing the WoW-inspired, ultra-cool of 4e. The palette is muted, almost muddied to the point of ‘90’s-era computer games like Morrowind or Quake. There’s lots of browns, umbers, and sienna with very little crimson or royal blue. When we get bold, brilliant colors, they’re atmospheric effects like lava, or a magical effect inspired by a monster, and almost never on a PC.

In short, the WotC focus has moved from who you are and what you’re doing and into concept-art style moods. The wall-of-action is gone; in its place are almost contemplative scenes that promise that action is imminent, but not happening just right now. Unfortunately, the moods tend to be things that art conveys very clearly, but can be more of a challenge in an RPG. The eminent attack of this giant is neat, but PCs rarely wait around for the monster to strike, not when there are buffs to cast, weapons to poison, and plans to make.

The other very common piece of art is the head-shot and full-body portrait, very reminiscent of stuff we’ve seen Paizo do for their adventures. Unfortunately, while this sort of thing ought to be extremely useful to DMs running adventures, my own experience with the art has been very hit-and-miss. It’s pretty rare that I see one of these pics and get a good sense of personality. These portraits rarely tell me anything useful about the people they represent. The most interesting thing about the headshot of Out of the Abyss’ Sarith are the bright orange spots that blatantly give away the most interesting thing about him.

The end result is art that feels like it’s attempting to justify its inclusion through utility, attempting to be informative and inspiring, but stumbling due to the traditional limits and expectations of RPG art. NPC portraits should come on sheets that can be handed to the players, with ample space for the players to jot notes on. Mood pieces should accompany tools and tips for DMs to create and maintain that mood to useful effect at the table.

On the one hand, I appreciate this respect for the consumer. The art’s not there just to be pretty, it’s not there just because there needs to be art, the art is actively trying to make my game better. On the other hand, I think WotC needs to be even more experimental, or, at the very least, pay attention to the experiments of others. Why are the end papers in their books still blank? Why don’t their full-color illustrations have the vibrancy and life and character of their sketchy line-art? Where are the visual puzzles? Where are the hand-outs of items and locations that contain visual clues for the players to pick up on?

All-in-all, I’m finding 5e’s art to be ok. Not great, but not off-putting either. It’s just kinda there. I don’t mean to be damning with faint praise, but yeah, it doesn’t really inspire or excite me. I won’t be rushing out to purchase poster-sized versions of any of it. On the other hand, I don’t feel like I’m having to fight against it, either, which is a step in the right direction for me.

Brandon Liao

Just added a new artist to my art links on the right: Brandon Liao.

His work has a very Numenera-ish feel to me, a sort of '70s-80s-era Saturday-Morning-Cartoons-grown-up feel I find pleasantly inspiring.

You can also see his stuff over at Deviant Art under madspartan013.

More A5t Via boingboing

Via boingboing, more 5e art, in this case specifically from the Player's Handbook.  Scrolling past the article, we find a red dragon facing off against some heroes by Daren Bader.

My first reaction: the Hildebrandts called and want their color palette back. 

It's ok.  There are bits of it I like, bits of it that kinda remind me of Otis, and the colors and shades and composition and little details all have a pleasantly fairy-tale feel to them.  But it doesn't grip me or get me excited about playing.

I like Tenery's wood elf city much more, in spite of it clearly owing a lot to Peter Jackson's movies and medieval Russian architecture.  Also, the clearly cut-and-pasted elements in it.  In spite of all of that, it has great mood and character.  Looking at this, I can tel you things about the people who live here.  As a player, I'm intrigued and want to explore.  As a DM, I'm inspired and eager to portray the inhabitants of this city to my players.  In short, it does (for me, anyway) exactly what I want art in an RPG to do.  This is especially so when you look at the bigger version at the top of the article. 

WAR's Mordenkainen's Sword is amazing.  I want to play this character and cast this spell against a foe who's been my nemesis for the past three adventures in a final spell-to-spell showdown.  He oozes cool.  He's clearly a bad-ass high-fantasy version of Dr. Strange, Harry Potter grown up and in another universe, an ass-kicker and name-taker supreme.  This piece grips me exactly in the same way that Trampier's  Emirikol the Chaotic did.  If this character doesn't wind up on a lot of character sheets or in campaigns (alas, most likely as a DM PC), I'll eat my hat.  This is Reynolds doing what Reynolds does best.

Then we have Claudio Pozas' Cloudkill.  It kinda looks like a MtG illustration, more so than even Reynold's Mordenkainen's Sword.  I think that's because in Reynold's piece, it's clearly the spell-slinger that's the focus of attention.  Here, it's the cloud. 

I like the details, especially the dwarves that strike me as vaguely Babylonian.  I think a bit too much punch was pulled on what is, in effect, a summoning of mustard gas.  But maybe I've been spoiled by Raggi's art.

I think I'll come to appreciate Scott M. Fischer's High Elf Wizard the more I look at it, but right now I appreciate the pleasant colors and shapes, but as a composition it just doesn't gel for me.  And is it just me, or does she look like she's just tripped and is about to impale herself on the spikey end-caps of her scroll?

As for the warlock page, it looks good: easy to read, easy to find information, pleasing to the eye and complex without feeling cluttered.  I'd have used a bit more sans serif, but they probably get better effect using color.

I've already said I think all there is to say for now about the cover.

All-in-all, I'm pleased.  I think too much emphasis is put on having a unified look in RPGs.  Sure, with some RPGs that have a very strong theme and setting, that can be important.  In a more generic RPG, like D&D, variety is called for.  There's stuff here that leave me feeling very meh about it, but there's also stuff that gets me excited to play.  And I'll bet you there are folks out there who feel exactly the opposite of how I do on the same pieces.  Variety means, sure, some of your pieces won't click with some viewers, but gives you a much better shot at having something that will click with everyone. 

Cover A5t Update

So this weekend I was at Comicpalooza. So was David Petersen and I was lucky enough to see him give an artist a very in-depth and detailed review of her portfolio. Among the things he mentioned was the dangers of making an image bigger. If you've ever taken a computer graphic that looked great on the screen and tried to blow it up to be a massive poster on your wall, you know the troubles he was speaking of: sharp lines become blurred (or even pixelated), details grow fuzzy, definition is destroyed.

I'm wondering how much of this we're seeing in the 5e covers? Apparently, this is the full picture Tyler Jacobson created for the PHB:

I gotta admit, as an image, I like this (even if it does look like the giant's been cut off at the knees). It's got action and scenery and reveals a lot of imagination. I love the hellhounds chained beside the throne and the dragon wing hanging from the giant's fancy hat.

I still don't like the crop they made for the cover, though. And blowing up the image like that didn't do anyone any favors.

Someone (Stuart Robertson? I can't find who now.) commented about the bad crop jobs done on these covers, how they're too close, cutting out interesting details and reducing important figures to illogical bits. Seeing the full version of the PHB, I can only agree.

I'm still not a fan of the art for the DMG. It's neat, but really doesn't knock my socks off. Apparently, the liche is raising the recently deceased to join it's legions of undead. Neat idea, but I think I'm just not on the same page as the artist when it comes to motivating DMs:

The lich is extremely powerful and we wanted the DMs out there to get excited about wielding that power. From my angle, I wanted the lich to be looming over the viewer and seem unstoppable as he raised the corpses around him. Heroes that just fell in an attempt to destroy him are now working for him. Very demoralizing.

Cover A5t

Oh.

Um.

Oh dear?

Ok, it's not that bad. But it does like rather generic. I mean, these look like, hey, look, another fantasy RPG. Nothing exciting here.

Granted, part of that is how front-and-center the art is, with the titles very minimized. They're almost not there. I want to click or swipe to make them woosh off the screen. That's not a bad thing.

It would be a better thing if the art was knock-my-socks off.

Anyone have any idea who made these? I'm about to horribly insult them, whoever they are.

First off, the good: they all clearly belong to the same product line. No confusion there. I'm not entirely certain they are all the work of the same person (the lighting and textures for the MM and DMG are very different, and there's a subtly muted, almost simplified feel to the colors and textures of the starter set). If that's the case, the art direction is all the more impressive for it.

The cover for Hoard of the Dragon Queen is fun: shiny dragon, cool (ha-ha) attack, neat use of color to highlight the action. My favorite of the bunch.

But I'm seeing nothing here I'd want to put on my wall, and absolutely nothing that makes these leap off the shelves.

The MM has the most painterly look to it. It reminds me a bit of WAR's work, but with much less character. In fact, it almost looks like it was fashioned from cut-and-pasted elements. Haven't we seen that exact pose of a beholder before? Is that a dwarf from an interior 4e illustration? What's up with the screaming, turbaned person of indeterminate gender? Are they in the same picture? Do they know there's a beholder behind them? And why is that statue spitting lightning bolts? Or is it getting hit in the face with lightining bolts? And why is there a staircase to nowhere in the background? Seriously, it's a jumble of elements which aren't really interacting with each other.

The rest have this odd, overly sharp 3d feel to them, as if they started as poser art and then were hit with oil-painting filters in Photoshop. The teeth of the green dragon, the hands of the giant, all have this oddly sharp feel to them even though, as you look closely, you can see the brush strokes and other artifacts of painted work. It's very odd.

And the DMG, I'm sorry to say, has the look of poser art from a distance: the electric glow that washes out all other colors, the plastic-looking skin, the shadows. A second, closer look reveals the painterly techniques, but...

And what, exactly, is going on in this picture? Is he animating a corpse? Killing a dude? And is it just me, or does the liche's amulet (clearly a shout-out to the Green Devil-face) look like it was added in later?

One thing that does jump out is the central place of the monsters. The heroes barely fit in the frame, clearly playing second-fiddle to the monsters, each of which commands center stage. I'm curious to see how far we've moved away from the character-centered art of late 3.x and nearly all of 4.x. In none of these pics do I recognize a hero who's doing something really cool. Maybe the Viking sorceress on the cover the PHB, but it's hard to make out any details on her. Dress her in something other than her furs and I'm not sure I'd recognize her. Ditto for the elven-warrior-of-indeterminate-gender who's with her  All-in-all, the giant on the PHB, with his awesome white-dragon-pelt hat is the coolest character in the bunch.

(So is the difficulty of assigning gender to the figures part of WotC's way of foiling the folks who count and comment on that sort of thing? Or an artifact of conscious effort to make the heroes cyphers upon which the viewer can project their preferences, rather like the art in the old Choose Your Own Adventure Books?)

The covers for 3e were daring, unique, and put you in the world of D&D; you, the player, were holding artifact tomes from magical realms of lore and adventure. The 4e covers were clearly attempting to ride the zeitgeist with their comic-esque, uber-cool figures.

These 5e covers do not look like the flagship products of an industry or a hobby. These look plain, almost timid. They look like the work of, well, hobbyists throwing things together in their spare time, with only a modicum of design knowledge gleaned from Google-found top-five lists. Seriously, how are these very meh covers supposed to share shelf space with the likes of these:

 It's official: so far as production values go, WotC is getting their behind handed to them by a guy in Finland working out of his living room (NSFW!).

Addendum: I haven't been as clear as I should be when I describe the art as "generic."  What I mean is, this doesn't look special or noteworthy or of greater renown or quality.  That's what I mean by "generic" here.  Not so much that this is a game based on standard tropes of fantasy gaming, but rather that these are nothing to get excited about. These do not look like the flagship products of fantasy RPGing. They look like just more in a sea of interchangeable products. Nothing here says, "This is D-and-motherfucking-D, the 500 lbs gorilla of RPGs, the game that started it all, the standard by which all others should be judged." Walking into my local gaming stores with no real knowledge of the hobby, I'd be just as likely to pick up Dragon Age or DCCC as these, just based on the covers, and far more likely to grab Pathfinder, ACKS, or RuneQuest (all of which I can find at local gaming shops in town).

Addendum the Second:  via Walser's Raging Owlbear, a mock up by Stuart Robertson that is, if nothing else, a lot more fun than the ones WotC chose to go with.  I'm not entirely sure I prefer the heavier trade dress he uses to the minimalist choices of WotC, but I can see why folks both prefer and expect that sort of thing.  And, as Robertson points out, WotC already has access to (and has been using to promote 5e) art that is more fun and more powerful than the choices they decided to go with.