Going up the D&D tree of life has made me curious about some of the other major systems. Call of Cthulhu isn't a lineage I've ever delved into deeply, but it's popular and pervasive enough that I definitely have a fixed image in my mind: Fedora-wearing investigators smoking heavily, aiming machine guns by gaslight at tentacles of some nameless horror framed just offscreen. That's what pop culture has fed me, but what did Chaosium opt for when they were publishing their very first adventure? In the Shadows of Yog-Sothoth we have an ambitious adventure against a world-encompassing threat. I know nothing about the details of the adventure itself, but given CoC is on its seventh edition...I think it did okay. Rather than our city stereotype, this cover takes place in a strange and alien land, greenish and misty. The adventure talks about Yog-Sothoth, but the city emerging out of the water? That's pure Call of Cthulhu (the short story). Although nothing depicted is strictly non-Euclidean, the architecture is strange, inhuman. It's certainly cyclopean in its scale, mountainous in the way even skyscrapers aren't. This looks like a location you're definitely going to have to make a few sanity checks to tackle. It actually took me a little while to notice the humans in this cover image. Reduced to the size of insignificant ants before the gaping maw of the structure's entryway, the slightly different colors they're wearing get washed out in comparison. Although there's no direct monster, there is something monstrous...the slightly phallic/slightly durpy stone octopus statue to the left. It's alien and weird at least, and completely indifferent to the rest of the scene. In fact in general I think the whole cover is about colossal indifference. Nothing in the strange, sickly landscape cares the slightest about the human party investigating it. The party is in danger, not because anything is particularly threatening them with malice, but because they're just exploring a place inimical to their lives entirely. It's a chilling effect, and has done more to make me want to play Call of Cthulhu than hundreds of mobsters shooting tentacles with Uzis. Well done.
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We’ve finally reached the present day, with Dungeons and Dragons’ Fifth Edition. A compromise between 4e, 3e, and the OSR, D&D 5e managed to displease the hardcore fans of every one of those editions...and so of course it is wildly successful with enormous numbers of consumers worldwide. Any criticism levied against the game edition itself or its extremely bland and generic art should acknowledge that the whole thing works as a commercial product beyond the wildest dreams of anything TTRPG that ever came before. That includes the D&D Starter Kit and it’s very generic little adventure Lost Mine of Phandelver. It’s inspired a lot of new people in some very standardized but still very fun directions, so I guess more power to it.
Stylistically, we're now fully into the corporate "brand image management" era. Smooth, slightly blurred, with all the colors muted and no doubt carefully workshopped in committee. The environment isn't a dungeon, but a crumbled ruin is certainly compatible with the D&D oeuvre and I'm giving full points for a most excellent dragon. Billowing robes and the sense of motion in the entire cover illustration certainly have us in the "action is happening" category, which I appreciate seeing. As with Pathfinder before there's no power disparity here between the heroes and the monster. The green dragon is titanic in scale, muscular and vast. It's breathing out a breath weapon, which unfortunately isn't traditional fire but rather poison gas, but at least it looks like something powerful enough to activate the magical protection of its opponents. Corporate carefully balanced the party composition with the most archetypal of parties; human male fighter, human female magician, elf female magician, dwarf fighter (presumably male because WotC isn't woke to female dwarf beards yet). A very enjoyable fight for a balanced party against a monster of appropriate Challenge Rating, fortunately the Bounded Accuracy math of the system will ensure everyone involved has a Corporately Approved Amount of Fun before the heroes succeed. With proper use of Inspiration, only two characters will go down to be revived later in the round. This cover art is perfect for 5e...it's competent, well-built, interesting, smooth, and very flat and generic. I can say it's not to my personal taste but it is objectively to the taste of the majority of customers. There are precisely the correct number of pants. As many of you know, when Wizards of the Coast made the jump to 4E, many if not most of the player base was frankly uninterested in swapping rules. Demand created itself new a supply, in the form of Paizo Publishing's Pathfinder. Beginning as just D&D 3.5 continued, it eventually grew (or metastasized) into it's own giant crunchy weird thing. Full disclosure, I love it, but I will be the first to admit it's a bit unwieldy for some people. Over time, as Pathfinder grew into something that was selling as well as D&D 4e, and Paizo realized if they wanted new people in they should probably try to be a touch more accessible. Thus, the Beginner Box, with simplified rules, handy punch-out miniatures, maps, dice, and a little starter adventure in Blackfang's Lair. That's what's depicted on the box cover.
First, let's give Paizo this. For all that it's been called Dungeons and Dragons, this here is the very first time that an actual DRAGON IS BEING DEPICTED. That's kind of shameful to D&D, considering this game is technically called Pathfinder and doesn't even have the creature in the name. Meanwhile, Paizo is here depicting a dragon in a dungeon, just as we'd hope to see. Great job, guys. The cover illustration setting is overall interesting, a crumbling castle or similar building lit by misty sunlight in the background. The architecture is a little wonky and stylized, the angles more to look cool than actually what I'd expect to see in a real building. The action is taking place in an extremely stylized arena, on the whole...the dragon's hoard of brownish crap looks crumbly, everything is sliding and falling. Videogame again, but this a much more active one. The general style is also spiky in contrast to the unnaturally smooth Keep on the Shadowfell pictures, everyone loaded with bits, bobs, and spikes for days. It makes for a dynamic, if ugly, picture. I don't think there's a power differential between the monster and the player characters depicted. The dragon looks beastial, active, and has some real weight to it, if not intelligence or calculation. Meanwhile, Elf Girl and Shepard Wizard are given equal standing to the dragon in both perspective depth and in power and menace. Damage is about to occur everywhere, but you get the distinct impression that nothing that happens in the next six seconds is going to be lethal for anyone involved here. The promise here is that you're about to have a cool rad fight on even footing in a nifty arena, something that seems pretty in keeping with the hardcore-but-crunchy reality that is Pathfinder. Mystery? Careful environmental exploration? Moral ambiguity? Nothing there. But you can "get gud" with building your awesome fight guys to fight the awesome monsters of your friend the GM, so there's at least something there. Accurate cover. Pants are back, baby. Getting closer to the present now. The team in charge of D&D has decided that there's too much crunch online, too many splatbooks, and too much independent publishing. To nip that in the bud, the wise designers at WotC have decided to release a new Game System License, locking up as much as they can with the shiny new edition's content behind ironclad controls. Inspiringly, the community all comes together and decides as one that they won't support this greedy corporate grab... ...oh wait, I'm getting an update. Apparently, nobody outside of a few publishing insiders really cares about the GSL, the real reason old fans are mad is that WotC took a really slick Diablo-like tactical fighting game and decided to slap the name Dungeons and Dragons on it. Huh, turns out it really is all about content. Even a slightly fuller version of Descent: Journeys in the Dark needs an adventure, though, so timed with the release of 4th Edition we have the edgily-named Keep on the Shadowfell as our intro adventure. The name is inspired by Keep on the Borderlands but Gygax's classic is hard to find here. At least it's trying to be an adventure still; in the next year places like Dungeon will stop even bothering and just publish slick battlemaps with neat tactical situations. For now, though, we have a high-gloss new cover to match a high-gloss new edition. It's certainly a new cover. My memory fades...was teal-and-orange a known meme back in the end of the aughts? We're still in muted palettes but it's now much more digital-looking and the orange of the fires and the teal of the spirit(?) magic really pops. I will say, for the first time since X1, we're finally once more grounded(ish) in a physical space, albeit a slightly noneuclidian one. There's an environment here that is stealing cues from Jackson's Return of the King leaving/entering Mordor. Boy, that was a great scene wasn't it? Sadly, this is just a reminder, everything looks menacing but very unreal. Like in 2nd Edition, we don't have player characters here, rather a villain. While Night Below looked like a movie poster, here in Shadowfell it feels like we're more in a video game cutscene. The guy front and center has some kind of magical power with his Ghost Dangle, looking very edgy and goth and all but his expression is more annoyed pique than real menace. All the skulls, but on his chest and on the faceless guards' shields, look soft, round, and kind of cute. It's the World of Warcraft aesthetic, without that game's refreshing bright colors. Or creative art direction. Or charm. Or personality. I suppose this is definitely a boss to battle, which is what 4th Edition is all about, so we have that accuracy to the cover's credit. Despite my comments, I don't actually hate tactical board games...this just doesn't look like what I think of for D&D. We've lost pants again. It's the year 2000. We've entered a bold new era for D&D. TSR is gone, now the brand is under the wise and compassionate stewardship of Wizards of the Coast, and there definitely won't be a CEO named Williams who ruins the brand by misunderstanding the customers ever again. A new team has made Dungeons and Dragons Third Edition, and timed with the release of the rules there's a brand new 1st-level adventure, The Sunless Citadel. And boy howdy do we have a tone shift in this cover illustration. It's a whole new world...
First, the palette and style. Muted "realistic" colors; this is teal and orange put through several grit filters. While not photorealistic, there's a real attempt to ground the art in realism, leading to some weird results like the halfling (?) being just an anatomically normal human. It's 2000 so grunge aesthetics are still popular, but there's a admirable restraint with spikes compared to the excess we know is soon coming. The lighting here is stark, we're still in a foggy space but with that tree there's at least a suggestion that the action is taking place in an actual location. And unlike Night Below, we're at least back into the action. The inversion of power from the earlier D&D eras is stark. Gone are the small adventurers, placed in the foreground against massive monsters. Instead, we have a swarm of tiny, spiky, literally faceless monsters, attacking in a mass wave but only threatening because there's a ton of them. The adventurers, meanwhile, are enormous when contrasted with the monsters, even the halfling. While these player characters are all obviously stressed by the swarm of spiky critters, none of them are taking any obvious injuries, a stark contrast to the 1e era where adventurers felt very fragile in the art. These adventurers are heroes, and very powerful:
With the new millennium, cover art have finally granted its protagonists pants. From 1989 and on into the 90s, something strange happened. Gary Gygax went to Hollywood and did a surprising amount of cocaine while laying the groundwork for the Marlon Wayons-Thora Birch epic Dungeons and Dragons Movie. Charts got themselves consolidated, turning into the clear and self-explanatory THAC0 number. And AD&D Second Edition came out in dribs and drabs, held aloft on the wings of Dragonlance and the clear understanding that Lorraine Williams has for her audience. Nothing could possibly go wrong. But how best to introduce players and DMs? Not the Book of Lairs bundled with the boxed set, that's no good. How about a nice new 1-10 adventure, taking characters from zero to hero? Enter Night Below: An Underdark Campaign. I know less about Night Below than I do many of the 1e modules, or later 3e adventures. It appears to be a fairly standard plot...first you have a menaced Ye Olde Medieval Village (The Evils of Haranshire), then you go underground (Perils of the Underdark), then you go even deeperer underground (The Sunless Sea). There's nothing intrinsically bad about this, but it's fairly generic...and that's borne out in the movie-poster-esque box set cover. First I suppose I should be complimentary...we're far beyond the bright and childish color palette and wonky perspectives that marked earlier modules' cover art. Not only is this illustration one with depth, but there's also a clear hierarchy in the monsters depicted. If I'm playing this thing, I expect to fight in order:
That's it, though. There are no protagonists depicted, unlike in earlier covers, no characters to inhabit. The monsters are also inhabiting a vague and cloudy neverspace, not part of a solid scene. There's no hope of treasure, no strange places to poke around, no protagonist actions suggested at all. There's an implication of progress, but it's just bigger and bigger bosses to battle, evil because they're lit up with menace. I don't think the problems with AD&D Second Edition were just due to the rules...all the vices are pictured right here. Still no pants depicted. We all knew this one was coming, right? X1: Isle of Dread. What has to be the most played lineage from the TSR era, B/X, started with this classic hexcrawl adventure with dinosaurs, zombies, sugar glider people, spiders, and weretigers. The adventure itself is a glorious romp in an exotic, strange island filled with color and that gets reflected in the adventure's cover art.
To start with, just as eXpert levels are all about leaving the dungeon, the illustration is also a startling shift. Long sight-lines showing multiple biomes, bright and vivid colors, enormous scale of action...this thing is a huge contrast with the covers we saw before. The care given to scale and depth is appreciated, although obviously its still a little crude. A lot going on though in this sun-drenched picture. Again we have the protagonist of the piece as the monster. I think it's supposed to be a T-Rex, but it's hands and stance make it just look like a huge lizardman. Big Green here looks a little goofy, but rippling to muscle, glaring with intent, and freakin' murdering a guy definitely have him as empowered and menacing. Critter has taken multiple spears in the back and is completely unphased. Strong secondary billing has to be given to the lovingly detailed coral snake, which I think is a normal-sized snake closer to the viewer but the wonky perspective kind of implies it's a man-sized snake as well. Scary, do not want to approach. The adventurers come off extremely unheroic. Now if I recall there's nothing stopping replacement party members from being from the local villages, but there's definitely the slightly unfortunate implication that Sailor Elf and Splayed Fighter Guy are the PCs, while the NPC allies or hirelings are the poor unarmored guys getting wrecked by the monster. It's pretty funny how the story is going, though...the NPCs are bravely fighting the terrible monster, posed in action and clearly scoring hits. Meanwhile the very armored PCs, with their access to metal armor and hair conditioner, are using the courage of their native friends make good their escape. I hope Splayed Fighter Guy steps on another snake. I think this cover is great for showing what B/X is all about. High adventure in varied and broad environments, powerful and terrifying monsters that should be run away from, and of course sacrificing the torchbearers to make good your escape. It's perfect. For the third time in a row, nobody pictured has pants. There's going to be a tricky section here with the next few "editions". After some debate, the module that makes the most sense as the "into" to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is C1: The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. It's obviously an odd duck, being a competitive tournament module, very different from the standard mode of play. The timing is right, though, and although the adventure is in some ways odd it is what TSR released to market these strange new "advanced" rules. I'm going to go with this as the representative cover illustration.
And what a cover it is. A psychedelic work of monochrome art, at first glance primitive but with surprising skill...I love the shadows being cast on the walls, the way that stream of fire is the central source of illumination for the whole piece. In immediate contrast to the monster-free In Search of the Unknown cover, here we have a monster front and center, engaged in violent conflict. And the monster...a weird bat-gargoyle thing that has no immediate mythological or pop culture antecedents, it's striking and strange and ugly. I'd say it's not particularly menacing-looking, but it's engaged in straight-up killing the hapless magic-user, with that aforementioned shadow adding some real weight to it. It's a great monster. The adventurers are interesting, here, because even though they're engaging in combat, there's nothing heroic about how they're portrayed. I'm assuming the Meso-American gentleman is actually a fighter for the party, but his stance is actually ambiguous, turned almost to smite the luckless magician with his glass sword. The heavily armored lady adventurer is also turned away from the monster, rearing back in dismay at her companion's immolation. The magic-user is at least doing some visible damage to the monster, although the contest is clearly one he's losing...the poor guy even gets a bland pageboy cut and an average build next to the Barbie and Ken proportions of his companions. Nobody on the player side is empowered by the art...they look like they should have run away, or figured out a better method of fighting that doesn't involve frontal assault. I love the disaster depicted here. What we can conclude from the Hidden Shrine cover is that while there are more weird, exotic, and strange threats here in this new AD&D, this still isn't a game about heroes conquering evil villains. The monster is weird and ugly, but it doesn't look like an existential evil threat to the world...in fact, it's clearly living where it's supposed to live, it's the adventurers who are trespassing on its home. We're still safe from any world-saving quests, it's just gotten a lot more dangerous and exciting, and you can still expect to be dying. As the hobby matured from the Chainmail-derivative little boxes, D&D eventually realized that the best way to teach the game to new groups not blessed to know somebody in Lake Geneva was through examples of play. The original DMG's examples were beautiful, but some people needed a little more...so in comes the published adventure module. And with the release of the Basic Edition, some bright star in the TSR marketing department realized that a companion adventure would fit the bill. Enter...In Search of the Unknown. I'm not going to review the adventure. It's been reviewed in various locations with exacting detail. But what I wanted to look at and compare were the cover art for various editions' starter adventures. My suspicion is that more than in the Player's Guide, more than in the DMG, more even than in the monster manuals, the given edition we'll look at can be properly summed up when looking at the cover art of the "first adventure". I'm not looking mainly at the reprint, let's look focus on the eye-searing yellow original, at the top. First off, I love the environment depicted both times. Fungal forests are wonderful; every decent-sized underworld needs one. Something about the weird, colorful mushroom caps just evokes the loamy scent of rot and decay, moist and soft. It's a low-magic way to thrust someone immediately into the Mystic Underworld, and you can tell the adventurers are unnerved, perhaps even a little grossed out. The adventuring party is remarkably tiny for old school D&D, just four dudes being dudes, eschewing pants like Uncle Gary intended. There's a tension and action in their poses despite the complete lack of monsters; it's the environment itself that holds the danger. Spear-Guy is poking a mushroom cautiously, well aware that it might explode into some terrible save-or-die trap. Torch-Dwarf and Awesome-Stache have just heard something worrying and are readying themselves to receive monsters hidden amongst the mushroom-trees, while Traditionalist Wizard looks on with vague caution (he is out of spells for the day). It tells a story. In Search of the Unknown has a cover that tells you that you're going to be delving underground in weird and dangerous DUNGEONS. There's clearly the possibility of monsters and fighting, but the environment itself seems to be the primary menace depicted on the cover. Traps and hazards are the focus of the cover illustration, not combat. There's nothing heroic in this cover...the adventurers look tough and scrappy but without a hint of nobility or chivalric tradition. I think it's a great cover for the basic edition. |
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