Day 4 of #RPGaDay2024 is the classic "RPG with Great Art"
A quick aside, as a wargamer, the last few weeks have been a full immersions into nostalgia.
Seeing a collection of 1/144th scale bi-planes snapped me back to my childhood room, staring up at the Sopwith Camel and Red Baron dueling each other, held by strings pinned to the ceiling.
A number of beautiful 54mm (toy solider) sized wargames at Historicon sent me back to lining up my newly purchased Britains on the wooden steps of my Aunt and Uncles old farmhouse in Vermont.
Heck, I'm now old enough that a conclave of men hiding in the corner at Historicon revealed a crazy Battletech games, and a flood of emotions from my late teens
For my early teens, I just need to look over at my RPG shelf look at this cover:
... and I'm instantly transported to far back of the Waldenbooks in the Palmer Park Mall, where all the role-playing books were. Sharing the same shelf as T1-4: Temple of Elemental Evil and A1-4 Scourge of the Slavelords, this lone pointy-eared (but not an elf!) tattooed warrior with a big-ass sword told me that this was something different than D&D.
The ad campaign in Dragon magazine surely helped promote that.
P.D. Breeding-Black's artwork dominates the early editions, and sets the tone for the game, but I was surprised to see Richard Thomas and Ron Spencer also in the credits for interior art. Thomas and Spencer are famous for doing the art on Magic: The Gathering cards (Thomas is famous for Black Vise, in hind sight, most of
Spencer's Magic art looks like it could come from a page in Talislanta.
Up until the comprehensive 4th Edition, the artwork for the game always left he GM and players to interpret the world based on the limited information.
And of course, we never knew what the hell a Black Savant actually was.... no matter what the the post-WotC Tal tells us.
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