Sometimes a picture tells a thousand words. Let us, then, tell many thousands of words with the following images, from what I think of as the holy triumvirate of artworks depicting a conceptual World of TSRan (see posts here, here and here). This triumvirate consists of Larry Elmore, Keith Parkinson, and John Howe - the latter of whom never to my knowledge having illustrated anything for D&D, but whose Tolkien pieces were roughly contemporaneous, and certainly just as influential on the formation of my imaginative contours in my early teenage years (as always, click to enlarge):
In the end, if I can add just a few words, I think what makes these pieces so important in building the necessary mood is the combination of three key elements: first, a sense of vastness of scale; second sufficient hyperrealism to allow the viewer to imagine entering the world depicted; and third, a sense of the transcendent or sublime. These are in short romantic images, and it is perhaps helpful to think of the World of TSRan as imbued with romanticism.
What can also perhaps be observed is that many, if not all, of these pieces are also curiously intimate despite the size and grandeur of the backdrop. The best example of this I think may be the image of Sturm and Flint travelling through the snowy mountains; these are real people, and you can imagine yourself there with them. There is a kind of genius in this.
You know, looking back at it I can't help but be struck above all by how much more competent Parkinson was than his TSR-4 colleagues. There's something cartoonish in even the most realistic of Elmore's figures, for example; Parkinson is idealized for sure, but crisp, clean, pure, just immensely capable. I don't think I've ever seen a picture of his I didn't like. In justice he should be considered one of the great Romantics, or an academic in the vein of Bougereau perhaps.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I agree, although sometimes his action scenes can look a little bit inert.
DeleteI don't mind a bit of cheesecake in my fantasy art, but what on earth is going on with the outfit in the second to last picture? A fur thong with matching boots, scraps of chainmail that I'd hesitate to even call a bra, plus headband, the perfect outfit for what looks like an autumnal sunset. Thank the gods she at least remembered her bracers, presumably of cold resistance.
ReplyDeleteThe fur boots are keeping her warm, clearly!
DeleteWhat springs to mind for me is how much I wish I had an overland travel system that was conducive to evoking this mood in play. It's my experience that the hex crawl with its neatly tessellating geometry and incremental procedure, while entirely proper for e.g. combing through a small island to find everything of interest, is in direct opposition to that Great Journey that I've always wanted my paper men to go on.
ReplyDeleteTotally. I wonder how much 'system' can resolve this problem as opposed to just getting really, really good at describing scenery? I certainly haven't cracked it.
DeleteThis is an excellent point and not one I've considered much. It feels so obvious once pointed out, but it's not something I've ever really stopped to think about . There is a certain heart-soaring feeling of travel that one gets in the best of the RPG-inspirational fiction (like Tolkien or Robert Howard's Conan stuff), and when one crosses the high, green hillsides of the Cotswolds, or drives through the red canyons of the southwestern US at sunset, or on takeoff when in a plane, or when one looks up at the sky in a place where it is not yet covered with telephone wires and electrical cables and one realizes how BIG it is.... It would be absolutely amazing to capture that in some way within the context of RPGs.
DeleteIn terms of how much "system" can help - it's not the be all end all, but there is a post on the Was it Likely blog called "Laws of the Land: meaningful terrain via in-fiction limits and conditions" that I think might form a solid systemic platform on which to develop.
I feel as though this is something I might spend some time pursuing now. If I make any strides I'll be sure to report back!
I think this is just one of those things games, as a format, are bad at. A good picture can convey the grand and soaring sense of scale of standing on a mountainside and looking out over a vista of peaks and ravines; a game mechanic that can do the same probably just doesn't exist. To be honest, I think you'd be better off indulging your yearning for this sensation by just hiking; long hikes with camping and good scenery. I say this entirely without malice; I myself used to be obsessed with making new D&D combat systems that were more realistic or more tactical/"gamey", or both, until I took up historical fencing. Then I realized that was a much better outlet for both those impulses, and realizing how impossible it was to put the vital experiences of even a one-on-one fight into game terms reconciled me to the abstraction of D&D combat. Now I feel like I have the relevant knowledge to adjudicate the abstractions better in play, too. My guess is a few years' experience of clambering up a slope beneath a rucksack, getting dehydrated, cursing the weight of your tent etc. will similarly both satisfy the itch better, and enrich your understanding of these situations in the game.
DeleteI know your comment is well intentioned but I do a lot of hiking! This is partly why I would like to find a way to better capture the sensation in games. But I also want to stress it's not just about modelling overland travel better. It's about capturing the mood of that particular era of D&D products.
DeleteYou must to prep keys for Wilderness encounters with evocative description on landscape or be good evoking the proper words on the fly.
DeleteSome of the most evocative experiences of travel I've had as a player, where the confinement of going through linear tunnels suddenly opens up and affords a wider perspective of unfettered travels across a sunless sea. The TSR landscapes give that feeling of creating a hill and seeing all the places you could go from here. I think the problem with hex travel is that wherever you go it feels like you never have more than six places to go next.
DeleteYour description reminds me of similar experiences I've had playing Elden Ring. There are many lovingly designed chokepoints that you need to go through that then expand onto beautiful, outlandish vistas with obvious points of interest, not immediately accessible, but accessible eventually, after braving the ambiguous terrain in between.
DeleteMaybe something like that can be translated into pen & paper in some way? Instead of just having the next six hexes to go to, maybe design the hexmap with more consideration to elevation / line of sight / observability relationships: climb this hill, and you suddenly see a shining tower 5 hexes thataway, and a monumental ruined temple 6 hexes in another direction.
So you're not just systematically filling out a blank map, you're working towards glimpsed objectives in the distance through the mysteries in between.
Yeah - some thought as to how far it is actually possible to see, in real life, is helpful here. On top of a decent hill overlooking flat terrain you can see for bloody miles.
DeleteSome of these feelings of awe are reproduced when you get to a high or open space in travel and you can add more hexes to your map. Of course, it's not just the mechanics of adding the hexes; the GM must do their part with fully-featured atmospherics incorporating weather, seasons, vegetation, and great looming things in the vista.
DeleteDefinitely - the interesting question is whether that can be systematised.
DeleteIt's amazing to me how most of these exemplify the rule of thirds. I didn't even know about this rule until recently, when I watched a Youtube video on capturing good pictures.
ReplyDeleteThe Heretic
Yes, interesting. I always wonder about these things - do great artists do that deliberately, or is it just that they instinctively compose a piece in such a way as to unconsciously achieve that outcome?
DeleteSo something like this? https://images.app.goo.gl/s2k1HaKCqYqJ9S1e6
ReplyDeleteYes - is that AI art or the real deal?
DeleteThe real deal, I first came across it years and years ago before AI art became a thing.
DeleteI can't seem to figure out who the original artist but it seems to have been circulating around the internet since at least 2013: https://tineye.com/search/befb2fb3fe0dc669c3b5c009ee4f9248e2726716?sort=score&order=desc&page=1
Interesting, if I were to attempt to describe the vibe of those pictures I'd say the characters contain the 'cosy' elements of The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings where they feel like real people with handmedown things and equipment that's been long used and cared for, but in archetypal forms. So not your beautiful knights in shining armour but neither your grungy mudcore ne'er-do-well pheasant scum. Kind of just ordinary people trying to embody those roles, even if they're a bit unprepared and weren't born into it. I guess your common definition of 'Adventurer'.
ReplyDeleteThis coupled with a transcendentalism of the landscape. Kind of reminds me of the Group of Seven's stuff where they paint light really well and the landscape is abstracted a bit to the point where nature itself is painted as something holy or transcendent in the same way you'd almost paint icons or a church. Or how a saint would have an intense religious vision of the landscape in the same way they'd have an intense religious vision of Jesus or something.
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/group-of-seven
https://www.gallery.ca/sites/default/files/styles/ngc_crop_16x9_1600px/public/snow_clouds_carmichael.jpg?itok=sEJoonTe×tamp=1624477729
https://ago.ca/sites/default/files/styles/image_large/public/2020-03/AGO.29391.jpg?itok=on0NplHo
https://vacay.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/gerry-lantaigne-group-of-seven-mural-huntsville-scaled.jpg
https://niackery.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/125_thompson-rapids-magnetawan-river_pierre-aj-sabourin.jpg
I agree with some other posters in that hexcrawls do a very, very poor job of capturing the feeling you get while in the wilderness, that feeling of expanse, of awe, of discovery. I think it's because you never really see the actual map that well in hexcrawls and then end up kind of treating each hex like a room in a dungeon.
I think what Dolmenwood has done where you have 1) a player facing detailed illustrated fun map with no hexes that really sparks the imagination and gives a sense of place 2) a player facing empty hex map and then a 3) more detailed GM facing proper hex map, is a great way to really try to give a sense of place and exploration.
Either that or just do a pointcrawl style map where you actually can really see the landscape in a way that flows with little names for area's and little illustrated details. Something that actually resembles a map you'd get in an old paperback fantasy book.
Great comment - thanks. Some lovely stuff there. You may be interested in this old Beyond Fomalhaut piece: https://beyondfomalhaut.blogspot.com/2019/04/blog-shallow-and-deep-wilderness.html
DeleteSo I actually like hexcrawls for immersion, because for me a hex creates a concrete and bounded scene. There's a period of time spent journeying through a hex and amount of scenery in a hex that are both bounded and concrete enough for me to visualize as a scene unfolding, which gives me something to dig into for descriptions.
ReplyDeleteFor the hexes with no encounters, I think the onus really is on conveying this sense of journeying through the scene/hex, of exploration and wonder, even if it is only a minor evocation of it.
I was always inspired by the Tales of the Lance boxed set and its hexcrawl., using mood as a pointer for the DM on what to convey to the player's about the hex. It also taught me to really try and game out every hex as a scene. I still think the player shared hex map actually enhances the experience of hexploration.
I know what you mean - I'm not against hexmaps.
DeleteI've gone and elaborated the case for why I think 3 mile hexmaps can be really helpful for immersion
Deletehttp://mythlands-erce.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-3-mile-hex-natural-unit-for.html
Perfect.
ReplyDelete(Interestingly, seeing these, with your words, has not only deepened my understanding of TSRan, but also my grasp of the concept of Romanticism).
It took me a long time to figure out that Romanticism wasn't code for proto-fascism, which is basically what I learned at university.
DeleteI don't think I've ever really engaged with the concept enough even to pick up that level of reading of it. My issue more generally is that I struggle enormously with abstract nouns - It often takes me about 20-30 years between first encountering an abstract noun and being able to form any sort of vaguely coherent, stable understanding of what it is supposed to represent. I guess what this blog post did is add some data-points to my cluster of instances of things I've heard called "romantic" and... a balance tipped. Romanticism just means the same thing as "saudade", right? Simplez. 🙃
DeleteI read in McGilchrist that the Japanese language has very few (non-imported) abstract nouns, and that this has profound implications for the way they construe the world as opposed to the way a Westerner would. I mentioned this in a Substack post a year ago - https://peakrill.substack.com/p/in-an-ideal-world - and I remember at the time wondering what you would make of this. Reading McGilchrist has validated my lifelong suspicion of abstract nouns (and made me increasingly wary of nouns in general). That's one reason (although far from the main one) why, although I've started attending Quaker Meetings, I will never call myself a "Quaker" (or, God forbid, a "Christian").
Also: universities suck. But then, I'm sure you know this better than most. (I had a long chat with a lecturer friend at the weekend, about the current crisis in English former-Polytechnics WRT foreign students and, fuck me, I didn't have that on my checklist of things to get deeply depressed about in 2024. Life comes at you. As does the vicious infant egregore of Brexit and modern "Conservatism").
DeleteMight be true about the abstract nouns in Japanese - most of the ones in the modern language are Chinese loanwards/calques. I can't say I've ever thought about that in any depth but will go away and do so.
DeleteI love the idea that we can identify all our problems in an overreliance on nouns.
Have you read The Matter With Things? That's essentially (as I understand it) the thesis of that book. I started reading it just over 2 years ago... and am currently about 2/3rds of the way through. It has massively upended my thinking about the fundamentals of EVERYTHING, and the ideas sparking from it are the main reason why I started my Substack, but at the same time I am developing a real dislike of McGilchrist and of his writing.
Deleteone could argue that some contemporary setting (midgard springs to mind immediately and DCC's aereth could fit inro this definition)
ReplyDeleteNothing new under the sun...
Deleteyes, but that is good :D
DeleteThat Elmore cover for Savage Frontier is just fantastic and I don’t think I’ve seen a better piece by him. Really awe inspiring, very American (in the best possible way) landscape, very D&D bunch of antagonists coming down out of the mountains. All highly detailed and not rushed and lazy like some of his later work.
ReplyDeleteYeah, love it.
DeleteI think the reason hex crawls generally don't inspire this is because there is not enough fantastic geography
ReplyDelete- great mountains that dominate your setting should be really big
- river should be the Anduin not a normal river
every time you make realistic geography you are playing hiking
you can add great description but when your players ask you "how tall is it" and you say "its a normal sized mountain" well you've lost
Ha, yes, there might be something to this. Or even just having enough fantastic geography to make it interesting - it's a normal sized mountain but it has a glacier on it that is made of red ice, etc.
DeleteI love these paintings and it took me down quite a rabbit hole of great tolkien covers
ReplyDeleteYeah, just put 'John Howe Tolkien' into google image search and watch the hours disappear....
DeleteWhat’s the first painting with the river and towers? Is that Tol Sirion?
ReplyDeleteI took it down pending investigation - I looked for it again and have a suspicion it's not a Howe image.
Deletewow
ReplyDeleteIn reading this, it strikes me that to evoke mood in travel descriptions or hex play, what we need is a real sense that there are Places We Could Go But Will Not. The paintings to me evoke something familiar but never attainable.
ReplyDelete