[Inspirational Pictures VIII]

Gerard Trignac is the perfect blend of Mervyn Peake and M. C. Escher:

Iconic Cyberpunk 2020 Images

Like a bride, a good cyberpunk image needs four things. First, it needs to be noirish: you have to be able to imagine whoever it depicts committing crimes. Second, it needs to be unspeakably 80s: it needs to be big hair, spandex, raybans and shoulder pads. Third, it needs to mix something conspicuously futuristic with something grimy and old; that juxtaposition is what it is all about, stylistically. And fourth, it needs to look cool. You get bonus points for big guns, cigarettes (though these can count, nowadays, as the "grimy and old"), and girls who a 12 year old boy would develop a crush on.

The fixer. Cyberpunk 2020 is one of the earlier games, I think, to contain what you might describe as "multiethnic art". I understand Paizo think they deserve plaudits for doing that with Pathfinder; maybe somebody needs to tell them Mike Pondsmith was doing it in the 80s.

All elements are present here: she's clearly up to no good; the leggings are unspeakably 80s; you have the mix of old leggings with holes in and super-duper cybernetic monocle thing; and she's cool. She also has a gun and is appealing to the adolescent male. (The adult male too actually.)  

An action piece. He has wolverine blades and he has just shot somebody through the chest with a micro-jet missile, and someday your character can do that too!

There is no mixture of the conspicuously new and scuzzy and old here. He's all brand new. But he does have a BIG FUCKING GUN.

Probably my favourite piece in the whole book: I don't think there is anything more cyberpunk than a guy in a trenchcoat sitting in a bar drinking scotch and smoking while showing off his new arm.

This one deserves a special mention, not just for the 12 year old boy inside me but also for the cyberdeck: this is what people used to think the future would look like. You'd have to carry around your modem in your handbag. One day, I'd like to see this in one of those "Complete History of the Future" type exhibitions where people examine cultural artefacts from the past which purported to predict our future.

She's cute. She's exotic looking. She is hiding her gun behind her back. She is cyberpunk.

Yoon-Suin Classes

Fighter

Magic-User

Rogue

Cleric

Let's Stat Up People Appearing In Old Paintings

See that guy in the foreground, on our left? Who is he? And if you were statting him up for the game of your choice, what would his stats be?

[Inspirational Pictures VII]

Naoki Ishikawa's work combines beauty with melancholy and undertones of the purely sinister.

Ghosts of wilderbeast in the dusk. Do they want you to follow?

A path to God knows where, between trees hiding God knows what. 

Abandoned ships, like those at Moynaq. Full of forgotten, decaying cargos. And inhabitants new and old. 

You don't want to go down this path. And yet you must.

Statues of monks at a forgotten monastery. As you passed, you could have sworn you felt one turn its head to watch you. 

(Last Ishikawa-esque picture is by Sukree Sukplang of Reuters.)

Hell Yes

L'Ange du Foyer, by Max Ernst.

Fighting Fantasy has so much to answer for

Back when the world was young, I wrote this entry, which, to summarise, tried to contrast British and American approaches to fantasy by comparing Warhammer with D&D:

I believe that in many ways Warhammer and D&D can be taken as representative of the cultures which created them. On the one hand you have a cynical, nasty, bleak and darkly humurous setting whose dominant idea is decay. And on the other you have a game basically founded on the principles of rugged individualism and self-betterment - in which a set of characters fight to success all on their own, without much in the way of a helping hand, or else die trying. In a strange sort of way, you don't get anything more representative of British values than Warhammer, nor anything more representative of American values than D&D.

You can see this in Fighting Fantasy too. And the tone is set by the artists who worked on it. By coincidence, Zak, here, and -C, here happened to put up posts with two of the most prominent of those guys over the last 24 hours or so. They are, respectively, John Blanche:

And Russ Nicholson:

I'm sure you can see the connection here and the kind of tone that I'm talking about.

This vein in Fighting Fantasy art was a huge influence on me as a kid, and I think it's influenced me ever since. To this day images like these have always struck a chord with me, and I think when I imagine stuff that appears in a fantasy RPG - goblins, dragons, trolls, whatever - the visions that appear in my mind always manifest as Blanche- or Nicholson-esque in tone: a little bit dark, a little bit grimy, a little bit weird, a little bit twisted.

I strongly believe that art has a big but not well-acknowledged influence on gaming style. The sort of work that Nicholson and Blanche deal in just lends itself to my type of game, being more interested in strange concepts and grim vignettes than heroics and grand themes. The sort of person who really responds to Nicholson's art, I think, is precisely the sort of person who is comfortable with save-or-die; the kind of person who appreciates the picture of the halfling being abducted by goblins probably also has an appreciation for the abstract, detached and uncaring universe envisaged by Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay or OD&D. If you like one you'll probably like the other.

Maybe this could be a test I could use if thinking about introducing somebody to one of my games. Instead of an extensive interview process, I could just hold up a picture like this:

If you like it you'll fit in. If not, move along, there's nothing for you here.

DiTerlizzi's "Early Spec Work"

If this sort of thing is your "early spec work" you've got a pretty good chance of making it:

Yoon-Suin Goblins

Goblins in Yoon-Suin look like this:

Larry Elmore and Utter Ridiculosity: A Love Story

More art, mainly because there's a bit of Larry Elmore love going round the blogosphere. I'm a fan of Larry Elmore, because it's his art that I cut my teeth on in my early years of D&D playing, and let's face it, there is no more iconic "Silver Age" D&D artist.

The thing I like about Larry Elmore art, now, is that it is all "quite" something, and never "very" anything. It is either quite good, quite cheesy, quite bad, or quite ridiculous. Some examples to illustrate:

Quite Good

Quite Cheesy

Quite Bad

Quite Ridiculous

Devils & Demons by Diterlizzi: A Love Story