D&D Art Eras and July 16th, 2014

Dungeons and Dragons Art Eras

(Expanded post at my tabletop blog)

1970's

This is pre-history for me.  I see some of the left overs of this artwork in some of the stuff I own, but this was never the "great" old days for me.  In fact, I very much dislike it.  Though, I do understand it.  This was the era of "Indie" Dungeons and Dragons, when friends and family did the artwork for Gygax.  With success came art budget.

1980's

The majority of my RPG books I inherited came from the 1980's.  The Basic set gave me a standard of excellence that a lot of the earlier stuff could not live up to(both in writing and artwork).  This was the era of the Dragonlance artists doing work for the entire line of Dungeons and Dragons.  High quality oil paintings that belong in museums.  Armor that was at least partially rooted in reality.  Metal had "weight", leather had texture, and the dragons looks real.  This is the D&D in my mind, even when playing in other eras.

2000's

The revised 2nd Edition of D&D became encyclopedic and returned to a more basic style.  The artwork for novels continued to be the stellar 80's style, but there was a discourse between them.  With 3rd Edition's release, we got a new style that some call "comic book".  I call it a combination of Anime and Super Hero.  The armors' only concern is that it looks cool.  There are buckles, bags, clasps, and belts all over everyone.  The weapons are generally exaggerated.  The colors, while abundant, many times lack definition.  I loved it, and it felt "new", and that's what was needed.  We've now had this look for 15 years.  With 4th Edition, Wizards saw no reason to change things, it probably would cost money.  With Pathfinder, Paizo wanted to inform everyone that 3rd fans should flock to Pathfinder.  Though, to give them their due, the Pathfinder art crew has taken the style to new and amazing heights, and rivals the master painters from the 80's.  What it lacks in "texture", the Pathfinder artists make up for in "motion". 

5 Edition

The theme of 5th Edition is blending old with new, and damn them if they did not get the art pretty much right.  The character design is still more that of the 3rd Edition stylings, but the artwork itself has the "solid" feel of the 80's super realistic stuff.  The stone here looks "rough", the metal looks "solid", and the creatures look "slick".  I have seen scans on some websites of the insides of these books, and the artwork matches the covers in being textured, but fantastic.

July 16th, 2014

Once upon a time The Magitech Factory of FF6 had my favorite music.  It is closest to being some sort of rock/industrial sound, and was pretty modern as far as video game music for 1994.  Also it reminded me of the song at the end of The Maxx, which was popular at the time.  I think the Opera, specifically Celes' theme, or maybe even Dancing Mad(in Orchestral form with a choir) has eclipsed it.  Cyan's theme is in there too, of course.  I think if the 16 bit tech of the time did any disservice to FF6, it is during the Magitech Factory.  I'm not talking about with graphics, the factory itself is really awesome.  The disservice is with the story bits of the Espers inside.  So much more emotion could have been taken from the scenes in the factory, it has got to be one of the saddest parts of a game that doesn't seem to have much put into it for that affect.  Also, I would have loved to have seen more flashbacks to those that would become Magitek Knights before the experiments.  Specifically the generals that I'm trying not to name here, but if you've played, you know who I mean.

Continuing my quest for a new anime to watch, I started up Chrome Shelled Regios.  The cover art for it looks really good, and I like the name of the series too.  At first it started out with some sort of DBZ/Naruto thing where everyone had a radically different designs, and every move of their finger had a super long name like "rising knee of shining justice slice!" and such.  I have to say... that was not a very promising start for me.  The animation though, wow.  The animation is some of the best for a high action series, there was no stuttering in the CGI assisted scenes, and the movements were smooth.  Then... it went into a highschool/academy kind of thing, and for good measure threw in some awkward teenage romance... the nail in the coffin though was the main character.  He was the "mysterious guy that doesn't care despite being obviously the best" guy and I can't stand that.  I later read that they resolved no story arcs by the end of the first season.. and no more seasons were made, so... it looked pretty but that was about it.  Next.

Weird Al is someone I can take in doses.  I appreciate what he does, and his music holds a great place in my life, but there is a huge flaw in it that I have come to realize.  I do not listen to popular music.  In my life there are various reasons why I knew some popular music back in the day.  I knew of Michael Jackson because of The Chipmunks.  MTV played some rock videos once upon a time, and to get to them you had to wait till the pop music ended.  That's probably the main way I knew of non-rock music.  Weird Al makes a living making fun of popular music, and honestly the newest pop music I would understand him spoofing would be "Wrecking Ball", but seeing as how I only know Wrecking Ball because of how many people doing other parodies, he probably thought "its been done".  Despite all of this, I did enjoy his "Foil" video and song.  Sometimes funny stuff is funny even if you don't know what it is a parody of.