High Fashion Fantasy Demigods

If a decorative plate pauldron and a purple trench coat count as full plate mail for Armor Class, and the character refuses a metal helm so they can show off a Supercuts fade with undercut and dyed tips, the art is already telling you something important. It is telling you the game does not take physical reality, violence, or consequence very seriously.

And once the pictures send that message, the players at the table will eventually receive it too.

That is the core problem with the current house style in Dungeons & Dragons 5.5E. The art does not depict people who live in a dangerous world. It depicts fashion avatars who happen to be holding weapons. The armor is sculptural and incomplete—single pauldrons, open chests, impractical silhouettes that would fail the first solid hit. The hair is contemporary salon work, carefully styled and colored so the face remains fully visible and marketable. Helmets are treated as optional accessories rather than the most important piece of protective gear a warrior owns. The overall effect is closer to a Fortnite skin or an Overwatch character select screen than to anyone who expects to survive a fight in the mud.

This is not a minor aesthetic preference. Visual language shapes how players understand the fiction. When every illustration prioritizes “cool silhouette under dramatic lighting” over weight, coverage, and wear, the game quietly trains its audience to treat combat as performance rather than risk. The armor does not need to function because the character is never really in danger of being hurt in a permanent way. The face must stay uncovered because the real product being sold is the character’s look, not their survival. Once that logic is baked into the official art, it becomes harder for a table to maintain any sense that the world has teeth.

I reached the point where I could no longer look at the books.

The pages felt like visual noise—too stylized, too glamorous, too divorced from the physical logic that makes fantasy feel solid. So I put them away. That decision was not about nostalgia or gatekeeping. It was about immersion. When the pictures stop supporting the idea that the world is real and dangerous, the game itself starts to feel like a costume party with dice.

I do not play D&D to simulate high-fashion demigods who just stepped off a runway and whose primary goal is leveling up their aura. The current official art pushes exactly that fantasy: characters who look like they were designed for a cosmetics campaign first and a dangerous world second. Everything is polished, stylized, and deliberately incomplete in ways that prioritize visual flash over function. It feels like the game has jumped the shark straight into its Ziggy Stardust glam-rock phase—all glitter, dramatic poses, and carefully curated spectacle.

My own sense of the genre sits closer to Nirvana and Guns N’ Roses. I want the dirt under the fingernails, the frayed edges, beer on the carpet, the sense that these people have been living hard in a world that can actually hurt them. I want armor that looks like it has stopped a blade, faces that show weather and decisions, and clothing that belongs to a time and place rather than a mood board. When the default visual language becomes pure glam, the grounded, slightly ragged energy that made fantasy feel real to me gets crowded out. The books start to feel like they are selling a different game than the one I sat down to play.

The books no longer feel like anything solid. They feel like a window into a fake Wonderland of fantasy identity wish-fulfillment—bright, weightless, and carefully arranged so nothing permanent can touch the characters. When the official art refuses to take the physical dangers of its own world seriously, it becomes harder for me to take the game seriously either.

The pictures are not depicting adventurers. They depict dungeon tourists: people dressed for the aesthetic of danger rather than its reality.

That is the poser problem running through a lot of modern fantasy gaming. The characters are shown in gear and armor that would get them killed in the first hallway of the Tomb of Horrors. Open chests, decorative pauldrons, uncovered heads, flowing coats that would snag on the first trap trigger—all of it prioritizes looking cool in a promotional still over surviving contact with an actual dungeon. The art sells the idea of the adventurer without accepting the costs that used to come with the job. Once that attitude is baked into the visual language, the game starts to feel like costume play with hit points instead of a world that can push back.

As a result, players end up in one of two positions. Either they stop taking the game seriously and lean into the costume-party energy the art encourages, or they try to run a grounded, high-stakes campaign while constantly fighting the visual and tonal signals the books are sending. “I can run a serious game with this” becomes the battle cry. But why should anyone have to fight their own rulebooks just to maintain atmosphere? When the official presentation works against the tone you want, the extra labor falls entirely on the GM and the table.

That is a tax most of us eventually get tired of paying.

Other games already deliver the tonal seriousness and visual consistency I actually want. I do not even have to leave the broader 5E orbit to find them. Shadowdark has done the job cleanly: the art, the presentation, and the rules all point in the same direction. Characters look like they belong in dangerous places. The illustrations carry weight and consequence. Nothing about the book feels like it is trying to sell me a fashion line or an aura. It simply takes the premise of dungeon crawling seriously, and that single decision makes the entire experience more coherent.

When a game’s visual language and its claimed tone are aligned, the table does not have to waste energy correcting the pictures. That alone is worth more than another volume of high-gloss demigod portraiture.

Traveller Aesthetics and Inspirations

One of the five defining art styles in Traveller is the plas-tech look. It's a world of clean, sterile surfaces, everything neatly covered up, and a modern aesthetic that's hard to miss. This is progress and civilization, or at least what the most significant players in the universe wish to project. It is cleanliness, power, advancement, profit, and an alignment to the greater purpose.

This is the projection of order and power, law and righteousness, method and tradition, and civilization's progression. If you add places like this in your game, you are sending a message about those inside.

This is contrasted and opposed by a post-tech industrial look, not the overly cluttered Alien "bolt a CRT without the case on the wall" sort of look. Still, the forms are uncluttered like plas-tech but dirty, hanging open, in disrepair, with instructions and warning signs spray-painted. This style can also encompass eight giant 10-meter-wide water pipes for a dirty dam with paint peeling off.

This isn't an "Alien" level of clutter; it is just massive, metal, and imposing, making you feel tiny and unclean in the universe. These places can be narrow, twisted, confusing, and metal, not purposefully cluttered unless necessary. They keep the universe running, dirty, loud, worked in, chipped and scratched, noisy, hot, cold, irradiated, and hard-working.

Post-tech is the machine behind the scenes that crushes imagination and independence. This is war, industrialization, resource mining, exploitation, and subjugation to the machine. If power is the clean, smiling face, this is the dirty boot that comes down after the deal.

Then there's cyber-fi, a style all about neon lights and the hustle and bustle of a commercial zone. It's loud, colorful, and superficial, a perfect cover-up for the decay and the machines that keep the universe running. It pushes buy-now, propaganda from the planet's leaders and factions, 24-7 news and entertainment, and lures you like a shiny, colorful bauble of dizzying colors and patterns.

This is more fake than it looks. Wires hang about, and the images can't be confused for reality. Wires hang down in places. The streets are still wet and dirty. The world isn't perfect, though it puts on a good show. Some genres blur the line between reality and the fake world; this can't cross the gap. Everybody knows how phony it is; the fake is visible, but they enjoy it for the moments of distraction it provides.

This represents the "bread and circuses" of the setting, the lies told to the population to keep them happy, and the constant stream of entertainment to opiate the masses. This is loud, screams in your face, colorful, sexy, appealing, and often happy fakery. Every side of a hot-button issue will have a channel that speaks to it and makes you hate the other side, controlled by the same company. You will be lied to, treated like children, talked down to, and you will be satisfied. Isn't that all you want?

Do you have enough problems in your life?

Let us take you away.

This is the newest part of Traveller in this group of influences. It is heavily influenced by the cyberpunk genre but mixed with today's post-truth information wasteland. There is no true or false; it is all the litmus test for your side. Where the cyberpunk genre is fascinated with flash over substance, this is a more insidious interpretation of the concept. This is the gunpowder on the fuse, hiding the growing unrest of people who feel smaller and smaller in a sea of crushing darkness between the stars.

Contrasting that is a dirty street-grunge look, almost like the red zone of any metro area. This is the most cluttered and layered style in the universe, evoking a chaotic, noisy, foul-smelling urban street area full of people and activity. This also encompasses the run-down and abandoned parts of the future, like ghost towns on forgotten worlds, where the money ran out for the mining colony, and there is no one left, no history, and no reason why people were ever there.

These are also the packed apartments of star-port and mine workers, the endless, shoddy, prefabricated, and dirty flats that 90% of the working class live in. The confusing streets, built on top of each other, with no real rhyme or reason to their layout, the cargo trains that bisect towns, the passenger rails, the roads filled with off-world cars of every make and model (with little hope of standard parts for any of them), and the factories, schools, cafeterias, hospitals, hopping plazas, sports arenas, drainage canals, parking lots, and office buildings that jumble the planets of the universe.

This is reality: the day after day of work, the appointments, permits, and licenses, the bills in the mail, the grit of the street, accidents, and arguments. Loud music shakes the wall. Police drive by with wary eyes. Lines wait to get into places of work and play. Gangs hang out on the corner, knowing the universe makes them insignificant, yet they try to pretend otherwise. Dust storms, rain, snow, heat, and cold. Scavengers. Miners. The rumble of starship engines overhead. The homeless and elderly look up at the stars and dream. Or denying they are there.

And this represents the places everybody forgot.

Broken roads, abandoned towns, crash sites, and closed facilities like the old days' auto plants and steel mills—or new ones going up in a flurry of activity and welder sparks—or being demolished for something new—or just being left to rot.

Just because a planet is TL 3 does not mean castles and knights are down there. It could mean the world is so poor and impoverished, and no one cares about them, that they have reverted to plowing the fields with animals and living in ramshackle houses. Bits and bobs of high tech can exist, just like the days of poor Appalachia, but mostly, there is little in terms of hope or a future coming anytime soon, or ever.

Remember the decay, abandonment, and poverty in this setting. They are just as much a part of Traveller as that sexy, clean, white plastic TL 12 laser pistol. And they will drive the story a lot better than playing sterile corporate troubleshooters.

This forgotten-grunge style is both the present and a past forgotten in a universe so big no one could ever remember it all.

The final type of art is this Moebius-ensue, strangely alien, ancient style—reserved for anomalies, alien civilizations, lost sites of forgotten races, fallen civilizations, and mysteries in the universe likely no one will ever solve. This is saved for only the required moments and serves as a counterpoint to all the art of "civilization" mentioned before.

Humanity in the stars will always be small.

There was always something before that was here, which we will never understand, and all our achievements and progress shall never hold a candle to.

Our minds will never be able to understand what this is.

Or why we are here.

Pathfinder 1e Beginner Box

Digging through my garage, I found my original Pathfinder Beginner Box for the game's first edition.

Wow.

This was a fantastic time.

The rules, the typical 3.5-isms, and I will say the 2e Beginner Box has a better presentation, fewer rules, and feels easier to learn. You had to learn a subset of the 3.5 combat and spell rules, and the basic set feels a bit heavy when feats and skills are thrown in here.

But the box, the art, and the presentation were incredible.

The game wasn't afraid; in ways, it spoke to the fans of fantasy with muscled warriors, beautiful heroines, sudden violence, and fantastic monsters. The art was kinetic. The game felt savage and unforgettable.

I loved this game.

My brother didn't.

We spent a lot of mornings arguing D&D 4 vs. Pathfinder 1e.

I wanted to go all-in, and since he was my primary player, he liked D&D 4 better, so we went with that. I was a fan of the battle-chess aspects and play of 4E, but not much else about the game captured my imagination. I had to build much of the lore and world myself, which was excellent, but Wizards let us down with unfilled promises and more broken promises. Pages of errata weeks after a book was released. The dependence on online tools. No official game world. Broken balance at high levels like the game wasn't even play-tested. Multiple balance revisions and an Essentials line felt like a 0.5 edition but needed the main books in a half-brained reboot.

Even he said in the end that D&D 4E let us down. It failed us.

We played a little Pathfinder 1e after the fact, and I enjoyed it. Still, the steam and our energy had lessened in fantasy due to the 4E disappointment, and it lasted longer than I expected, but it ground to a halt around the 6th level. We moved on to sci-fi which is where things ended.

But Pathfinder 1e was always excellent. Trapped in a bottle, it is still ultra-cool and still speaks to me. It screams adventure. It challenges you. It dares you to create heroes you would expect to see on the covers of fantasy novels. The monsters scream wicked, evil, fierce, and encompass the forces of darkness.

The game is Metal.

Today, I can't say the same about Pathfinder 2e Beginner Box. Even the art feels restrained and held back, and we have many pictures of people just floating in space. Mechanically the game feels better; everything is logical, streamlined, and well put together. But the game feels afraid of challenging us or upsetting us. When I say challenging, I don't mean difficulty, as 2e is the more demanding game, but the world and art feel overly filtered and safe. And there are very few action pictures in the 2e set urging me on.

On page 61 of the 1e Beginner Box Hero's handbook, there is a bottom page spread of the iconic bard shot full of arrows and bleeding out. On almost every page of this 1e boxed set, something damn cool is happening, an action picture in your face screaming, "This could be you!"

This could be you.

Just pick up the dice.

Pathfinder 1e had something to prove back in the day, and that came through in the art.

The use of light and shadow, negative space, shapes, and figures just sings to me. A lot of the new stuff seems mashed together, confused and muddled. Compare the beginner box covers. The dragon on the new one does not even feel like a threat; he is smaller than the characters and in the background. You don't need to explain the old cover much; you feel it.

Maybe I am asking too much, and there is no replacing the original art team. Maybe.

I suppose I am happy Savage Pathfinder is out because they use the original art, and all those initial feelings are back. I can buy the original adventure paths and have that old-school fun again. When I returned to Pathfinder 1e recently, I did not know why, but I feel I know now.

I still support and keep my subscriptions to Pathfinder 2 going, and I hope I can find that spark of inspiration with the new game again. I hope the new game's art and presentation go from mildly inoffensive to an epic metal band level. If I let the subscriptions lapse, I will regret not having the books someday. I am not pessimistic and have hope.

But I see Savage Pathfinder or even the original messy 1e rules, still capturing my imagination. I still have issues with Savage Pathfinder in the amount of conversion needed to make it work, but Savage Worlds is like that, hand wave the details off and have fun. Close enough is good enough.

The adventures and feelings that never really left us are back.

The Art of Plane Shift: Zendikar

OMG, this is a beautiful book. Today, The Art of Plane Shift: Zendikar came, and I am exploring a world that cannot be easily described. It has to be seen. This is more of a world-of book than an art-of book, and it shines in its presentation and style. If you love magic and want to get lost in this place for a while, this is your book.

This book feels honestly like what World of Warcraft wants to be, minus all the pop-culture jokes and silliness of Blizzard's creation. It is serious, epic, dramatic, torn asunder, lost, populated, mysterious, familiar, current and ancient all in one swipe of the brush, instantly capturing my imagination and excitement with each thrilling image and place. It is epic and deep, with meaning and a gravity of place and sense of importance that words cannot describe.

This is also not D&D, not by a long shot. This is much bigger, and more mature than the normal D&D worlds. Heroic NPCs can exist here, with no immature fear that "the player characters will be unimportant" sort of nonsense we get in the D&D world books. This is also hugely epic, with titanic creations the size of cities walking the fractured land. Turn the 3d up to eleven if they ever make a movie about this place, because you are going to need a bigger computer to render this.

Forget computers, you are going to need a bigger mind to take it all in.

Things exist here which D&D cannot easily describe, nor should it try.

I wouldn't want this to be D&D either, it is Magic: The Gathering, unique with its mana types and lands, and it doesn't feel right to fighter-mage-thief this place and kill goblins in a camp while a titan the size of a mountain walks by. Seriously. These are epic heroes who shatter mountains and conquer cities, not your average street-level rogue counting silver pieces. This is Magic, and this is greatness and power personified. D&D is trivial and minor in scope, worrying about ten-foot poles and what's in the next room. This is epic, Lord of the Rings stuff, cinematic and dramatic from level one, saving the world one adventure at a time.

This needs a completely new roleplaying game to even begin to describe, and not D&D, d20, or something we have seen before.

This is a book which will expand your mind, and open your imaginations up to possibilities great and wondrous. It is one of those which inspires and gives you the itch to adventure. It is also one that makes other fantasy worlds look plain by comparison, for good or bad.

If I can describe it in one thought, it is like the movie Avatar, when that movie first came out and blew people away, but for fantasy gaming. It changes the game. It is less so fiction than it is an experience.

Completely blown away by this. Pick it up and explore.