The Gaming Den

Open license RPGs face one major problem in the digital age: art.

Companies can afford to pay real artists to do RPG art with dragons and iconic monsters from your setting, and that fires people's imaginations.

My question is this: does anyone know of an online repository of free fantasy-related art?

I've been checking online book collections of pre-1923 art, as well as artists trying to promote their work under various forms of open licenses, but my searches are coming up short. All I seem to find is either obviously bootlegged art from established artists or weird online companies trying to make money on photo searches.

Any ideas?

www.elfwood.com - search for an artists that doesn't charge money for his/her time and ask for permission to use 1+ of his/her current creation(s).

That's what I did the first time. There hasn't been a second time, yet.

I found that art house websites selling prints and such have good quality samples on their sites. I filled my 'L5R with the serial numbers filed off' CCG with period Japanese art, lots of which involved monsters and sorcery.

Is there a particular style of art you're looking for?

Mostly I was looking for public domain stuff common to fantasy (castles, guys in armor, mythical monsters, hot chicks, etc), but elfwood has enough good artists that I should be able to get a few on board.

Well mongoose's inability to get good art has never seemed to stop them from producing reems of books

ckafrica at [unixtime wrote:1201448594[/unixtime]]Well mongoose's inability to get good art has never seemed to stop them from producing reems of books

Same for WOTC. I hate Arne Swekel's art, or whatever the fuck his name is.
We also have Ron Spencer and his shiny, lumpy Otis-esque jokes for characters.
Or that guy with the crappy pencil sketches nestled between chapters in some of the more recent splats.
And Wayne Reynolds was wayyyy overused throughout most of 3.5e.
Damn. Where do they get these goobers?

sigma999 at [unixtime wrote:1201470531[/unixtime]]

ckafrica at [unixtime wrote:1201448594[/unixtime]]Well mongoose's inability to get good art has never seemed to stop them from producing reems of books

Same for WOTC. I hate Arne Swekel's art, or whatever the fuck his name is.
We also have Ron Spencer and his shiny, lumpy Otis-esque jokes for characters.
Or that guy with the crappy pencil sketches nestled between chapters in some of the more recent splats.
And Wayne Reynolds was wayyyy overused throughout most of 3.5e.
Damn. Where do they get these goobers?

What, you expect WotC to hire established professional artists? Game companies hire illustrators, and wizards gets some good ones too.

Do we have some place to host these things when we find them?

I'd like to insert appropriate art on the wiki at some point.

http://www.eternalspires.net/wiki/

-Username17

Actually, yes Catharz. I do expect better of a multibillion dollar entertainment company.

sigma999 at [unixtime wrote:1202071722[/unixtime]]Actually, yes Catharz. I do expect better of a multibillion dollar entertainment company.

Yeah, I'm sure Wizard's D&D group's excellent playtesting and R&D could only improve if they were spending 5k an illustration. And, of course, it would certainly be in the best interests of Hasbro to spend the larger part of their budget turning a small section of their CCG division into art dealers.

sigma999 at [unixtime wrote:1202071722[/unixtime]]Actually, yes Catharz. I do expect better of a multibillion dollar entertainment company.

Not to nitpick but Hasbro is barely a multi-billion dollar company with revenue equaling 3.1 B USD but their net profits only 230 million.

Granted this is from '06 but it still holds to a degree. Probably a much higher degree as the market has taken a fairly downward spin in the last year.

Out of that 230 million, I doubt that Wotc holds a major sharehold within Hasbro as Hasbro has other more profitable ventures in Milton Bradley/Playskool/Tonka etc..

So you probably shouldn't expect better from a multi-billion dollar Wizards.

You might expect better from a multi-million dollar Wizards though.

WotC do have some good stuff, though: both Fiendish Codices have good art in them, and there are enough monsters well done (from the 3.0 Dryad and 3.5 Nymph to the Cornugon, Balor, Pit Fiend and some of the strange newer ones). Draconomicon also has some good ones - a few of the dragons are actually well drawn, looking as though the artist spent time figuring out how the pose should look, and the faces are awesome.

Oh, and Mongoose sells by having stuff that every player wants, even though they'll need a really good trick to get it past the DM. See: Scion (Ultimate Prestige Classes. Cleric full-casting PrCl that grants you all of your god's domains, spontaneous Domain Casting, "tell someone else what they roll" 1/day at level 1, gain the 1/2 Fiend or 1/2 Celestial template for free at level 10, all good saves and more as well).