ITT: Retro Fantasy Art

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>i can smell the dimly lit used book store

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If there is one thing I love, it's the Lizardmen from the Fighting Fantasy series.

Wait,is this Yoshitaka Amano's take on Elric of Melniboné? Neat.

Contributin' with an spooky skelly, 80s power metal style.

>Still no Musiał

>>see this

what do?

from a board game called Divine Right

>Flail Spear
The fuck?

also
>Dave are you going to even look at a picture of a crab first?
>No man it's cool I know what crabs look like.

Meant to also link

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He is operating operationally.

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damn you made me smell it too

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I've noticed that older fantasy art tends to depict mostly scenes, depicting several charcters and detailed backgrounds, whereas more modern art are often pin-ups, depicting one character or monster, sometimes even looking at the camera, with little else in the frame. The correlation is not perfect of course, and I'm aware that there are other stylistic differences, but still.

Has anyone else noticed this, or am I just seeing things, biased by my own hypothesis?

There is SOME merit to it even if you're exaggerating a bit.

Basically, back in the day you had smaller budgets for art for project, and way less art was custom made specifically for projects. So instead of "Brad we need 1 illustration each for the classes" it was "this painting is awesome, lets buy it from that guy and put it on the cover of our rulebook even if it has jack shit to do with the content"

When you make art specifically for a project it's usually very well defined and controlled, so we get more pinups of one specific thing, but when people were just buying up cool fantasy art or licensing it for their projects you more often had art that was done without a specific purpose other than "awesome fantasy scene"

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Old TSR art was a mix of the two, really. A lot of stuff was action scenes like your Spellfire cover and this awesome bit by Jeff Easley, but there were pin-ups too, although they were mostly group portraits of the PCs. The Dragonlance art featured a shitload of group portraits of the Heroes of the Lance, for instance.

Would Chronicles de la Lune Noire qualify?
The RTS game based on that was a big part of my childhood.

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I want to think the axeman's face looks like that because that octopus is groping round his leather-and-rivets Speedo.

>That's a penis

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In my opinion, the older art is far, far superior. But then again, I adore that traditional fantasy painting style.

Also rip EQNext. We hardly knew ye.
People still run the EQNext decal in Planetside 2 and I have a giggle each time I see it.

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The streetlamp makes it funny for some reason. Like the skeletons wandered into town and are asking for directions. Skeleton on the right is pointing to the road, and skeleton in the back is going "Where the fuck are we now?"

Fucking Frazetta all up in this thread. I approve.

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I can't tell if the fighter in front is watching the group's flank, or if he just failed his perception check.

hahaha man, that gun looks like something an user made in gunmaker.

Man, this brings back a different time. One when the lines between Science Fiction and Fantasy weren't as defined or immutable.

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>Thunder! Thunder! THUNDER!

Is it me or was Retro Fantasy art more low-key than modern fantasy art?

I like it. Low Key stories interest me more than EPIC HUGE ARMIES CLASHING FOREVER ARRGHHH ARMIES EPIC that everyone does nowadays because of LOTR

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I think it took itself less seriously, and ironically it ended being more serious. I feel like nowaday, 1/2 fantasy stories are really about edgy people in a medieval/magical setting.

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>Gee Bill, FOUR thumbs?

I wish that the fantasy and science fiction genres could return to that. And not in a phony "science fantasy" way either but in that authentic prototype you speak of.

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Most retro.

Anyone ever read the Death Dealer novels?

That head looks like the cacaodemons depicted in original doom art, same artist or did doom reuse the art?

Different sorts of art, and a different sort of illustrators - a lot of this art is by artists from the hollywood area, commissioned when TSR was a fairly big deal and had a decent sized marketing budget.

But at the same time this is art for covers and boxes, books from this period had much the same pin-ups of individual characters, like this image of a defiler take from inside the first edition Dark Sun campaign book.

Note also that most of this art would be sold multiple times and reused by a variety of projects, from game box art to novels to other RPG books and box sets, as well as as posters sold by the artist directly.

>undead up front: Scared shitless, making saves left and right
>undead in the back: laughing their bones off, clearly a group of comedy-relief mobs giving color commetary for the cleric's antics.

>A Dracolich!
>Where?!

Funny you should mention that, I JUST found out today that the Cacodemon design is in fact a copy of that thing's head. Not same artist, they just ripped it.

Speaking of failed spot checks, this is my favourite example.

Whoever you are - countless thanks, because I was looking for it for past two weeks!

so that video game was based on a comic book?

Most of them are corny, but at least weapons are of realistic sizes if not going full-on Heavy Metal.
Nowdays the cornyness is decreased, but weapons and gear in general are just overworked pieces of shit.

Why we can't have both?

Roll to seduce.

Also sorry I don't have anything to contribute OP..

Yes, especially if we could get the lost TSR documents which linked it to Greyhawk.

Is this was supposed to be Kull? Because the sword Conan found was referred as atlantean.

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>Musiał
Will post some after getting back from work

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The original "Tommy Two-Swords"

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