The battle lines are drawn, and they are crisp black lines and dazzling swaths of color.
It is not a question of AI or no AI. Both sides have been known to use AI art.
It’s just color versus black and white, straight up.
This battle is nothing new. It’s been going for some time now, and it sure ain’t confined to the narrow realm of tabletop role-playing games, either; it is being fought across the board, in multiple forms of entertainment. But our main focus on here is RPGs, so let’s talk about that.
The 5e sun is not shining as brightly as it used to, and many gamers choose to return to or discover old-school D&D, which is great. It certainly can’t hurt to know the classics.
But then Wizards of the Coast goes on record as saying that old-school D&D isn’t D&D anymore.
The 5e influencers boldly staked their claim to D&D at the Wizards of the Coast Creator Summit, and now they’re not going anywhere. It’s their place. It’s not unlike a crowd taking over a bar. Every week there’s more and more of them; they keep coming and keep asking for BTS and mocktails; so the bar plays a lot of BTS and serves twenty different sorts of mocktails. It’s what any business would do. Know who your customers are.
Your customers like bright colors and furry fairytales — give them that.
Which means that the gritty black and white Russ Nicholson art “isn’t D&D anymore.”
I get it. Colors can definitely be awesome.
Look at this gorgeously decadent movie poster. It was supposed to be for Alejandro Jodorowski’s Dune. We were robbed of something truly epic. Look at the ships! Look at Orson Welles as the Baron! Look at Dalí as the Emperor!
Fast-forward forty years and now we have Denis Villeneuve’s Dune — dreary, glum and colorless.
Colorless has become synonymous with “serious.”
Colors are for the furry fairytale crowd, and black and white is reserved for deep, serious stories. This is what we have come to.
Black and white aesthetics are busy remaking classic games under their new paradigm, even when the originals were already in black and white. Shadowdark is AD&D, of course. Blades in the Dark somehow feels like Warhammer — both Fantasy and 40K. And Mothership feels like Traveller. You get the gist.
Don’t get me wrong — I also love black and white. I love Jim Jarmusch’s early films, I love the work of Kwapisz and Chan in Savage Sword of Conan, I love the art in the 1977 Monster Manual, especially Trampier, and I love the 1981 Fiend Folio, especially Nicholson. In my opinion, the art in 5e is repetitive, and we no longer see player characters die or even take any serious beatings. It’s a real shame.
The 5e art is also quite lazy sometimes. If Keith Parkinson had painted that Eve of Ruin cover, he wouldn’t have wasted so much space with violet rocks and boulders.
Vecna could have been the lich in the ’77 Monster Manual, and it would have been so much better. A classic rendition for a classic lich!
Also, Parkinson — or Caldwell, or Easley — would have filled that decor, that cave, with hundreds of tiny details: broken statuettes, forgotten phylacteries, pieces of armor, weird components, eldritch treasure, you name it. Instead, we only get this monotonous sea of mauve.
But that’s not all. There is a weird new trend of conservative Christians getting into black and white tabletop role-playing games, and insisting that one can actually “win at RPGs.”
I call them the Game Jesuits. They are among those who despise “tourists” the most. They demand a lifelong commitment to the hobby — like marriage. It’s very Christian indeed. If your commitment only lasts a few years, you are a tourist. Full stop.
“For six or seven years in the early nineties I was really into grunge music!” Tourist.
“I rode my mountain bike so much when I was in my twenties, man!” Tourist.
If you love something, you must love it and keep engaging with it till death do you part. If not, you are a tourist.
Yeah, those people completely freaked out in 1985 — Satanic Panic, B.A.D.D. and all — and then, forty years later and after realizing that they couldn’t have been more wrong about D&D and tabletop role-playing in general, they move in and claim these games as their own, but not the rainbow games, mind you, just the honest, straight, black and white ones. In retrospect, it appears that the demon idol on the cover of the Players Handbook and the giant horned efreeti on the cover of the Dungeon Masters Guide were not that much of a threat. But LGBTQ+ folks playing the game, that’s a big no-no.
Satan is all right.
Trans people are the root of all evil.
Hypocrites.
Plus, they seem to be saying: fuck Gygax’s “fourth category” of games, let’s make this a thing you can WIN, like any other game.
Conservatives, am I right?
And they sure are very suspicious about colors.
Now that every single color means something extremely precise, they refuse to put on a shirt that isn’t plain black or plain white because they certainly don’t want someone on the street to approach them and say, “Aegosexual?” — as if something like that would ever happen.
So black and white it is. They eagerly barricade themselves into OD&D with their three little black and white booklets, and refuse to allow anything else in that sanctum. It’s almost Waco-esque.
I’m not asserting that the anti-color people are all conservative Christians, of course not. A diverse (pun intended) variety of folks hate colors these days.
One Xwitter user caused quite a stir when they posted a beautiful Dragonlance piece by Larry Elmore and wrote: “Imagine thinking this is D&D.”
That was really something.
They want you to know that D&D is just three little brown books, Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry, Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes and fuck all else. It’s terribly reductive, but those are the battle lines now. It’s even getting into 40K. I recently saw a guy post some old black and white illustrations and say that “40K art peaked at Rogue Trader.”
I won’t pick a side today, sorry to disappoint. Dune in shades of grey is bad, and Vecna in riotous lavender indigo and heather mauve is equally bad. Artistic directors need to learn when to make use of colors, and when to stick with black and white.
Both sides have their flaws, but why do they hate each other so much? That’s a societal issue that thoroughly transcends tabletop role-playing games, and I’m not insane enough to try and answer it here. Smart people are doing friggin’ PhDs on that subject…
Color me impressed.