Tabletop roleplaying games, as a sales category, may be evolving faster than many fans and publishers realize. For the most part, players and publishers focus on content for the gaming table, limiting their requests and production to what will be used on game night. It’s sensible and born of nearly a half-century of experience: The further from the table the product is, the smaller the TTRPG audience that it appeals to. However, that conventional wisdom may be as dated as the fashion of the 1970s. The RPG audience has grown, expanding into non-traditional groups. There are active game paraphernalia collectors, a group that doesn’t game, but collects the fringe products of the culture. D20 earrings, The Legend of Vox Machina actions figures, t-shirts featuring RPG related concepts like THAC0 or murderhobo flow charts, and the entire mythology of Stranger Things. There’s another, wider market with an appetite for products beyond the games. Some of that market is being tapped into right now, but a considerable amount isn’t. This column considers that audience and the products that they’re waiting for. What are they interested in consuming that hasn’t been marketed yet or has fallen out of print. For the first article in this series, we’ll talk about The Art of [INSERT RPG].
Over the decades, there have been multiple Art of… books including Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History, The Art Of Dragon Magazine, The Art of the Dragonlance Saga, and The Art of Vampire: The Masquerade, not to mention individual artist’s books like The Complete Elmore, Visions of War: The Art of Wayne Reynolds, and The Art of Clyde Caldwell. These books are well loved and offer a fantastic sampling of the artwork that helped make these RPGs classics. Some are quite pricey in the secondary market.
However, many of these books omit a sea of published, unpublished, and forgotten artwork related to specific games. Think about that, many of these books are not detailed references but best-of collections. They left a substantial number of promotional, interior, and cover images out due to their layout and page limitations. For many of these books, they were created during the era of mass market bookstore sales, which prioritized price point and shelf space over other details.
As the fanbase for tabletop games expand, so do some of the ancillary aspects of the hobby. The secondary market price for original RPG artwork and high-quality prints have obtained un-imagined heights. The expanded fanbase and market suggest its time to experiment with a new type of artbook. We may be to the point that a The Art of Dungeons & Dragons [X] Edition Omnibus would sell itself.
With more books produced online for direct to the fanbase consumption, that model may fall off for a new option, one that generates massive books, lovingly designed and written, for the new fanbase that loves the concept and look of RPGs, but either don’t play or joined after, say, AD&D, Shadowrun 1e and 2e, or never saw a Tim Bradstreet vampire. The audience for the artwork is there, but the products to support it aren’t.
Imagine this book: The Complete Artwork of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons First Edition. Every imagine that TSR printed including covers for books, boxed sets, and certain boxed sets of miniatures, all interior artwork, ads, and everything else that an RPG historian could find. Offering sporadic information like names, publication info, notations, and essays, this book would be a collector’s item for every hardcore 1e fan.
There’s no need to stop at 1e. There’s the artwork of basic D&D; rougher than 1e, but no less beloved. Just as intriguing, the complete artwork of the middle editions of Dungeons & Dragons would be winners. These books would be voluminous, beautifully printed, high-end artbooks. Sure, each volume would be expensive, but it’s a luxury good, not a starter set, so price comparatively. Produced at the rate of one or two volumes a year, this project would cover Original/Basic, 1e, 2e, 3e, 3.5e, 4e, and, by the time D&D is onto 5.5e, the complete 5e artwork is an option. That’s seven volumes coming over a number of years. Even if Wizards of the Coast passed on printing this in-house, there’s enough content that a third party could make it work.
But this doesn’t begin or end with Dungeons & Dragons. There are just as many options for The Complete Artwork of Call of Cthulhu First Edition, and beyond. Could you imagine the books and all of the varied artwork Chaosium could include? It would be stunning. I mentioned Shadowrun, which has so much to pull from.
How about The Complete Artwork of Vampire: The Masquerade? There are many editions, many World of Darkness and Chronicles of Darkness games with hundreds to thousands of images to collect, all of which could be utilized for their own series.
One that would be a multi-volume series: The Complete Artwork of Pathfinder First Edition, Volume 1 to who-knows-how-many volumes. I doubt they can construct a book spine sturdy enough to support all of Paizo’s artwork in a single book. Thus, they could divide the art up by publication date or adventure path or however, but get it out there for the fans. This might only cover one game, but it’d be a ranging book series given how many official Pathfinder books Paizo has produced over the years. Add to that, if you can bring in the comic series and do an omnibus, that’s bound to be a lot of artistic content.
There are many more games to collect: Traveller, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Rifts, and a list too long to name. Each of these could do a variety of artbooks giving fans a complete taste of all of the artwork from different eras of their publications. They could produce these in-house, crowdfund them, or even license these books out to other publishers.
These books are a suggestion of one product line that tabletop roleplaying publishers could exploit, but have not leaned into overmuch. There’s no specific reason that they should create these products, but I believe that fan demand for an all-inclusive artbook would justify the effort. These books would provide all of the artwork from an era of gaming, look great on a shelf, and even better when opened to any page. They’d combine lovingly crafted books, history, and great reproductions of beloved works along with rarely seen pieces. While not for every fan, they’d find an audience and be considered treasured works by many.
If publishers were to create a series of The Complete Artwork of [INSERT RPG], what RPGs have artwork that is ready to be featured in an expertly laid out and printed tome? Let us know in the comments what RPG and edition you’d like to see a complete artbook for?
Egg Embry participates in the OneBookShelf Affiliate Program, Noble Knight Games’ Affiliate Program, and is an Amazon Associate. These programs provide advertising fees by linking to DriveThruRPG, Noble Knight Games, and Amazon.
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