least favourite d&d artwork!

Best Selling RPGs - Available Now @ DriveThruRPG.com
The "should Drow be black?" is an interesting story in its own right because apparently its been a feud going on behind the scenes of fandom and publishers for decades. In addition to the fact the "Always Chaotic Evil" race being black is a terrible thing (especially when they were cursed by Corellon to have black skin like certain crazy ass sects say black people were), there's the people who actually liked that the sudden influence of Drizzt clones actually meant there was a lot more color among fantasy characters.

For me, I grew up not realizing Drow WERE meant to be black.

Yes, because the art always showed them as purple when I picked it up.

MAY052685-full.jpg
9780880389051-us.jpg


Speaking of bad Drizzt art, there's also this awful cover created by famously someone describing Drizzt as a "seventy year old elf" to the artist.

51ZjT8ihY0L._SX312_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg


It doesn't help that Cattie Brie looks twelve years old and this is when their romance begins.
 
In my home games I made drow skin a sort of grayish-purple (lavender or thistle) color (instead of black or brown) years ago. I thought I was being clever and original by doing so and only learned well after the fact (I’d already been off the Official D&D train for many years) that I’d independently ended up in the same place WotC already was, at least de facto, which felt mildly embarrassing.
 
For me, I grew up not realizing Drow WERE meant
Speaking of bad Drizzt art, there's also this awful cover created by famously someone describing Drizzt as a "seventy year old elf" to the artist.

51ZjT8ihY0L._SX312_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg


It doesn't help that Cattie Brie looks twelve years old and this is when their romance begins.
EB5B9738-3B65-4089-8255-D1AFC675CD16.jpeg
 
In my home games I made drow skin a sort of grayish-purple (lavender or thistle) color (instead of black or brown) years ago.
I strongly prefer modern brown and purple elves to traditional drow. If I do fantasy with elves, "dark elves" are just a different shade of the Melnibonean spectrum than the "high elves". If I do underground humanoids I go weird, like morlocks and troglodytes.
 
On my end, I love fanservice and sex positive fantasy art.

S&M drow for the win!

:smile:
People can like what they like, for sure. I just dont feel any need to cater to it unless its also what I want, design-wise.
 
Then how would you make them shameless fanservice like male and female fans prefer?

Fafhrd falls in love with a ghoul and there is an extended description of her naked, transparent body by Leiber. He also sneaks a fair bit of BDSM into Fafhrd and Grey Mouser in general. The old pervert was far ahead of the curve!

I find the Queen of Spiders cover hilariously tasteless and dated myself. But my favourite interpretation of the underground elves remains Mystara's Shadow Elves.

51+uXwrz7GL.jpg
 
Fafhrd falls in love with a ghoul and there is an extended description of her naked, transparent body by Leiber. He also sneaks a fair bit of BDSM into Fafhrd and Grey Mouser in general. The old pervert was far ahead of the curve!

I find the Queen of Spiders cover hilariously tasteless and dated myself. But my favourite interpretation of the underground elves remains Mystara's Shadow Elves.

View attachment 46923
That's one of many reasons why I believe Leiber's work is still underappreciated:tongue:!
In my home games I made drow skin a sort of grayish-purple (lavender or thistle) color (instead of black or brown) years ago. I thought I was being clever and original by doing so and only learned well after the fact (I’d already been off the Official D&D train for many years) that I’d independently ended up in the same place WotC already was, at least de facto, which felt mildly embarrassing.
Actually I like that. It's still dark enough for dark elves, and it's showing that this isn't a stand-in for a real race...or should be, some people are bound to misinterpret it regardless:thumbsup:.
 
The worse thing about this cover to me is that it plays only to the pre-existing base. I can't imagine any kid being inspired to check this book out because of the cover.
I was that kid, and now I feel self conscious.

View attachment 46726

This Druid looks like he talks alot about Kraft beers...
Christ I used to work with this guy. A self proclaimed Viking Priest that would bless the kitchen knives each night and made Mead in his apartment. Wore a beret and smoked pot in the walk-in freezer. Half the time you couldn't tell if he was going to stab you or was just in a good mood.
 
Here is my image contribution, the 3E Elf Wizard:
View attachment 46937
Now I'll admit that I liked the 3e art for it's previously mentioned Planescapeyness, but that face... there's something fundamentally wrong with it and it makes me uncomfortable.

That comes from the anatomical guides that they tried to shoehorn into D&D during the 3e era to give every race (even the goblin previously posted in this thread) a distinctive look that didn't even look like prior editions. They sort of decided after the fact that this is how each race looks now in a desperate bid to give D&D its own unique identity, but IMO they all came out horrible. For elves they tried to make their eyes overly angular and sort of flattened their face, shortened their brow and elongated the mid section, giving this weird fugly look to this once sexy ass race.
 
This picture is really weak.
1655597561409-jpeg.46679

This cover is supposed to be selling the setting of Eberron, with its skyscrapers, trains and dinosaurs, and the background is an empty canyon. Of course the foreground is two characters striking a pose while not actually doing anything. This is from a large corporation with an art department and marketing people, and this is what they came up with to sell people on the setting.
It's still better than the original proposal:
1656082496376.png
And though I bought the alternative cover, it also only shows one aspect of the setting:
1656082599158.png
Eberron must be hard to art...
1656082714147.png
The 3rd edition covers at least have a common theme; I like them but they are so busy with different images crammed together like the frames of a comic book panel...
1656083307416.png
 
Last edited:
Erol Otus went from my least favorite DnD artist to my absolute favorite DnD artist over the years. I disliked his style as a teen but after art school and a bit of time I came to love it. It's funny how tastes change.
 
I've always liked that "hanging dragon" picture because I always assumed it was supposed to be like a group of adventurers who thought they were total badasses but comically weren't. You know, like this:

What you heard at the tavern:
1634e73f6ac2b9ea05e74df94e981e04.jpg



What actually happened:
DnD-podcast-header.jpg



In any case I actually like both of those pieces so they aren't my Least Favorite nominations. Which would be the 3E total mockery of a vampire:
3e-vampire.jpg




I mean, just... What in the unholy hell IS this?!? It's like somebody's grandma decided they were going to be an angel for Halloween but then took a fuckton of bath salts until they started vomiting up their own intestines and decided to go as Marilyn Manson instead, but of course by then the retirement home party was already starting so they didn't quite get to finish that idea either. Oh, yeah, and along the way they mistook an unflushed toilet for the bobbing for apples game and never washed their hands afterwards.
 
Here is my image contribution, the 3E Elf Wizard:
View attachment 46937
Now I'll admit that I liked the 3e art for it's previously mentioned Planescapeyness, but that face... there's something fundamentally wrong with it and it makes me uncomfortable.
Funny the drawing and rendering are cool but that face is 'orrible. A Chernobyl elf perhaps?
 
The "should Drow be black?" is an interesting story in its own right because apparently its been a feud going on behind the scenes of fandom and publishers for decades. In addition to the fact the "Always Chaotic Evil" race being black is a terrible thing (especially when they were cursed by Corellon to have black skin like certain crazy ass sects say black people were), there's the people who actually liked that the sudden influence of Drizzt clones actually meant there was a lot more color among fantasy characters.

For me, I grew up not realizing Drow WERE meant to be black.

Yes, because the art always showed them as purple when I picked it up.

MAY052685-full.jpg
9780880389051-us.jpg


Speaking of bad Drizzt art, there's also this awful cover created by famously someone describing Drizzt as a "seventy year old elf" to the artist.

51ZjT8ihY0L._SX312_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg


It doesn't help that Cattie Brie looks twelve years old and this is when their romance begins.
I think their romance worked out alright...

1656820578658.png
 
By accident or design TSR c. 1986 decided to interpret drow “black” skin as brown like African-Americans - it wasn’t just Parkinson, Elmore’s cover of “The Crystal Shard” from 1988 depicts Drizzt the same way. I don’t know if they thought literal black skin would be considered offensive but brown skin wouldn’t, or what. Either way, it looks in retrospect like an embarrassing misjudgment (especially on the GDQ1-7 cover in combination with the sheer spiderweb swimsuit and high-heeled fuck-me boots).
Having dark skin doesn't automatically make you of African descent. It just means your people live close the equator, like those from Southern India or Thai and Malay.
 
Having dark skin doesn't automatically make you of African descent. It just means your people live close the equator, like those from Southern India or Thai and Malay.
Which, to be fair to the no-black-Drow people, is somewhat nonsensical for a race that lives underground.

Because I like the idea of Drow as an inversion of standard elves, I've decided they really come from the Hollow Earth, and the Underdark is just their current stronghold.
 
Funny the drawing and rendering are cool but that face is 'orrible. A Chernobyl elf perhaps?

Yeah, the outfit is kinda weird, but not bad. I almost wanted to like that pic, but always kept looking at her face and thinking "WTF happened to her at child birth?"

Which, to be fair to the no-black-Drow people, is somewhat nonsensical for a race that lives underground.

Yeah, this came up earlier in the thread, but there's always the "It's magic!" element to it that can trump modern scientific thinking. I always included brown skinned dark elves as an option in my games, cuz I thought they looked hawter than pure black, gray or (weird af) purple, and that was the color I chose for my main drow witch character back in the day. Plus I never made the association between dark elves, or any non-human fantasy race, and black people, cuz to me they were non-humans and derived from European folklore anyways. Most dark elves didn't even have distinctly African features, like broad noses or thick lips.

I wish there were non-human races derived from proper African folklore, though, cuz I'm not sure what that looks like. Closest thing to African myth in D&D is Egyptian or Middle Eastern in origin, like Sphinxes and Jinn.
 
Which, to be fair to the no-black-Drow people, is somewhat nonsensical for a race that lives underground.

Because I like the idea of Drow as an inversion of standard elves, I've decided they really come from the Hollow Earth, and the Underdark is just their current stronghold.
According to Forgotten Realm lore, there's a form of magical radiation called Fazress? Something like that, which the Drow created their cities on, and that darkens their skin and pale their hair.
 
Ed Greenwood's DROW OF THE UNDERDARK has it so that the Drow are black skinned because, well, they are the elves of a tropical sunny part of Faerun that were driven underground in relative recent years (by elves standard).

The cult of Lolth seizing power but hardly the only Drow.

Which is probably severing the Gordian Knot regarding them.
 
There's always some gobbligook that can explain why the flahderiha is hookaspang. The gobbligook above is all weaksauce.

A POC friend of mine put it, "Yeah, the Drow could all be albinos. Then there's literally no black elves whatsoever."
 
Young me always thought the radiation view was more intuitive than the sunny elves one.

older me says “it could be, you know, just genetics and we can worry less about the environmental factors. After all, there are green skinned elves and Coppery skinned elves and blue skinned elves and nomadic pale skinned elves that all don’t make sense.” Somewhere they started getting multi complexion within the elf subspecies.

this still makes me want to do a Cyberpunk Menzoberranzan game. There are even protocybernetics in the old 2e drow of the underdark.
 
You can't just drop an observation like that and leave the rest of us hanging . . .
Well, sorry/not sorry for the detail but the idea of lower house/no house drow cyberpunks fighting against the WOMAN and the priesthood. You got magical cybernetic limbs in DotU, and many small magical gadgets that are pretty much identical to cyberpunk equipment. You got hand crossbows as firearms, magical traps, mechanical traps, magical information networks that look like computer nets. A whole urban environment to work with. A literal goddess of webs and webs of intrigue. A lot of style over substance. You even have traditionally slave races who have a hard time getting any respect in the culture, even if they are free.
 
I read in a 2e book once that the Drow were once High Elves who through worship to nd torture from Lloth took on a visage and characteristics that were perversions and opposites of their former selves. This is why their hair turned white and their skin turned black as coal.
 
Banner: The best cosmic horror & Cthulhu Mythos @ DriveThruRPG.com
Back
Top