Art Pressure
About four years ago, my friend and longtime collaborator nuclearobelisk and I made a campaign guide for running a West Marches-style game, specifically for 5e.
At the the time, we were game development students in college, seniors about to graduate. I’d been running a campaign that she played in (one of about a dozen players) for close to two years. We ran a Kickstarter and raised about $25,000, but really needed that cash ourselves and had lots of shipping and printing to pay for, so our actual budget for the project shrank fast.
But we wanted it to look good. This was a 5e book, which meant we needed quite a bit of art. Commissioning all the art we’d need—or even a tenth of what we’d need—was completely out of budget. While nuclearobelisk is a brilliant illustrator, she didn’t have the time or willpower to go draw a hundred full-color pieces.
After hunting around, we eventually found a solution: stock art. Go onto Adobe Stock or Shutterfly, sort by illustrations, and search for something like “fantasy landscape.” There are hundreds of thousands of results, available for—when you buy them in large enough quantities—only a few bucks apiece. So, we used stock art. Dozens or hundreds of pieces, a couple on every spread.
(Most of these were by a single artist, grandfailure, the bedrock and secret unsung hero of RPG art for low-budget projects. Spend enough time looking at indie RPGs on itch, DriveThru, and the DM’s Guild, and you see their work everywhere.)
The book came out okay! We had enough experience with Photoshop and InDesign to tweak and modify the pieces so they didn’t look too generic, and we spent a lot of time curating down the firehose of options that Adobe Stock offers. While certainly not a radical departure from the 5e standard in terms of visual design, it was definitely good enough. We got more than a few compliments on how well it looked compared to other student projects, or books of similar budget.
Stock art saved our project, basically. Without it, we would’ve either had to produce a book with very little art or gone massively over budget. But instead, we used a bunch of cheap stock art, paid for one nice big piece of commissioned art for the cover, filled in a few gaps ourselves, and walked away with a few grand apiece. As students, we counted it as a huge win.
Last year, more than three years after that book, I picked up a graphic design gig working on a third-party 5e project. This was not an official Wizards of the Coast project, nor was it from any of the biggest players just below them—Critical Role, MCDM, or one of their types—but it was from a significant and influential team, only a step or two further down. These were the kind of people who’d been making RPGs for decades, had an official WOTC sourcebook of their own, and made hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in revenue every year, mostly from the DM’s Guild. If you’ve been in RPGs for a while, you’ve probably heard of them.
I met with their project manager and got the rundown: a big setting splatbook, standard 5e two-column layout, a mixture of key and spot art. All very standard stuff.
But then, we got to the interesting part: the project manager linked me to their Google Drive folders with the written plaintext and art in separate files, as normal, and I noticed something. While they had plenty of commissioned art custom-made for this particular project, there was lots of other art, too, more generic stuff.
At first, I took it to be recycled art from previous projects. WOTC does this all the time, especially from old editions, and many other publishers and studios follow suit.
But then I dug a little deeper, and I realized: it was stock art. Some from the DM’s Guild, some from Patreon artists who license it out, and some from Adobe Stock and Shutterfly. This team, with a budget in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for this project, couldn’t afford all the pieces they wanted. Even though they’d sell thousands of copies in the first few months, they still had to use stock art.
This leads me to my next question: what are we doing here?
I mean it! How is it that we’ve gotten to the point, as a hobby and an industry, where one of the most successful and influential teams of the past 20 years, people worked on literal actual Dungeons & Dragons, can’t afford to pay for the art to go in their new book? How have we priced out full-time professionals making some of the most popular products in the world? What strange confluence of conditions brought us here?
The answer, I think, is one of culture, rather than medium. There’s nothing about an RPG book that demands more art; illustrations are nice, and diagrams are sometimes necessary, but ours is a written medium. It’s entirely possible to write an RPG book with no art (just look at your own campaign notes), while an RPG book with no words is more or less incomplete. Provocative and inspiring, maybe, but illustrations alone cannot sustain an RPG in the same way they can sustain, say, a game of Dixit. You don’t need art to play an RPG.
And yet, if you looked at, say, DriveThru, or Kickstarter, or even just your FLGS, I suspect it’d feel different. It’d feel like art was this vital necessity, something requisite to be an RPG. The popular RPGs you see for sale are filled to bursting with illustrations.
Why? Why is it like this?
Mainly, I think, because consumers expect it. Demand it, even. The best-selling RPG books are ones loaded with illustrations and overwrought graphic design. The RPG books that raise the most money on Kickstarter do so on the basis of their gorgeous visuals, not on the quality of their writing. Think about it: when was the last time you bought an RPG because the writing was great? When was the last time someone recommended an RPG to you because they loved the words themselves?
We, as the audience and market for RPG books, seem to consistently value illustrations and graphic design over everything else. Publishers know this, and are so scared of releasing an RPG book without art that they’ll load it full of discount stock art, stuff that looks wildly inconsistent from page to page and clashes heavily with the project itself, just so they can avoid the accusation of being a book without art.
I call this art pressure. The indelible and sometimes ineffable pressure that consumers place on publishers—and publishers place on themselves—to create bigger books with more art.
It is a consumptive desire; books with more art indicate higher budgets, more production value, more “bang for your buck.” They look nicer sitting on your shelf and in the background of your “shelfies;” books with more art are pleasant to page through, to skim over and daydream about rather than actually sit down and read. An RPG consumer who owns many beautiful books displays their dedication to the hobby, proves themselves a genuine fan, regardless of what they actually play—or, as the case may be, don’t play.
And it’s killing small projects. Commissioned pieces are expensive—rightfully so—but only gigantic corporations like Wizards of the Coast have the budget to pay. That small indie RPGs compete in the same market with largely the same expectations as corporate brands like D&D only enhances this pressure. If you’re an indie launching a project on Kickstarter, more better art is the surest path towards selling more copies, and all that art paid for ahead of time is a huge risk. You can use stock art, sure, but do you really want your book to like everything else? Is that what we want our medium to become?
This competition, this pressure to beautify the pages of your book more than you can afford, will continue until we as consumers decide to change. Until the audience for tabletop RPG books decides it is willing to pay for projects without illustrations and deluxe graphic design, the art pressure will continue. It will continue until drains smaller artists—and I say artists here in the broader sense, writers and designers and editors along with illustrators—entirely dry.
This is my challenge to you: go out and buy an RPG book with no illustrations or fancy graphic design, then read every word.
Look around and you’ll find them, on itch or DriveThru or the small online retailers. They’re cheap, cheaper than they ought to be, so you can definitely buy them at full price. Take the time to remind yourself what exactly it is that makes the games you play.
Some of my favorite RPG books with no or almost no illustrations, if you’re looking:
- 1,000 Statues, blark
- Black Manse, Micah Anderson
- Black Wyrm of Brandonsford, Chance Dudinack
- Empire of Texas, Luke Gearing
- The Haunting of Ypsilon-14, D.G. Chapman
- Mike’s Dungeons, Geoff McKinney
- Reivdene-Upon-the-Moss, Chris Bisette
- Songbirds 3e, snow
- Thrift23, Thriftomancer