Him and that Bellflower dude down in Tejas.
Off to bed....
Off to bed....
New thought about the course of Traveller
- Thread starter Garyius2003
- Start date
Usually the first image of Vargr I think of is the one done by Mike Vilardi for MegaTraveller Journal No. 2, page 47. It's an action scene with three armed Vargr shouting and pointing.
FWIWIMO, MegaTraveller had the best art of all the editions of the game.
GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
TONE is a completely different issue, and is not solvable because each of us brings a different set of expectations and references to this game.
Blue Ghost said:
Mainstream publishing had a LOT more money available to it. For every SF&F book selling 20,000 copies there was a Romance novel doing twice those numbers and a NYT Best Seller at twenty times that, or more. Sometimes a LOT more. The paperback side also uses a lot of cheaper paper.
And don't forget that a lot of SF&F had really poor covers. Getting Foss, Whelan, or another talent for a cover was often limited to a particular series, and called for one piece of art per year. Game books from a prolific company require a stack of interstitial art plus a cover, and could be needed a dozen or more times per year each. On sales figures of four digits in most cases, five in a few exceptional cases. Even Dragon never had the circulation numbers of The New Yorker or Playboy (two magazines known for their interstitial art, among other things...), and by the standards you apply, neither of them has good art either. That one of them depends on *ahem* photography is also significant. Photography is potentially far more efficient monetarily. and gaming can't use it except on the occasional convention report. Those convention reports were often swimming in photos because, unlike in the News business, those pictures were effectively FREE.
Funny coincidence: the only game magazines that survive outside of the top selling RPG (Paizo's Pathfinder) are focused on miniatures, where the efficiency of the camera can make their pages cheap to fill with pictures.
Chuck Anumia
SOC-14 1K
Agreed
It seemed like the PTB took their art seriously and were trying to promote a realistic future rather than a fantasy/Sci-Fi future.
I agree
It seemed like the PTB took their art seriously and were trying to promote a realistic future rather than a fantasy/Sci-Fi future.
SpaceBadger
SOC-14 1K
De gustibus non est disputandem.
I personally prefer the artwork of the GURPS Traveller line as a whole (NOT GT Humaniti!).
I personally prefer the artwork of the GURPS Traveller line as a whole (NOT GT Humaniti!).
Garyius2003
SOC-13
This pretty much expresses what I think of 66% of Traveller art.
http://www.somethingawful.com/dungeons-and-dragons/traveller-artwork-steve/1/
http://www.somethingawful.com/dungeons-and-dragons/traveller-artwork-steve/1/
T4 art did nothing for me, but otherwise I'm fine with the various products produced. Art takes time and money. It must convey a point, emotion, description. Hopefully, it is accurate.
Fantasy art has a bigger draw, more artists and hence more product choices for the developer. I try to avoid straight comparisons.
Well, I was pretty young and dumb back then. I simply didn't know any better. I just remember seeing a lot of the cover art on many a sci-fi novel repeated here and there for other publications. And I often wondered why that was.
But here we are three decades and a few years later, and art, good art, seems to be difficult to obtain for my favorite publications.
GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
White Dwarf got away with it by being second use, and being the only RPG game in the UK for many years. Dragon got away with it by being where some of those artists made their name in the first place.
You did NOT go there! :nonono:
MegaTraveller cover art is all based on 80's bands album covers. Flock of Seagulls, Duran Duran, insert eighties technopop band name here... You are slamming an entire genre of...
(As an aside, I once asked if it was possible to create an app which dropped the MT cover template on top of random 80s album covers pulled from the web. Sigh...)
ShapeShifter
SOC-13
:rofl:
These guys crack me up every time!
On the Next Episode of Jonny Quest (or the Venture Brothers)...
o:
Well, I can totally see the financial argument. Money is the limiting factor. But here we are in 2014, and we're still dealing with the same issue. I think Traveller is hampered by its own level of success, and I think part of that has been the art.
I'll take another shot at another CT artist contributor; Bill Keith. The dude can write circles around me, but his pencils for a lot of the CT supplements really made me cringe. My friend and I almost put down Traveller because of that. Not a very good thing to say, but, well, I can't say we were the only ones thinking along that lines all those years ago.
When you're younger you don't understand about money. Okay, fine. How come Traveller didn't look as sleek as a Parker Brothers or Milton Bradley game? You get older and figure it out. But now it's 2014, and there are better and more reasonably priced artists out there now. There's an explosion of talent, and we're still kind of dealing with some of the same issues for this game.
Vladika
SOC-14 1K
My own thought is that the "art" never mattered to me. Traveller is imagination, not a comic book; the brain tells the story, not the pictures.
In many instances the poor "artwork" would have been better left out and a few more lines of print added.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
I'd be happy with the plain text of CT with the gun ⌧ that was the inside covers of T2300 
Yes, but you know Traveller. When you're introduced to it and see all the art it opens the imagination. I think DGP found that out the hardway with AI. They had one piece of art and a book of rules at a table in Gencon. I got the feeling the hadn't pushed much interest forward.
I will agree with you that bad art can hurt a game just as much as no art. I found little interest in opening the T4 books.
Well, Gygax and S. Jackson learned the lesson, and so did a lot of other companies. The original art D&D makes me scrunch my lips.
As the years wore on I noticed that the D&D line seemed to improve in aesthetically. So did GURPS for that matter. SFB, was, well ... SFB.
Presentation isn't everything, but it does help a great deal.
As the years wore on I noticed that the D&D line seemed to improve in aesthetically. So did GURPS for that matter. SFB, was, well ... SFB.
Presentation isn't everything, but it does help a great deal.
Actually, I thought of the Venusian dragons in his Between Planets.
Maybe, BG, that's because they are NOT a T4 race, but were originally documented in Journal of the Travellers Aid Society No. 12 by the late, great J. Andrew Keith.
Heh. Winchell himself said (when he was re-doing the Annic Nova, just recently) that he wished he had the skills back then that he has today.
And mused about how his artwork might look now, if he had had those skills back then, plus the extra 30 years since...
(I hope you've all seen his updated Annic Nova, and been suitably blown away!) Here:
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/nyrath/sets/72157626769746781/
I vaguely recall that. When I read up on the Virshu some years back in the GT Aliens Supp it immediately kicked me into a writer's binge, and at the time I couldn't think of where I heard of them first. I had a scout team with a Virushi medic on a type-S, and one of the human crew had to share a cabin with the Virushi medic. If I ever dig it up I'll post it on my blog.
I don't have too much to say about T4 nor its contribution to Traveller. I never played it, though I bought several of the books just to have when Imperiumgames.com was near to closing its doors.
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