Saturday, March 7, 2015

My Favorite RPG Covers


Pretty sure this was originally commissioned for something else


(Carcosa)




This was originally the cover of a sci fi novel, I believe, so also cheating

16 comments:

  1. The Stormbringer cover is by Michael Whelan. It is called "Stormbringer" and is one of his most famous works. The earliest use I know of is for Daw Books in 1977. The artist sells prints of it on his website.

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    1. It was also used on a pretty dope Cirith Ungol album cover

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  2. Had to look up the band. Their first four albums are using the same Whelan covers as the Daw Books.

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  3. I can't disagree with this list at all. Very cool covers.
    I have always been partial to the cover to CJ Carella's WitchCraft myself.

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  4. Now I wish I still had my copy of _Stormbringer_.

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  5. The Stormbringer cover was also used on the first Swedish rpg "Drakar och Demoner" (dragons and demons) around 1982. It was my gateway drug into the rpg world.

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  6. Posted a comment about Stormbringer in the wrong post, but yeah, what chartmapcounter said. Also, Whelan's Barsoom illustrations rival Frazetta's.

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    1. mmmmm…i think they lack the dynamism and darkness that makes Frazetta more than the sum of his parts
      They're nice, but Frazetta was _Frazetta_

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  7. Yoshitaka Amano is the cover artist for the Japanese version of Stormbringer.

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  8. I always liked the Gerald Brom art for the Dark Sun line; they made me want to read the books to see what the heck the characters were.

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  9. Gotta say, despite the, um, lackluster monsters contained in the original Fiend Folio, the cover really sold me on the book back when it first came out. I still think it was worth the price just for that!

    I guess you could say it's the gith that keeps on giving!

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  10. Not an RPG cover, but I always loved this piece from the Wraith: The Oblivion sourcebook about the Holocaust.
    http://static.intelimedia.pl/wod---wraith---the-oblivion---charnel-houses-of-europe_big.png

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  11. I love that Feng Shui cover. It captured the HK sense that the game is trying to express much better than some of the interior art.

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  12. That Traveller image was also used on the 2nd edition of the SpaceMaster Companion I from Iron Crown. The piece is by Jim Burns, a famous science-fiction artist from the 1970s on... so I'm sure it appeared somewhere, from the sounds of it, likely on a Robert Silverberg book cover...

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  13. Aaand here's an io9 article about that Jim Burns piece... http://io9.com/5751393/is-this-the-most-archetypal-1970s-science-fiction-book-cover

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  14. Thieves' World supplement http://www.blackgate.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Thieves-World-Chaosium.jpg using the same cover art as the first book in the series. I have to agree with the FF cover, it made up for the inclusion of the Flumph.

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