After hearing about how awful the Book of Erotic Fantasy was, I decided to see what all the hoopla was about and illegally downloaded it.

Don't worry, I didn't read any of the articles, I just got it for the pictures. And the pictures they did suck. It wasn't a good suck, either Badly photoshopped pictures of people in absurd fetish costumes. They sucked worse than a shop-vac with a hose that is just short enough for your penis to reach the motor blades.

So, after being scarred for life by the worst art ever, I am left to ask myself, is a book with this art in it even worth reading. And I say no. So I delete it without bothering. It isn't worth hard drive space, much less the retail cost of a paper version. The artwork tells me so.

A wise person said that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but that leaves us to ask if you should judge a book by its interior artwork. And I say yes. I'm sure that many other people so, as well. When you have 5 minutes to flip through a book at a store, artwork can be powerful. Artwork is a measure of quality if the makers of the book can't bother to put good artwork into it, then why would they both to put good writing into it, or good rules.

Come on. When I open a The Book of Erotic Fantasy, I want to see a large-breasted Drider performing cunnilingus on a unwilling bugbear Paladin and two Beholders fellating each-other's eyestalks in a 69. What the hell were they thinking?

If you're going to have a book about how gold dragons can take human form for the purpose of violating elven princesses the least you can do is have a good artist make the illustrations instead of using bad photoshopping. ("I don't know but I've been told....")

There are plenty of high quality fetish comics and you know there's artists out there who could do centaurs on orcs. If you're going to do something do it right. Especially if it's a book of erotic fantasy which people will not take seriously unless it is high quality. It should be at least Viper RSR quality.

Maybe we should start a petition to create a proper version.

I often wish that I were a millionaire philanthropist on the grounds that I could finance stuff like this. I'd hire some of the best-respected BDSM artists to draw water elementals tupping dryads and then I'd hire some doctors to make ultra-realistic tables for humanoid on humanoid sex in terms of things like probability of contracting STI, probability of concieving, and so forth. Finally, I'd have historians write a background piece on STIs in medieval times.

Should that be, "Good to goo?"

On the pseudo-original topic of effects of interior art on the product over all, I point to Living Room Games as a prime example. They did Earthdawn 2nd edition. Badly. Some of the worst art I've seen. To make my case of how art work reflects the over all quality and effort, I'll point to LRG's horrors book Scourge Unending, vs Fasa's horrors book, simply titled Horrors.

We'll start howeverm with the cover.
LRG cover - badly done man in armor, freaking out as a shadow of a horror is seen sneaking up behind him.

Fasa - verjigorm coming to eat your face

Winner - Fasa

But that's cover art, so it's only tangetly related.

Already thinking about it, i've decided that I don't want to go over a case by case review of the art in either book. It's not worth the effort. I'm lazy and frankly not that bored. Suffice to say, most of the art in the Horrors book is disturbing, twisted, crazed representations, lots of them done, naturally, by Laubenstein. He makes crazy ass pics, especially in Earthdawn. It fits the material well, and makes for an over all oogy (yes I said 'oogy') feel to the book.

Then we have LRG Scourge Undending. Cool title, but the coolness ends there. We have the majority of pictures (we won't call them art cause we're being snobby now) that loko like they were drawn, I kid you not, by high school art students. Bored high school art students. Bored, bad high school art students. Well, since a lot of them have the same style as well, make that 'student' singular.

They're cartoony, and I don't mean comic book cartoony where you can have cool guys like Jim Lee or Michael Turner. No I mean like Tuesday afternoon Batman animated series cartoony. Weak and uninspired. They just stink.

Then you go to the content of both books.
Fasa Horrors A number of first person accounts and stories, usually from the 'presented from the Great Library of Throal' approach, describing the effects of the horrors as they actually happened. Not "this is the critter, here's it stats". Stats were a very small part of this book. Naturally that can cause problems when you try to run the game, but by far the attention was devoted to the feel of it. The aura of menace, evil, and plain ol' wrongness of the Horrors. Which, IMO at least, is how it should be.

LRG - Scourge Unending -A recap/ catch up on the horrors from the first Horrors book. That's write, they just took all the horrors someone else had written up, and updated them, plus a half dozen others, many pretty unusable. They've got one in there that's a giant vortex, a moving whirlpool in the sea. Now yeah, tha's dangerous, but WTF?! Is it horrifying?! No. Is it even something that can be used in a game? Even verjigorm can be used as a high level threat, such as in the Fasa adventure Shattered Pattern. but WTF are you going to do with a whirl pool? "Oh shit! A whirl pool! Uhh... go... faster! that's it!" Can't fight it, can't sling spells at it, can't try to inspire it, you can't even really be terrified of it and it's menace unless it plays with it's food. Not very usable from the game masters POV.

The one thing this book did do was provide stats for a number of low level horrors with a few ways to use them in game. Which, really, is a good way to sum up the book as a whole. Low quality, more quantity. And the art is the same. There's more pics, and they stink.

So yes, interior art work is a good indicator of the substance of the book, in my experience.

Not a bad review, but you mixed up one thing: according to the colour page inside (which has the same picture but is labeled with the Horror name) the cover is actually Taint coming to eat your face, not Verjigorm.

Also, while many of the pictures are wonderful, several of them are also horribly inconsistent—not that that's not explainable in many cases, but compare the two pictures of Chantrel's Horror and see if you can reconcile them.

(Disclaimer: still my favourite RPG sourcebook ever. Possibly the only thing that can be this awesome with this little '80s.)

~J

Big fat +1 on the LRG artwork problems. In addition to much of the quality just being low, there are stylistic issues that come up when your artists are that different from one another. The artists for a book doesn't all need to match up perfectly in style, but when some looks like middle school art class attempts, some looks like sleek, stylized, anime characters, and some looks like a would-be Elmore, the whole thing is just left not meshing well.

A buddy of mine has done some artwork for Livingroom Games, and I always feel a little bad for him -- most of it is so bad when you flip through it, page by page, it doesn't really help how good his is. I've bought every book his stuff has been published in, partially because we play ED 2nd sporadically and partially because he's my buddy and that's what friends do...but I've felt a little stupid after each purchase. I get one picture I like, two or three I tolerate, and some I'd hesitate to blow my nose with. One good piece of art amidst all the rest isn't enough to save a book.

It's like finding a quarter in a pile of dog poop. Yeah, sure, I really like quarters. But that doesn't mean you're going to feel like a genius if you pick that particular quarter up.

Adding to the problem is that he can't draw cartoony stuff. He once tried to draw some anime-style characters for a friend's birthday present (a poster-sized picture of the main characters from Gold Digger) and he was physically incapable of drawing them all anime looking. They got a realistic interpretation of three anime girls, with a silly anime comic book gun drawn as an M-16 instead, etc, etc.

So it's kind of jarring, to flip through The Way of War and see all the weird junk, then the troll stick-fighter that's drawn, for lack of a better term, as a somewhat realistic fantasy piece.

Been looking through a friends NWoD books at the art recently and I don't like much of it. I'll probably read through the system a little mainly mage but the art sucks. I loved the old stuff.

I'm glad they have rules for fetal alcohol syndrome. It's a very important rule when you think how in medieval europe people both drank a lot of booze and also probably didn't know about the risk of fetal alcohol syndrome.

I'm a fan of Phil Foglio's work if that helps

http://www.studiofoglio.com (my not be work safe depending on where you click).

Carl

Ah, the Mighty Phil. I remember the cover he did for Dragon Magazine #32. It was a kid on Christmas morning, who had just opened his presents; he got a bunch of toy soldiers. Unfortunately, they came to life and started shooting at him, whist he cowered behind a chair. Brilliant! Alas, when I emailed the site, they informed me that none of his cover work was available in print form, though they promised they would add it to their (very backlogged) projects list.

I totally agree about LRG's art. RedBrick forever! White Wolf also suffered a bout of "anime syndrome" in Werewolf 3rd, as well as Exalted. Bleh. On the other hand, the stuff for Vampire: The Dark Ages 2nd rocked.

I dig Girl Genius. Im a sucker for good art. On that note, I hate seeing crap artwork. Which is why most of LRG's stuff I consider crap.