The Art of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Game

Featuring works by Clyde Caldwell, Jeff Easley, Larry Elmore, Fred Fields, Keith Parkinson, John & Laura Lakey, Denis Beauvais, Jack Pennington, Erik Olson, Jeff Butler, Jim Holloway, David Doman, Valerie Valusek, Stephen Fabian, and George Barr.
The art is from a long "sweet spot" in the history of fantasy illustration, a late 1970s to early 1990s pre-CGI era. While still paying homage to foundational inspiration back to the Pre-Raphaelites and the Art Nouveau-tinged illustration of the late Victorian to Edwardian fairytale books, this new wave in the genre abandoned the rigid stylization of earlier work and embraced diverse influences, from lurid pulps to action-oriented comics, and imported a love of vibrancy and detail found in the output of the period's best sci-fi illustrators (as found especially in Heavy Metal), plus barely detectable hints of anime. These artists jointly forged something of a "canonical" look for D&D in particular, blending Medieval, Renaissance, Nordic, and Near Eastern motifs with Asian and other influences, and otherworldly, novel fantasy elements. This modern, Gen-X fantasy not only forked from the increasingly stereotypical 1960s-1980s "mainstream" style, championed by cover artists like Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, and the Brothers Hildebrandt, it went on to palpably inspire the look and feel of two generations of new work, especially in video gaming (from Dragon Quest and World of Warcraft, through Warhammer – sharing a tabletop origin with D&D – to The Elder Scrolls and The Witcher).

Note: This ePub is a serviceable but not ideal copy. The (sparse) text has not been OCRed, and every page has a strange sort of histogram thumbnail at bottom left. But the art scans are actually reasonable for screen resolution, good enough to enjoy and even to reuse for things (e.g. social media posts) that do not need high fidelity. This work really deserves a high-resolution scan from the original book, though.