Goodman Games 25th Anniversary Celebration Project Update: The DCC Cover Art Takes Shape

Goodman Games

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13 days ago

Project Update: The DCC Cover Art Takes Shape

Few independent TTRPG's have sold 200,000 copies of their core rulebook, but Dungeon Crawl Classics can make that claim. Doug's iconic "blue cover" or "door cover", as it's alternately called, has been seen by quite a few gamers over the years.

As part of this history project, I went through several old hard drives. These include some 2010-era mockups of the cover concept, into several of Doug's early sketches and color roughs. For today's update, let's review these exciting artifacts!

This earliest mockup used the cover of an old paperback I had in my collection. If memory serves, I scanned the paperback cover and dropped in the logos. The goal was to show "concept and tone" rather than a specific image. I had a lot of paperbacks and this cover seemed to get a lot of things right.

Another logo mockup. Based on file dates, we were doing this in March 2010, so around the time of the Gary Con 2 visit.

Another mockup, closer to the final trade dress.

With those concepts established, Doug turned in three rough sketches in early May.

By July, we were experimenting with logo treatments. Doug was actively painting as we tried out a variety of logo treatments on the color rough.

Savage Sword of Conan was inspiration on many of these cover treatments.

The finished image with the first trade dress, which included the yellow logo at lower right. If I remember correctly, the yellow color was inspired by the old DAW spines. In the final version of the cover treatment, as we all know, that logo got removed.

It's fun to look back on this cover, 16 years later, and think about how far we have come!

The cover itself featured many aspects uncommon in fantasy RPG illustrations at the time. The character's face is not visible. Is he a hero or a villain - or simply an adventurer? He carries implements of a warrior and a wizard, sword and staff - what role does he serve? The door has a face and stares back at him - what sort of self-reflection is occurring? The path from character to door is broken and jagged, with the peril of a jump or descent, and no clear safe landing. Much like the path from 4E to DCC RPG...

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