Review by C.J. Bunce
As a high schooler who wasn’t a gamer, I watched my friends with their stack of books and wondered why the books looked so… corporate. I knew enough about the basics of Dungeons & Dragons, and knew the focus on role-playing and imagination, and couldn’t see why players didn’t use some kind of fantasy covers, like poster art from Dragonslayer or The Dark Crystal. Wandering a Borders or Barnes and Noble bookstore more than 15 years ago, I thought the faux leather and metal locks-and-hinge look from the 3.5 Edition was what I had expected for an in-universe look of a game that was about bringing players inside a new world. Wizards of the Coast stepped into a different flavor of that theme with its variant series of books for the 5th Edition, and the result has been pretty stunning.
The variants Wizards of the Coast chose were created by Hydro74. That’s the alias of artist Joshua M. Smith, whose artwork often reflects a unique style that pulls together the bright-on-black contrasts of 1970s black velvet posters, magical stylized creatures, and eye-popping foil-embossed, metallic inks. In a series where magic is key, the selection of Hydro74 for the 5th Edition special variant covers was a great choice.
Wizards of the Coast has been slowly releasing the variants beginning late 2016 with Hydro74 covers on special editions of Volo’s Guide to Monsters, and continuing with Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, this year’s history of D&D: Art & Arcana, and a stylized D&D ampersand dragon used for other covers and poster art that began as a cover for Dragon+ magazine in 2015. But now the publisher has created a one-stop ultimate collection of special covers for the key 5th Edition books released before the other Hydro74 covers became the theme, in the Special Edition Core Rulebooks Gift Set. The set includes Hydro74 cover versions for the Dungeon Master’s Guide, the Monster Manual, and the Player’s Handbook, and a sturdy storage box and screen–both decorated with shiny red and gold embossed dragon imagery. If you haven’t picked up the core rulebooks for the 5th Edition yet and you’ve been thinking about diving in, this is the place to start.
And the reverse art on these books looks just as intriguing as the front.
Check out links above to each book for the borg reviews of the contents of each publication.
Keep an eye out and you may find Hydro74 art everywhere. He’s done other commercial artwork for Solo: A Star Wars Story for Hasbro and the coming Hasbro release BumbleBee, plus Gatorade, snowboards, motorcycles, magazines, shoe companies, poster art, and lots more.
Just out, pick up the new Special Edition Core Rulebooks Gift Set now at your local game store. The variant editions are first released in game stores, but can often be found in the aftermarket via third party sellers of Amazon or on eBay if you can’t find a local store.
Here are some higher resolution images showing the details of the cover art for the Gift Set and past cover variants:
A standard edition of the boxed gift set with screen including the regular edition cover style is also available. Check it out here at Amazon (link to Amazon regular set after 2018).
