#RPGCovers Week Twelve Legacy: Life Among the Ruins (2018) Tithi Luadthong aka grandfailure
While they’re since become a regular go-to for many people’s stock art (a good thing, I’ve used them for the Age of Ravens collections), Legacy was the first place I really noticed Luadthong’s work. I’m sure I’d seen their images elsewhere but here the cover grabbed my attention. Then, as I went through the rest of Legacy, I was struck by how much the interior art by Luadthong felt consistent and right.
I don’t know if it is a question of exposure and mental connections, but I can’t imagine any other art with this– the core book or the two supplements. I remain shocked that the art wasn’t commissioned specifically for these concepts and materials. Maybe they were all then released as stock art, but I don’t think so. I’m focusing on covers, so let me stick with that– but understand that the interior art in these is great, evocative, and smartly chosen.
Part of what makes Luadthong’s work so good is that it presents a rich story, but one which leaves open a great deal of imaginative space. Things are in silhouettes, abstractions, or slightly blurred, leaving you to fill in the details.
For our main cover, we have an orange sky– is it dusk or dawn? Or is the sky that color from some fallout? The lightest color falls about a third of the way down the page–so there’s a spectrum of light and dark from the top and bottom. We only view our figures from the back, but we can see that weird mix of archaic tech and cobbled together tech scrap. Just above them we see the ruins: titanic and collapsed.
But below them, where we’re looking down, we see a settlement. Are our figures returning home or is their purpose more sinister? The village below is the only place in the color scheme which shows us a true green, hinting that this is a place of life and growth. The logo at the top and the settlement below balance out the composition of the page.
Legacy has a couple of supplements which use Luadthong’s work. The two most significant are The Engine of Life and End Game. The former is more green and filled with life, as is appropriate for the subject matter. We actually see the faces of our characters, but we’re still left with questions, like what is this structure they’re sitting in? On the other hand, End Game works in harsher reds and oranges. The sky behind burns, and it feels more like an explosion than a dawn. Unlike EoL the figure here is shadowed and uncertain, hidden from us. What is this “swing”? A metaphor or a literal harness for some flying craft?
We don’t know and again that’s its strength: letting us find our stories.
I should also mention the Legacy logo is pretty good. I like the combination of a distressed font with an almost stencil approach for certain letters. I hadn’t noticed until I really examined this closely, but the letters are cut away by a ruined skyscape. At first I assumed that was an element added to the main title, but it’s actually part of the font itself and appears across the lettering. It’s subtle and great.
