Let's compare covers

[Wolverine]

Goal of your cover: Get people to buy the product or at least pick it up.

A cover should also, in my opinion, portray a scene which the players could re-enact within their own game. They may not be able to do so with starting characters, but it should still inspire them. FantasyCraft does this, while 4.0 merely shows two characters posing in a tunnel. As Morg mentioned at GenCon, if you replaced them with fruit would anything really change with the picture?

[Nepenthe]

And I'll be the first to admit that I'm a friend of chicks, both in bodysuits and otherwise in varying states of undress. The combination with the draconic guy just makes it seem like it should be next to the expression "playing it safe" in an illustrated dictionary.

Nep, the unofficial head honcho of the ms. Intruder fan club 

[Crafty_Pat]

That being said, I think your probably targetting the niche market, and in doing that in succeeds. From this board and other comments probably rather well. Commercials can be busy too, it depends on your market. But you really shouldn't downplay what it is.

A lot of thought and dialog went into the target market for Fantasy Craft - what it is and just as importantly what it's not. The ultimate truth of the matter is that we're not even remotely courting the same audience as 4E. In fact, we suspect that a bunch of Fantasy Craft fans will actually be former D&D fans - folks who want something a little more traditional and a lot more robust.

Oh, and just the least bit retro. Oh yeah, I'd say there's as much AD&D as 3E in there - especially in the art.

[MilitiaJim]

I hope you won't mind too much when I drag my friends who usually play D&D into the Crafty 'Verse.

[Crafty_Pat]

I hope you won't mind too much when I drag my friends who usually play D&D into the Crafty 'Verse.

Mind? Not at all! Like I said, we expect some crossover but we expect just as many fans who don't play 4E at all. All are perfectly welcome.

[Crafty_Alex]

Just for point of reference in response to the "busy" vs. "retro" stance, here's a few pieces of reference I looked to for inspiration:

The FC cover:


The Basic Blue Cover:


The Basic Red cover:


Warhammer Fantasy Battles v1 Cover:


Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay v1 Cover:


Heroquest cover:


AD&D PHB Cover:


While the FC cover is certainly not in the modern style of super-clean and single figures posing...there's something decidedly exciting about it for those of us crusty enough to reminisce

[TheTSKoala]

I hope you won't mind too much when I drag my friends who usually play D&D into the Crafty 'Verse.

MilitiaJim's idea is the same as mine.  They love Spycraft for the modern things... they're still hestitant of going away from "the known evil".. but I'm not giving them a choice. 

[ThunderMonkey]

I thought the Crafty cover IS rather old-school, but in this case... old-school is good.

The only thing that the 4.0 cover has in it's favor... it shows more skin. Then again, that should testify as to what WOTC thinks of the content of the book: A little flash and a lot of tease.

[Desertpuma]

The cover is the good ol' school!

[Number Three]

Just for point of reference in response to the "busy" vs. "retro" stance, here's a few pieces of reference I looked to for inspiration:

I think I might have figured out the complaint.  It's not that the cover is too busy, it's their eyes.  I can't find a focus point in the Fantasycraft cover.  On the Blue Box, your eyes go straight to the dragon.  Warhammer, like the first edition Legend of the Five Rings RPG, has a prominent hero at the center of the melee.  There is no doubt that the AD&D cover is about that statue being looted.

What's the first thing your eyes go to with the Fantasycraft cover?  Yeah, it's awesome, but where do you first focus?  The... giant... hand?  Then maybe to Hannibal Halfling?  You have to pull back to see the party, and then further to discover the unique point of view.  If you have a frame a reference, your mind will then resolve the whoop ass taking place.  If you don't, you are lost.  It is so old school you have to have graduated from the school to know.

The point of all this?  Ascetic issues aside, both covers do exactly what they're intended to do.  They're just intended to bring in different people.  ...Even if that does mean, sadly, that I'm resorting to the Kevin Smith Theory of Critical Immunity.

Complete aside:

[sigh]  You guys are going to make me be the downer, aren't you?   As Famine... already pointed out

A trenchcoated guy and a chick in a skin-tight bodysuit. Groundbreaking, Crafty, groundbreaking.

Oh, it still makes me sad how hard I fought for the cover to include the BACKGROUND imagery that goes with those figures  . SO much cooler as a complete scene rather than isolated figures.

Pix or it didn't happen? 

[Crafty_Pat]

Complete aside:

[sigh]  You guys are going to make me be the downer, aren't you?    As Famine... already pointed out

A trenchcoated guy and a chick in a skin-tight bodysuit. Groundbreaking, Crafty, groundbreaking.

Oh, it still makes me sad how hard I fought for the cover to include the BACKGROUND imagery that goes with those figures  . SO much cooler as a complete scene rather than isolated figures.

Pix or it didn't happen? 

It didn't. The mandate at the time was that all covers would feature 1 inactive character, with Spycraft 2.0 being an anomaly in that it featured... 2. 

I'm kinda surprised I got away with the World on Fire cover, to be honest. It shouldn't have been an option.

[Number Three]

Oh, it still makes me sad how hard I fought for the cover to include the BACKGROUND imagery that goes with those figures  . SO much cooler as a complete scene rather than isolated figures.

Pix or it didn't happen? 

It didn't. The mandate at the time was that all covers would feature 1 inactive character, with Spycraft 2.0 being an anomaly in that it featured... 2. 

Shucks.  I got the idea that the original cover image had a background, and you guys had it lying on a hard drive somewhere.

I'm kinda surprised I got away with the World on Fire cover, to be honest. It shouldn't have been an option.

Er, because the pursuer isn't so much as "featured" as he is "standing in the background", "providing necessary context" and "inadvertently appearing to wield a light saber three times his size"?

[Crafty_Pat]

Shucks.  I got the idea that the original cover image had a background, and you guys had it lying on a hard drive somewhere.

Oh the image did, yeah, but it was never built into a full cover.

I've got that lying around. I'll try to get it up in the gallery later this week.

I'm kinda surprised I got away with the World on Fire cover, to be honest. It shouldn't have been an option.

Er, because the pursuer isn't so much as "featured" as he is "standing in the background", "providing necessary context" and "inadvertently appearing to wield a light saber three times his size"?

Heh. Because they weren't static. At the time, action on covers was largely verbotten.

[Agent 333]

See, were I given the necessity that there be no action on the cover, I would have used the picture of Richard Poole instead of the akwardly posing people that ended up getting used.

[Morgenstern]

Goal of a commercial: Get people to buy product or at least look at it.
Goal of your cover: Get people to buy the product or at least pick it up.

So that being said your cover SHOULD look like a commercial.

Typical interaction between customer and comercial: Deliberately ignoring it after the first exposure.

While the cover is intended to be an introduction and an enticement to perchase, it assumes that the target audience (who will be expected to sit down and read it and even devote 4+ hour blocks of time to playing it) has an attention span longer than a few seconds. So while it is a comercial, it doesn't look like a comercial in terms of simplicity . And entirely unlike a typical comercial (or in my estimation the 4.0 covers) it is designed to reward interacting with it beyond the first brief glance.

There are several schools of though in advertising, and some of them are just about played out as they have throroughly immunized the audience against their wiles with over exposure.