Intro Adventure Cover: 3rd Edition

  It's the year 2000. We've entered a bold new era for D&D. TSR is gone, now the brand is under the wise and compassionate stewardship of Wizards of the Coast, and there definitely won't be a CEO named Williams who ruins the brand by misunderstanding the customers ever again. A new team has made Dungeons and Dragons Third Edition, and timed with the release of the rules there's a brand new 1st-level adventure, The Sunless Citadel. And boy howdy do we have a tone shift in this cover illustration. It's a whole new world...
  First, the palette and style. Muted "realistic" colors; this is teal and orange put through several grit filters. While not photorealistic, there's a real attempt to ground the art in realism, leading to some weird results like the halfling (?) being just an anatomically normal human. It's 2000 so grunge aesthetics are still popular, but there's a admirable restraint with spikes compared to the excess we know is soon coming. The lighting here is stark, we're still in a foggy space but with that tree there's at least a suggestion that the action is taking place in an actual location. And unlike Night Below, we're at least back into the action.
  The inversion of power from the earlier D&D eras is stark. Gone are the small adventurers, placed in the foreground against massive monsters. Instead, we have a swarm of tiny, spiky, literally faceless monsters, attacking in a mass wave but only threatening because there's a ton of them. The adventurers, meanwhile, are enormous when contrasted with the monsters, even the halfling. While these player characters are all obviously stressed by the swarm of spiky critters, none of them are taking any obvious injuries, a stark contrast to the 1e era where adventurers felt very fragile in the art. These adventurers are heroes, and very powerful:

1. Standard Dwarf Guy is poised to chop a monster with his axe.
   
2. Odd Perspective Halfling is athletically in the midst of stabbing a monster with her sword.
   
3. Human Fighter has just cleaved through multiple monsters, splintering them with his mace.   
4. Elvish Alan Rickman is casting some kind of bright spell, looks to be completely in charge.

  The power, energy, and action here is all carried by the player characters, and its expressed by them all being cool badasses in combat. Gone are the days where we should worry about it when combat begins, here in 3e "roll for initiative" should means everyone gets excited and leans forward in their seats. The base game system can support old-school play, but that's not what's being depicted here...here we have a party of badass heroes, eagerly smiting ugly and unpleasant monsters in the foggy dark of a set piece. It's pretty accurate to the edition, I'd say.
  With the new millennium, cover art have finally granted its protagonists pants.