#RPGaDAY2020 4: VISION

#RPGaDAY2020

4: VISION

Some advice for using visual references in RPGs, featuring trailers and title sequences for some of my games, a photo that made a scene happen, and the time I lifted a character from a Red Cross advert.

I use visual media quite frequently in gaming. I often have, both drawing myself and swiping photographs and other art, though particularly since getting online in 1999 and having access to so much more. A lot of my prep time goes to finding suitable imagery. Generally photography for modern games, traditional art for fantasy, comics style for supers, fancy CGI spaceships for SF and so on.

I really got going with The Watch House, four years after I got online, based on TV, and with the Buffy rulebook suggesting casting the game like a spinoff show. This grew to the point of Christmas and birthday presents including customised action figures, commissioned art, and video editing a title sequence.

I’ve made some more title sequences since, including gifts (referencing the original made in The Movies) and requests, trailers for gamelines, and more

I also made one for my Sounds Like Hell Buffy setup at the Nationals once I had a tablet to show the players, and have made some in advance for games I planned to run, which I often then didn’t actually end up running...

For pictures of Buffy monsters, my main source is the suitably forehead-y monster appliance store The Scream Team.

Red. Big fan of the Sox.

One of their photoshoot models, Alex Ward, is now known as Jasper in L.A. By Night. So I can say he appeared in one of my games before he was famous :D

Recently I took visualising characters further with some Vampire games, both Masquerade and Requiem, with card-sized pictures printed out for basically everybody. I brought spares to make it less obvious which NPCs I prepared in advance and which I didn’t, and put names on the cards to make myself think of names in advance and cover that blind spot. It also helped show who was where in meetings of the Camarilla vampire establishment and the anarch opposition.

For modern Vampire, I look for a Prince and other really key characters first, and then a consistent source for more NPCs, avoiding anybody too starry. Person Of Interest is a goldmine of not-that-famous New York character actors, with lots of people looking sinister in suits and shifty in street clothes, often at night. (Wiki with many good quality images in the Character tab, and obviously spoilers.) Find a few less human-looking Nosferatu types (The Walking Dead less rotten zombies help here) and some other highlight characters to taste.

The most prominent Nosferatu in my first V5 game was represented by Jane Levy as the possessed Mia from the 2013 The Evil Dead. She looked variably scary depending on her Hunger. This is her on a bad day. She even showed up looking human once, suggesting she got down to Hunger zero...

See also fantasy art for fantasy games, concept art for SF properties like Star Wars, galleries of original superheroes and villains (I try to keep a consistent art style here) and so on.

Art can influence games as well. I might include a character or scene because I found an image I want to use.

The anarch leader from that V5 game was recycled from my previous short-lived Requiem game No Man’s Land because this picture of Abbey Lee Kershaw looked so dang cool.

Out in the day, that's OOC.

And she showed up at the Camarilla Winter Solstice ball partially because I also found a picture of the casting choice in a suitable outfit.

This led to jokes about having accidentally cast a real vampire as a vampire.

The oddest place I ever picked up a character was this advert for the Red Cross, which inspired a Thin-Blood seer in a Masquerade game.

The ultimate example was when I ran the Serenity RPG when it came out, and when most of the players missed a session, I asked if the player who had shown up had seen the film, as it was in cinemas at the time...