Campaign Spin-Up VI - getting the aesthetic across

Spinning up the Southern Reaches campaign, one of the things I did to get my new players on the same page was collage a bunch of art together off the internets to explain what I was going for - a picture worth a thousand words as they say. Monster and Manuals talks about something similar in terms of the concept of your Megadungeon for #dungeon23, where the themes of your dungeon, hex-crawl, city, etc. should be set out before start. They mention three themes - historical, structural and aesthetic - but for launching this campaign I set aside both the historical and structural to start and delved into the aesthetic first. This was to try and get all the players aligned on what is the feel of the place, especially since as my own milieu there is no extant imagery to point to - so how should they know what it is like?

As it turned out, once people had this much it gave them enough of a grip to be able to throw in some suggestions and decide what they wanted. The handout I gave them was a pdf'ed powerpoint since thats what I'm most familiar with working with. Since the spine of all this is a re-skinned Brancalonia and I backed their kickstarter I had a block of nice digital art to draw on from Lorenzo Nuti that got things rolling.

Lorenzo Nuti, Brancalonia

From there it was a collage of influences to get across the 'menagerie world' aspect - starting with Gwelf by Larry MacDougall, the art from Root by Kyle Ferrin, Wildlands by Stephen Wood, Historia by Mana Project Studio and the art of Omar Rayyan, Saint Monstre and Pocketss.

Gwelf by Larry MacDougall

Historia by Mana Project Studio

The art from Root by Kyle Ferrinl

Omar Rayyan

Pocketss

Saint Monstre

Wildlands by Stephen Wood

Others I might have drawn on would have been Arthur Rackham, Aubrey Beardsley, Beatrix Potter but the further back one goes in searches the tricker it becomes to find what you are looking for for non-human figures. All kudos to For Gold and Glory for populating an entire AD&D retro-clone edition entirely with suitable public domain art - see this round-up of sources from New School Revolution. Others of the OSR, particularly when creating publications mine public domain art extensively - see "OSR Art Friday: Editing Batten (note blog header NSFW)" for a good walkthrough of process and a sense of the extensive elbow-grease involved.

For the location itself, the landscapes Lorenzo Nuti provided with Brancalonia were again a start, bulked out with searches for Italian and Arcadian landscapes from art museums. I fished for public domain art, such as Francesco Guardi and Thomas Cole at The Met, Arcadian paintings, particularly from the Denver Museum of Art by Thomas Moran and Thomas Hill. I think landscapes are often something left out but they provide a great way to expand on a seed image - "if the view zoomed out, behind them you would see...." With some very brutal image processing we get the campaign banner for Roll20.

Finally for atmosphere, fold in Alfred Bestalls Rupert Bear annual endpapers and finish with Wayne O'Connor and some of his wonderfully evocative stuff.

I used all this to break up the player brief I hacked together, hopefully giving a sense of the landscape, the denizens and the atmosphere of the campaign setting.

Trying to do this while tracking sources as opposed to just skimming across aggregator sites like Pinterest is a deep, deep time sink down which one can fall forever. I think the overall exercise is worth it, to fill out the world, especially when you are trying to do something outside of 'standard heroic fantasy D&D land' but caution must be exercised to watch when the effort being put in is no longer delivering useful returns - once you have enough imagery to convey the initial sense of the world, stop. The world will get built at the table, this is just the kindling to spark the fire.

Returning to our frame from Monsters and Manuals - this is just one of multiple pillars. For me, this is fodder to session one and very early sessions to get people pointed in the right direction to start - from session zero we are going to have what players want to do, where, what type of game they want to play, etc. and those player decision will shape the atmosphere and aesthetic more than any briefing document is going to do.

An important piece of this for me - while this art is good for getting the aesthetic across to players, as a GM I am not referring to these images at all, I am looking at the map - I have these images in my head already but the map is telling me how it all fits together, who can see what from where, who sails past what on the river, who should be talking to whom, aware of whom, what things are on the well-trodden tracks and what places are out of the way. Once the game gets rolling, the map will become king.