Art-Spiration! (Part 1)
Hosted by Campaign Mastery over on the RPGCarnival, this month's topic is Art-Spiration.
(Point of note here: Mike likes to write very long blogs I think – but we like to keep them short and easily digestible here, so we’re going to keep them in smaller chunks).
Now I'm going to let you in on a little secret. At the time of writing, I have no idea what that is, so I'm just going to run with it, and say that to me, this is about getting inspiration from looking at various forms of artwork. I.e. letting the artwork influence your writing, rather than the other way around (which seems to be the norm for roleplaying games, even though the artwork is the part we normally have the least amount of control over. Interesting dichotomy, but that's a topic for another day).
(The above was written before Mike posted his first post on the subject. It turns out my prediction was mostly correct. :P )
I've actually done a bit of this in the past, over on d20radio in a 5-part series that you can find here (Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 where I created a monster for Starfinder based upon existing artwork. So we're going to be doing something similar here, though not quite the same, as it's not the time to create a Starfinder monster right now. :)
Instead, I'm going to be looking at it more broadly and use the artwork to inspire some writing. We’re going to see if we can't turn it into a piece that can be used in our upcoming Fractured Worlds setting, like how our free adventures will be incorporated.
Now what I'm going to do is first that I'm going to go through my stock art library and see if I can find a piece that looks interesting, and I've chosen this one (which you can find for yourself here).
To me, this is a great piece. When you look closely at it, there's a lot going on, but it doesn't overwhelm you with colors or the action. The muted browns and blacks contrast very well with the yellow and reds, so it's pleasant to look at and it tells a story, as you could easily imagine this being underground. At the same time, the fact that there are those pterodactyl (or dragon) like creatures flying around seems to indicate that there is at least some form of life down here. Perhaps it is sort of a “Lost World” that’s hiding down there or perhaps it is more like Hollow World, with dragons? (Or is it just a Hollow Earth?)
This is the piece we’re going to be using next time to do a bit of fabrication and extrapolation on what we see, to create an underground world or area, for the players in your campaigns to explore. But that is for next week, so come back then and have a look. 😊
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