Occasionally, I'll find a photo of a place that inspires me to try to sketch out a scene using the photo as an anchor point or reference. This is true to Rydell's Sanctuary, which is based off a photo of Scotland's Faerie Pooles and is more or less a text duplicate of the image, to the best of my (admittedly limited) skills. I've never been to Scotland, nor had I heard of the Pooles... I just loved the photograph.
In the early/lower levels of the Agojen, I did something similar with this photo:
This isn't one I stumbled across and then decided to insert into the story. this time, I had the idea (I needed a way to power all the stuff in there even in the absence of the Agojenites) and so I hunted for the right photo. When I found a good one, I tried to do another text-sketch. This scene was a real challenge to put together, mostly because there was a lot of noise that needed to be included to capture the grandeur of the falls... but I also had to have dialogue happen. I must have mixed it five time to get it right :)
Just catching up on some posts. I perform a similar exercise for my games. In addition to sketching out the plot, or acts, NPCs and other minutia I'll create a folder just called assets. I'll fill it with pictures of things associated with the (potential) story. So an adventure that involves a cove, I'll try to get some interesting pictures of various coves to help drive narration. If we're at the table I sometimes even flip a monitor around and full screen the pic as I narrate, I find it helps with immersion and also can drive the PCs to explore or ask questions which can push the story in interesting directions. AS you point out having a picture can help bring realism and cohesion to the scene.
ReplyDeleteHave you ever found a good search string or one-stop site to find character portraits that are non-cartoon/non-manga style?
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