graphic design and book layout
The #RPGaDAY topic for yesterday was all about inspirational illustrations. Which game has the most inspirational interior artwork? I’m not sure why “interior” is in that question. Can’t the cover artwork be inspirational as well?
Right now, I’m split between two games for having inspirational artwork. And for “inspirational artwork” I’m reading that as artwork that says everyone can be a hero: you can be the hero in this game. Spoiler: I’m not making a final decision between the two.
The #RPGaDAY writing prompt for today is “How do you find out about new roleplaying games?” — a question I don’t have a good answer for. I mean, I used to read message forums and know about cool things that way. I also used to enter the neighborhood bookstore and stumble across something new. This is how I found out about Shadowrun, through a copy of Bug City sitting on a shelf at a Hastings in a slowly-dying mall in Bryan, Texas. It’s also how I found out about 7th Sea. (But that was at a used bookstore, a month or two after I discovered Shadowrun, so my big college era game was more cyberpunky than swashbuckly.)
I guess these days it’s social media.
Well, that and working on layout for books then getting told what’s coming out down the line but I can’t tell anyone about it until the company makes an announcement.
Ah, for Scariest game I’ve played, there’s not many to choose from — I usually run the games. Last year, when coming up with an answer to this topic, I went with the Don’t Rest Your Head game that my friend Brian ran. When preparing to run it, he asked each of us for a recurring nightmare we had. We told him, because we trust each other. We knew that the nightmares were going to manifest somehow in the game, so it would be interesting to see how they would come about in that dream world. Brian went away and came back next week to run the first of two DRYH sessions.
That first session was incredibly tense. He didn’t incorporate our nightmares in the game. All that game, we were wondering When? When is this going to happen? What is it going to be like? and it kept getting delayed and stretched out and… Suspense.
That whole session was crazy spooky.
Anything to follow-up on that topic, Thomas?
Most of the games I run also aren’t horror games, but there have been a few. We did a Chill one-shot in Venice which had some horribleness happening that creeped out the players, with a Headless Horsemen-like creature that could only be seen by the person it was going to kill (yes, concept stolen from Doctor Who, sure). The Lacuna game I mentioned in an earlier post. My friendly guy-next-door character in the Shadowrun/CthulhuTech mashup game where he kept his “wife” locked up in a room in the basement whenever he went out of the house. ((I actually played in a game!)) Oh, and The Armitage Files, but I’ll talk about that in just a little bit.
Horror is like comedy in a game. You can’t force it. It just happens.
Unless you’re playing Dread (which has that Jenga tower in the middle, threatening to kill your character off) or you share secrets, like we did in Don’t Rest Your Head.