Looking At A Bigger Picture, Part 2 of 2
Landscapes are wonderful things, more significant & useful than many GMs realize. This post focuses on using Landscapes, both literal and metaphoric, using the lessons from the first part of the article. This is Part t 2 of 2.

Image by Karl Egger (shogun) from Pixabay
This is the 4th of my time-out posts in between the Trade In Fantasy series, which I expect to resume next week.I made the time-out logo from two images in combination: The relaxing man photo is by Frauke Riether and the clock face (which was used as inspiration for the text rendering) Image was provided by OpenClipart-Vectors, both sourced from Pixabay.
Part 1 gave non-artists the tools to analyze landscapes (and other images). Part 2 is all about using landscapes (both real and metaphoric), and picks up right where I left off. Everything below (unlike part 1) is outlined in my original draft of this article – in a way, it is the landscape, and the first part are the discrete elements that have been included.
Landscapes as Generic Symbols
Everything that’s been presented in this article so far doesn’t exist in my half-page outline of this article. It’s all information and understanding that’s going to be relevant, but it has all been added outside of that framework, and for that reason, this section brings about a major shift in focus and direction.
Let’s think for a moment about generic icons and symbols. What symbolizes a campaign, generally (as opposed to specific content relating to a specific campaign).
There are three choices, really – and most people can only think of two.
The first is the hex grid – but that’s less ubiquitous now than it once was. Nevertheless, the association is enough that I employed it as the foundation of Campaign Mastery’s icon:
The second is a die, or set of dice. These could be d6s, or a d20, or even a combination of different dice types. Symbolic of playing a game, the association between polyhedra and RPGs is strong enough to make the connection.
And the third choice is, I would argue, a landscape – a representation of an environment through which the characters can or are traveling.
Just about any landscape works as symbolism for a campaign generally..
Specific Associations
It follows that there has to be at least one “perfect” landscape that is perfectly symbolic of a specific campaign.
It may not contain everything that’s specific to the campaign (in fact, it usually won’t) but it will contain something that can be uniquely associated with that campaign, and no other, by the people who have played in it.
Initially, it may have to be fairly representational, but familiarity will permit abstraction. For example, the big bad from the early days of the campaign may have been an Orc with an eye-patch and one gold earring. As the campaign progressed, it was eventually discovered that he was a pawn of a bigger bad whilst secretly in the service of an enemy worse still. But he remains symbolic of the entire campaign, and eventually, an eye-patch and gold earring are all you need to graphically represent that campaign.
That’s a bad example, in that it’s a portrait and not a landscape, but the contention is that there will be a landscape that is just as iconic and symbolic of that campaign, a location so evocative that it can represent the whole.
Environment
Landscapes have that power because they don’t just depict a location or a setting, they display an environment – a climate, a geography, and possibly a society and an economy, all summed up in the one image that still follows all the rules for a good image.
Those include a clear focus, a good design, internal cohesion, an emotional impact, and prioritized detail.
- a. a string of hikers were following a climbing track, heading toward the viewer, obviously in modern clothing.
- b. some of the people had clambered up these rocks and were seated there.
- c. Another hiking trail heading to join a, with more hikers on it.
- d. And a fourth.
- E. A large plastic bag was wrapped around two bushes, rather spoiling the ambiance once it was noticed.
- f1 through f8: climbers seated here and there, some with colorful plastic drink bottles. This is where I think they were located (I’m working from memory). In some of the locations, the merest hint of what was there remains – a hint of legs at f7, a blue shoe at f8, an arm at f6.
- at h (I think it was) (it should have been labeled g but I lost track of where I was up to), there was some spray-painted graffiti.
- And, finally, I have a clear memory of photo-editing the rocks in the right-hand foreground, but no longer remember why I thought it was necessary.
- A generic Aztec-style pyramid in a jungle full of threatening eyes in the foliage – nope. The pyramid is a prioritized detail.
- An Aztec-style pyramid in a generic jungle full of threatening eyes in the foliage – that works. The jungle is an important component of the setting’s totality, but not a prioritized one.
- An Aztec-style pyramid in a jungle full of generic threatening eyes in the foliage – “generic eyes In the foliage” would work, but the inclusion of the emotion-laden adjective “threatening” makes this element incompatible with ‘generic’. These are a prioritized detail.
- A different Cliff? (I’ll come back to this one).
- A different rock? Yep, no problem.
- A different tree? Again, no problem.
- A different Dragon? Not really – see the discussion on ‘cliffs’ below.
- A different Castle? Maybe in theory, but the architecture is far more suggestive and informative than most people realize, so using a different castle would probably change the overall impression of the image. So that’s a (qualified) ‘no’.
A Clear Focus
It’s really easy to overload a single image with too many elements that demand to be the focal point. I’ve done it myself, many times – most recently, one of the chapter title graphics for the Trade In Fantasy series (you’ll know it when you see it).
How can you tell? If a clear and prominent element is in the image but not there to support the primary focus, then the image is – as my old art teacher used to say (his name was “Art”, by the way) – ‘confused’.
The problem increases exponentially with every other such element. On top of that, any element that needs to be explained adds to the confusion. Anything that’s not self-evident and self-explanatory is counter-productive.
I wrote once that A Picture Should Be Worth 1,000 Words – that point tends to get lost if you need to use 500 words to explain what’s in the image!
By way of illustration, let me close out this section by analyzing three of the graphics from the Trade In Fantasy series.
Example 1: Composite 9 (Poseidon & Time) from Chapter 3 Part 3

It’s really hard to find Fantasy Images that symbolize or show time. In the end, I had to make my own. In the background, the Posiedon image is by Enrique Meseguer (darksouls1). Dominating the foreground is a gravity-defying hourglass which is actually a combination of this image by gunter (moritz320) and an extract from this image by Alexander Lesnitsky (AlLes), with various color trickery to get the two to match up. The edges of the upper surface of the sand have been treated with a textural extract based on dry lake bed by Dimitrios Savva (Photography), https://polyhaven.com/all?a=Dimitrios%20Savva, https://web.archive.org/web/20230623201912/https://polyhaven.com/all?a=Dimitrios%20SavvaJarod Guest (Processing), https://polyhaven.com/all?a=Jarod%20Guest, https://web.archive.org/web/20230623201919/https://polyhaven.com/all?a=Jarod%20Guest, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons with some additional texture extracted from this dry lake bed
by Forest & Kim Starr, CC BY 3.0 US, also via Wikimedia Commons. “Floating” in the sand as though it were a liquid are two elephants, one extracted from elephants-1535881, image by Monika (MonikaP), and the other from elephant-5083580, Image by Mansour Obaidi (Msobaidi). Unless stated otherwise, all images were sourced from Pixabay“.
There’s a lot of work gone into this image, and it arguably tries to do too much. The hourglass – that’s actually a composite of several. The blue sand that is liquid in the center. The elephants swimming in that liquid. And the image / statue of Poseidon on the rock in the background. Plus the sea and the sky.
The topic was time, hence the hourglasses. The elephants and textures of ‘sand’ are to imbue a sense of strangeness, of Fantasy, of the incredibly improbable being possible. And its the presence of Gods / Magic that achieves that transformation.
So it all holds together – just barely. Why Poseidon, though? Answer – because I came across the background (with sky and sea) and loved it too much not to use it.
That’s a terrible reason. “I needed a background and it was there”.
Furthermore, it breaks depth of field. The elephants are as sharply in focus as the Poseidon\, while the hourglass itself is not quite as sharp. The rule of thumb is that if the foreground is in focus, the background should be blurred, and vice-versa. I get away with it in this image simply because the whole composite is such a bizarre combination of elements.
As a spot illustration, this is fine; it is in no way good enough to be a Chapter Title graphic and besides, it’s orientation is Portrait – because the dominant element is the hourglass, and that’s more vertical in orientation than it is side-ways.
Example 2: The Watering Hole, also from Chapter 3 Part 3

Image by Pexels from Pixabay. I’ve painted out some rock climbers in obviously modern clothing and extended to the image slightly to the right.
The most interesting part of this image, from a technical standpoint, is this part over to the right. I’ll explain why in a moment; let me start by taking about the rest of the image, to get it out of the way. There are obviously people bathing in this lake – and that in itself is interesting because there’s a risk of contaminating it. It suggests that the water is either (a) unsuitable for drinking already, or (b) reputed to have some magical properties – fountain of youth, anyone?
The setting is lush and green, which adds to the latter impression. There’s a crystal-clear waterfall, which would provide water that’s almost certainly potable, diminishing any concerns regarding the lake.
Critically, the figures of the people are way too small to make out any hint of what they are wearing or not wearing.
One of the things that immediately grabbed me about this image is the composition – there are so many ways for the eye to be drawn, but all roads lead back to the ‘beach’ and the crowd there:
Every time you examine this, new details will be revealed. So it was that the defects (in terms of my purposes) weren’t even noticed for a very long time. Which brings me back to that right-hand-side:
Let me run through the list:
A lot of the work was done with tools that I hadn’t previously done much with, like the pencil shader and the pallet knife, employed in conjunction with copy and paste and other tools with which I was already familiar. I’m quite proud of the results – you simply can’t tell that it’s been so heavily modified.
I want to talk about those hikers, in particular. If they hadn’t been wearing obviously modern clothing – shorts, joggers, t-shirts, and baseball caps, specifically – and if they had been heading toward the bathers and not away from them, they might have been acceptable, because as visual elements, they would have then supported the main focus of the image, which was supposed to be one of those wonderful landmarks all the locals know about and that travelers love to discover.
Third, Composite 7 from Chapter 3 part 2

This composite starts with the ruins background, by Dorothe (Darkmoon_Art), to which I did a quick-and-dirty extension off to the right. The “dragon” image in the sky midground consists of the wings from an eagle (photo uncredited), which I attached to the body of a Seahorse extracted from Hippocampus_coronatus_1.jpg by Leo D’lion from Flikr via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License. Finally, in the foreground (minus a bush and some indications of ground) is an image of a heavily-laden Hiker by Clker-Free-Vector-Images, with some 3D toning and shadows added by me. Unless otherwise noted, images were sourced from Pixabay.
The original version of this that I did extended quite a bit further off to the right – there was a second, smaller, tree (you can just see the left edge of its foliage), and a rolling plain sloping down, and a dragon flying between the two and looking toward the guy with the big backpack.
I had made the Dragon by combining the body of a seahorse with the wings of an eagle and a lot of color filtering and scaly textures over the top, and I thought it looked great.
That dragon was the problem. It didn’t seem to matter where I positioned it, it didn’t look right. I tried mirroring it horizontally – same problem. I tried it in front of the cathedral, behind it, to the left of it, to the right of it, you name it. I spent easily two hours moving that dragon around, but the only solution that I found was to have it in the air above the trees, which shrunk both cathedral and hiker – to the point where you could no longer see his spindly little legs.
And that was the whole point of this image, that was the focus: the overloaded character truckin’ right. I was so so busy with the dragon that I didn’t even notice the second building in the distance on the right until the Dragon covered part of it. That was when I decided that the buildings alone were enough to convey the “Fantasy Element” of the environment, and left the dragon out completely, permitting a closer focus on the building and the overburdened traveler (The dragon might yet reappear if I use this in chapter-title format, though – or maybe I’ll use it in a standalone spot image somewhere).
The bottom line: the dragon wasn’t just not supporting the main focus, it was detracting from it. So it had to go.
A Good Design
I’ve touched on this in discussing the examples, above. A good design has good composition – it moves the eye where you want it to go in order to convey a total impression. In particular, it makes sure that the viewer sees all the important elements that add context to the focal point.
A still more advanced technique employs the movement of the eye to tell a sequential narrative (or, at least, to hint at one). That’s really hard to do well – I’ve managed it in comic book form but not in a single image, at least not yet. The “serendipity” image linked to earlier comes close, though.
Internal Cohesion
If you know what you’re doing, the incorporation of one or more visual elements that don’t match the rest of the landscape can be definitive, an outright statement that there is an environmental discontinuity. But even if you do know what you are doing, it’s incredibly easy to mess this up, and hard to get right.
It’s all about the suspension of disbelief; the more strain you put on the viewers sense of this being ‘real’, the more expertly the disconcerting elements have to be integrated.
For the most part, then, internal cohesion is incredibly important. Everything has to feel like it ‘belongs’ in the environment depicted, or the credibility of that environment is compromised.
An Emotional Impact
The best images capture a mood or emotion in addition to depicting the contents of the scene. Take ‘Composite 7’ from the Trade In Fantasy series, shown above. There is a sense of adventure inherent in the landscape – the buildings, the man alone and seemingly equipped to prosper on his own, the pathway receding into the distance, while running past one strange structure and heading in the general direction of a second, and even the fact that the scene seems quite serene, as though the world were holding its breath and waiting for something to happen – it all adds together to have an emotional impact.
Compare that with ‘Composite 9’, also shown above. Here, there were so many fantastic elements that I was so busy ensuring internal cohesion – things like the shadows from the elephants were redone a dozen times before I was satisfied, and I’m not sure they are even noticeable when the image is reduced to “Campaign Mastery Size.” I mean, I notice them because I know they are there, but anyone else? I’m not so sure.
Prioritized Detail
Some elements are going to be more important, more definitive, than others. “An Aztec-style pyramid in a jungle full of threatening eyes in the foliage” – that’s fine as a concept. To determine what elements should be, or are, prioritized, insert the word “generic” in front of each of the nouns and see if the overall description still makes sense:
This test can be used even if what you have is a visual, not a description. Just pick out one element after another, give them a label – “Cliff,” “Rock”, “Tree”, “Dragon”, “Castle” – and try the word generic in front of that label, or try imagining the image with some variation on the content actually present.

This is a very rough sketch to give you some idea of what I had in mind when describing the assessments below. As an exercise in everything that has been discussed, there is a deliberate error in the image, made twice. See if you can spot the problem – I’ll tell you what it is at the end of this section.
It doesn’t matter how specific the element, as rendered in the image is – what matters is whether or not it could be replaced with something similar without subtracting from the total sum of the content and what it tells you about the location, and that’s what this tests. I spent quite a lot of time on the cliff (and thought about doing more). The castle and dragon, by comparison, took no time at all.
So, a different cliff, yes or no? To some extent, one cliff is exactly the same as another. So that would argue for a ‘yes’ answer. But there are subtle details that matter – perspective, and the nature of the cliff face, and the underlying geology – and they say ‘no’. But the trump point in this discussion is that the cliff is a key design / composition element, drawing the eye back to the left from the bottom right corner, where the sequence clouds -> sky -> leaves -> tree leads it. And to do that job properly, it has to have the right shape.
That, incidentally, is why the rock is important – without something to interrupt the eye’s passage from right to left along the cliff edge, it would simple exit the image on the left. The rocks pull the eye up, and the castle then grabs attention.
What about the dragon? located where it is, the eye can be drawn to it from the rocks, or from the castle, and the natural inclination is to follow it’s line of sight – up into the clouds and leaves, for another loop around the composition.
But if that doesn’t happen, it doesn’t matter too much, because the image is adequately framed by its content. Arguably, it would be more effective if the Dragon was on the opposite side of the Castle – enough so that if I were trying to create anything more than a quick sketch, I would try that. But that’s not important enough to distract from the main point – which is that the posture and positioning of the Dragon then becomes critical. Where is it going? What is it looking at? These provide the eye with the cues that it needs to move on from that element of the image.
So, to the deliberate mistakes – readers have had ample opportunity by now. Answer: In both the castle and the dragon, the shadows are on the wrong side. The tree, cliff, rocks, and clouds, are all highlighted on the right and shadowed on the left. The castle’s highlight is on the right, and shadows on the left. And it’s the same with the Dragon, though that’s a bit less obvious. How did you go?
The GMing Trap
It’s very common for GMs to fall into the trap of focusing on specific elements of their metaphoric landscape and overlooking the bigger picture, simply because the latter seems to be a lot more work.
This encounter, this town, this road, this river, this villain. It’s easy to do, But each and every one of these has some context that needs to be defined, and that context provides the connections that join it to the bigger picture.
I thought it might be useful to run through the above list and look at what the relevant context is likely to be. And then I thought of another category, and another, and another. This might take a while….
This Encounter
Even the most mundane encounter has the context of the environment in which it transpires.
Some encounters involve creatures that are definitively magic-based, which therefore have an additional context of Magic in nature, and the nature of Magic.
Some are (literally) spiritual – fiendish. demonic, devilish, Undead, Divine, Good vs Evil, Law Vs Chaos – and have a moral / moralistic context. the latter usually demand that the players define where their characters are going to stand on specific moral issues, and accept the consequences of those choices.
All encounters will reveal at least part of a “natural” ecology – the mere existence of a particular kind of creature forcibly creates an environmental niche for them to occupy, usually by force and at the inconvenience of whatever is already in that niche. The mere fact of properly defining the encountered creatures and specifying how they exist and how they propagate creates an ecology around them that can then be assembled like Lego.
This Town
It’s a similar story when it comes to population centers. The larger they are, the more self-defining they tend to be – they grow so large simply because they can and inevitably will do so. The resulting concentration of population is sufficient to create demand for services and that fuels further growth in what seems like a never-ending spiral of growth.
Things are different when it comes to smaller population centers; they need a reason to continue to exist in their current location. The more amenable the location is to a settlement, the more self-explanatory that reason is. So the more difficult the location, the stronger the external justification needs to be.
Every population center is defined in part by its relationship with its’ neighboring populations and with the nearest larger community and with the seat of administrative power each step up the social ladder. It’s leaders will have relationships with each of these and those relationships will, in part, define the circumstances and existence of the community.
One of the key aspects of those relationships, and one that probably deserves separate consideration, is the economic relationship. In particular, what do they need in the community that they cannot supply (even if the supplied item is a local substitute) and where do they get it from?
You simply can’t make up a town out of whole cloth without defining these things (even if they are also to be made up complete) – which defines the surrounding region and the neighbors.
I would still consider this community to be sand-boxed if there was no reciprocal creation – make a town, define its relationships with its neighbors, but don’t create any of those neighbors until it becomes clear that the PCs are actually going to go to one.
This Road
Roads don’t just exist, they connect one place to another. If it’s a small rural road or pathway, that might be all it does; if it’s larger or more important, then it will need to do more, probably connecting a series of small towns to a larger hub, which will usually be the regional administrative power. And, if it’s larger and more important again, then it might well connect a regional authority to the national authority center.
Roads are hard and expensive to build well, and even more expensive to maintain. Using the best modern technology, roads built in the 1930s and not maintained are close to undrivable now, less than a century later – and they were reasonably well maintained for about half of that time.
Roads built in medieval and fantasy environments will be even more expensive (in relative terms, per mile / km) and of far lower quality and resistance to wear and tear – which is to say they will have higher and more expensive maintenance demands and will deteriorate even more quickly if those demands are not met.
To justify that maintenance, there needs to be one or both of two reasons: the rapid movement of goods and supplies, i.e. commerce & economics, or the rapid movement of troops, i.e. a military response / purpose. If the latter, there will be various barracks and staging points along the way, plus a string of forts to maintain control over the road. If the former, there will be less such.
How is the maintenance paid for, and by whom? What is the economic and social impact of the road on the communities through which it passes? Where is it considered to begin, and where does it end? And what is the terrain through which it travels?
Most sci-fi campaigns will have access to 1930s road-building techniques or better. But the economic realities are such that maintenance is begrudging at best, impacting the condition of the road. And it might be that the campaign conditions impact on the need for maintenance; at best, there will be no such impact.
Every alternative transportation method increases the reluctance to maintain the road while diminishing its criticality – a double whammy that more than compensates for any reduced wear-and-tear. It doesn’t matter if that’s a-dragonback, teleport booths, interstellar gates, flying cars, or dirigibles.
This River
Unlike roads, rivers don’t need a lot of maintenance; leave them alone, and they will keep on doing what they are doing for as long as the climate is stable. Egypt may have been swallowed by desert, but the Nile still flows.
Depending on winds and other prevailing conditions, it’s a lot easier to float things downriver than carry them upriver, and that impacts on availability and price. But I’m not going to go into that too deeply in this post, I’ll save that for the appropriate chapter of Trade In Fantasy.
Erecting Dams for irrigation can, however, have a major influence on the quality and size of a river – to the point where it may need to be replaced by a road running alongside it.
Absent such interference, a river has one other property of great interest to authority figures – it’s just as easy to ship troops downriver (or up-river) as it is cargo. Furthermore, rivers join other rivers to become bigger rivers, and the points of such joining have such natural advantages that communities naturally super-size over time, which magnifies the relevance of such troop movements. And. on top of that, because of irrigation, rivers also run alongside the most productive farmland, on which those larger communities rely. So every cent that isn’t spent on maintenance, and then some, would logically be spent on forts to monitor and control river traffic.
The other critical thing that rivers posses are bridges and fords and the like. These are a lot less common than most fantasy mapmakers would have you believe – and everywhere that one is needed but not available, a ferry of some sort will spring up to act as a substitute. But these imply the presence of other communities and roads.
A river is therefore surrounded by the regional context and a vital component of it.
It’s only when sci-fi or steampunk technologies provide cost-effective alternatives that rivers begin to diminish in significance.
This Villain
I hate creating villains in isolation. Heroes can wander, so their context can be at arm’s length, but villains are rarely vagabonds (unless and until they have fallen from grace). Villains therefore have a power base, and their authority over it not only affects that power base but also their actions and capabilities beyond personal combat.
In a dungeon, a power base might be confined to a single room. It may or may not be under constant threat from the inhabitants of neighboring rooms – but either way, the context matters to the condition of the room and the trappings and appointments within.
What’s more, with rare exceptions, even villains need to eat. Where does their food come from, and if that creates a point of vulnerability, what have they done about that?
What additional resources can the villain command by virtue of the domain that they claim power over?
The most richly-detailed villain is a cardboard cutout if the context and its implications aren’t spelt out. And remember, the PCs will almost certainly encounter that context and/or ripples of it, long before they actually get to confront the villain himself (there are circumstantial exceptions).
This Vista

This image of an Italian Sunrise is by Ida (IdaT) from Pixabay
My, but that’s a pretty picture. It ticks all the boxes in terms of eye-catching scenery. One look at that and you can tell exactly how a PC traveling through it is going to react.
But there are parts of the picture that you can’t see – what’s the rest of the story?
There are parts where objects within the landscape are hiding what’s on the far side – forests and mountains and deserts and oceans are all pretty good at this. But so are plains, if they are vast enough. What’s beyond?
Most, of not all, of the wildlife are not especially visible – what lurks, and where?
Land always has a history, often told through remnants and ruins (especially in a D&D campaign). Where are they, how have they not been pillaged, and what abides within?
These places never exist in isolation – they are always found en route from one place to another. What and where are these places? If there’s no road or path, why not?
What secrets are hidden in this pretty little landscape? That’s the context that a GM needs to answer – before he can put this pretty image in front of the players.
This Administration
No matter what the politics of the region – even in an absolute monarchy or dictatorship – there will be political factions, alliances, and disagreements. If one side has the authority, they may seek to suppress / persecute the other, but that doesn’t mean the other has gone away, just that it’s more secretive and furtive. Many a dictator has been surprised by the vehemence displayed during their overthrow.
Whenever you create a government – be it local, civic, regional, state, national, global, para-dimensional, multidimensional, interstellar, or galactic empire – always determine who the major factions are, what they disagree on, and how much protection / authority members of the non-dominant faction have.
Why? Well, when PCs encounter the ruling authority, one of two things will happen:
- They will get along fine with the current administration and so become enemies of the opposition; or,
- They will confront the current administration about something, maybe try and make them do something they don’t want to do, in which case the opposition will see them as potential friends and allies.
- The gods themselves. Are they friends, rivals, allies, enemies?
- The religious doctrines and higher leadership – what are the official policies?
- The rank-and-file priesthood, who have to live in the real world and try to guide it.
- The ultra-zealots.
- The ordinary citizens.
- Religious issues will rise to dominate the game; or
- Everyone will find them boring, and do their very best to ignore everything that you’ve created, most of which will be wasted effort.
This Faith
Religion and religious issues are some of the biggest headaches a GM will encounter when world-building, because Clerics have genuine powers that have to come from somewhere and those automatically give their beliefs – whatever they may be – credibility.
Is there one pantheon in the world? Or are there multiple pantheons? And if the latter, what are the relationships between them? And what is tolerated, what is forbidden, and what exists in a gray zone in between?
There are multiple levels of the pious hierarchy to consider.
Throw in official links between a faith and a government, internal politics, corruption, factions, schisms….
And, once you’ve done all this work, one of two things will almost certainly happen:
Striking a happy balance between these extremes is one of the hardest things to do successfully. But if you don’t find either of those choices palatable (I generally don’t), you have no choice.
This Beginning
Some lyrics from Semi-sonic’s “Closing Time” are relevant:
So, gather up your jackets, move out to the exits,
I hope you have found a friend.
Closing time, every new beginning
Comes from some other beginning’s end, yeah
Nothing ever starts in complete isolation; it is always surrounded by, shaped by, whatever was there before this new beginning. This is absolutely essential to showing the contrast between old and new.
Of course, this immediately begs the question, where did the old situation come from? And, it you aren’t careful, you can find yourself writing centuries of history of only limited relevance.
What’s needed is to Temporally Sandbox the campaign history. That means that recent history is well-known and easily accessible, and most of the last century’s history can be found out (incompletely and in broad) just about everywhere – but there will be, as the illustration puts it, “Pointers, Hints, & Isolated Details” – signposts to the past, offering tantalizing glimpses into what once was, but completely without context. And if you ask a local about one, at best you’ll get folklore and myth that has a very small kernel of truth buried somewhere deep inside.
For a while, it was my habit to make those myths up out of whole cloth and decide as I went what the kernel of truth was – then to make everything else the complete opposite of the true story. If there was a Necromancer involved, for example, he might be recorded in myth as the Darkest Evil (true fact) or as a misunderstood hero (myth). His foe might be an arrogant righteous knight (true fact) or a despotic fallen knight (myth). Who won and who lost? Complete opposite of the true story – and so on. But then my players at the time began to cotton on to this simplistic approach, as the underlying reality got exposed a time or two, and I had to develop more sophisticated tools for the creation of myths.
Another point was that I paid no attention at all in the construction of these myths to internal consistency, and that also became recognized as an immediate tip-off.
These days, I create half-truths, exaggerations, and romanticized superstructures around those kernels of truth. Sometimes, history gets it mostly right, sometimes it is breathtakingly wide of the mark. But it’s no longer as predictable.
Getting back to the main point: there’s an immediate payoff for wrapping your history in a temporal sandbox: every pointer to the past holds the potential for a plotline. It may be short, or long, conclusive or inconclusive, but there can be an adventure or sub-plot that results from the difference between myth and truth.
Quite often, the idols that a (romanticized) history places on pedestals turn out to have feet of clay – and, in some cases, be not very nice people at all.
Temporal Sandboxing is one of the primary purposes of a simple tool that I provided here at Campaign Mastery some time ago – Throw Me A Life-line: A Character Background Planning Tool. The purpose is to divide history up into first-hand experiences, second-hand experiences related by an elder, and third-hand experiences that can only be derived from books, museums, artifacts, and other leftovers.
This Plot Development
So something has happened in-game that has advanced a plot or sub-plot – that’s all very well and good, but there is a context that has to be considered.
Every plot development links what’s already known to something new – it might be a new source of information, a new political perspective or force, a new location where the event happens. It may introduce a new antagonist or a new ally.
So that’s part of the ‘landscape’ thereafter. The other detail in the landscape, aside from the development itself and logical consequences thereof, is the person who is behind the plot development, and their motivations.
That’s either a PC who has done something, or an NPC. But, even if the act was performed by a PC, the ripples that spread from the event will do so through NPCs. Every time someone does something, the first thing that a GM should ask themselves is “what will the locals think of that, and how will that affect the PCs?”
This Location
Everywhere that something happens in a game should have a landscape comprising a history, and/or an atmosphere. That could be as simple as stumbling over an old lost coin, hinting that a former empire’s reach was vaster than previously thought, or it could be as complicated as an old rotting library in the bowels of a Lich’s mansion or tower.
In the second-ever RPG game session in which I played, in a particular room in a dungeon, the treasure included a (magical) book. I pointed out that either this was not the only book present, and the GM simply wasn’t mentioning the others for some reason, or there was something noteworthy about this particular book that it was the only one present. Either way, there was a story that wasn’t being told.
The reason for this was, obviously, because the GM hadn’t thought about the landscape surrounding that particular treasure; the random tables said the book was there, so the book was there. To cover this gap, he hurried us right along before too many difficult questions could be asked – his usual technique was to have a wandering monster appear out of nowhere, posing a distraction.
This then became part of the landscape, the background, when I was creating the Legacy Items for Assassins’ Amulet. These were all about the history that each one carried. Sometimes, that history was the creation of the item, and sometimes it was about the price to be paid for access to such powerful magic. But there was always a context.
It’s the same with locations. This is your first time in the Great Library of Domasticus The Cruel? Why does someone with that name even have a library? What can the contents of said library tell you about the ruler? Was he as bad as the name suggests, or was there a softer side that no-one pays attention to?
If it’s a more typical location – an overnight camping site on a trail from A to B – what is the scenery like? Did anything interesting ever happen here? Did anyone interesting ever pass this way? Are there any traces of the history of the place?
This Dungeon
And, if ever there was a place where that holds more true than any other, it’s a dungeon. What’s the history of the place and how does that impact what the PCs will see and find? Has anyone attempted to loot it before, and how does that impact the current day? Even if you construct it as nothing more than a few little vignettes of history – “a party once looted this room, disabling the traps and routing the inhabitants. They came to a sticky end in room XYZ, so the loot from this room will be found there, not here. The former inhabitants crept back, reset the traps, and reinforced their position – so the fight with them this time around will be much harder, with not as much to show for it”.
That gives a history to the creatures that lurk in this room, to the room itself, to the contents of the room and their context, and to room XYZ, which (logically) should not be that far away and on a direct line from here.
What’s more, it implies context to every location, every room, in between.
And, when compiling a historical context like this, don’t neglect whatever loot those in-over-their-heads adventurers were carrying!
Playing Catch-up
Once you get behind in construction of these contextual landscapes, catching up is that much harder to do, but that’s not the biggest problem – in a moment, I’ll show you how to take a lot of the work out of playing catch-up. But first, the far bigger problem is when the context that you eventually create should have had a noticeable impact on the scene or location, and didn’t.
There are only three ways of handling this, and two are not all that satisfactory – and you can’t use the third all the time.
- The PCs simply didn’t notice the blindingly obvious except now, in hindsight.
- The PCs did observe the blindingly obvious but didn’t appreciate the importance until now, in hindsight.
- The PCs didn’t see anything of the context because someone has undertaken active measures to hide it.
The first two are unlikely to be more than thinly tolerated by players. This isn’t being determined by die roll or by referencing the history and abilities of the PCs – it’s being declared by GM Fiat to cover his own failures in an in-game context.
The third can be extremely useful but only on rare occasions; it’s very easy to over-use it. That said, I did once hear of a party whose mentor was a high-level wizard that had gone a bit strange in the mental department; he had an Unseen Servant roam ahead of the party and “tidy up” locations before the PCs got to them, muddling and even erasing the historical clues to what they were actually finding. (I wish I could tell you more about the campaign and what happened, but that’s all I know of it!)
Left without reasonable in-game answers, the wise GM looks beyond the game parameters to find a metagame solution:
- The GM admits that he messed up and got behind and that the PCs should have found X, and then enlists the players and their creativity to help explain it in-game.
Obviously, this too is a card that can’t be played frequently (and certainly not regularly) – it covers the occasional lapse, which everyone has every now and then, nothing more.
Clearly, the best answer is not to get behind in the first place. But, as I said, everyone has the occasional lapse, but there is a technique that can help when that happens:
Coalescing Historical Landscapes
This works from looking at the bigger picture (mentally) and applying selected parts of it to multiple areas that should have been detailed but weren’t. Traces of a past great empire, for example, in the form of portions of giant marble statues that dot the land here and there. The next time one then gets encountered (and it can be useful to deliberately seed one into the next session of play for this very purpose), simply mention as part of your descriptive narrative that the new one encountered reminds the PCs of something that they saw in Room A of dungeon B, and the town square at C, and outside the High Priest of D’s Temple. In other words, the PCs have been seeing these things regularly, but paying no attention to them because they didn’t seem important.
A Plague Upon Historians
Things can go even more rapidly downhill if one of the PCs happens to have a History skill at a reasonably high level. Presumably, this is then a subject that interests the character, and one that he would therefore notice things about. Those little lapses and omissions become far more significant when they are things the player is trying to hang his characterization ‘hat’ upon.
That brings me to a useful game tip:
Do this at your next game session: Get each PC to list, on a single sheet of paper, their top three skills. Not the scores, but the number of ranks they have bought in that skill. The player gets to break any ties.
These are the things that the PC will particularly notice about each and every person, place, or thing. Use them to guide what you spend prep time creating.
If this is revealed as a problem, it’s definitely time to wheel out solution #4 – and to resolve to do better from this point out. And mean it.
Searching For Landscapes
Discussing metaphoric landscapes has taken us a long way from the original point of the article, about iconic representations of a specific campaign. It’s time to start looping back around in that direction so that the whole article can dovetail with a satisfactory conclusion (gee, someone might think that I actually plan this stuff).
There are a myriad of sites that you can search for landscape images. Google has a page for image search (see Finding Your Way: Unlocking the secrets of Google Image Search) and so do Bing and DuckDuckGo, and a few specialist operations like Tineye and Yandex. On top of that, you have image curators like Pinterest and Wikimedia Commons, and clip art sites like my #1 go-to for article illustrations, Pixabay.
So, if you’re diligent about it, you could probably spend hundreds of hours looking for the perfect image.
Don’t.
By all means, search for landscape images to fill particular campaign needs; and, if you’re lucky enough to stumble over the perfect representation, by all means appropriate it. You could also pay attention to the articles that I have posted on image editing and compositing, and learn how to make your own. But that’s not necessarily necessary; there is an alternative to consider.
- hundreds of thousands of results on Google Images
- hundreds of results on DuckDuckGo
- 1,201,398 results on Wikimedia Commons
- uncountable thousands of results on Pinterest
- 1,480 pages of results on Pixabay…
Using AI
While you could use AI image generation to create what might seem to be the perfect representation, there are a number of problems with doing so.
First, the technology isn’t there yet. It leaves things our, has problems comprehending relationships between objects, and fares poorly sometimes if you ask for something that doesn’t get photographed very often – like a crashed UFO.
Second, as a general rule, it only includes things that you have told it to include or some of the logically implied content – with maddening omissions.
Thirdly, AI-generated images that don’t require some hands-on editing afterwards are as rare as hen’s teeth.
So, while it is a theoretical solution to the problem, it’s not an alternative to consider – yet.
Keywords
The heart of any image search are the keywords that you search for. With some search engines, the sequence in which these appear is also critically important. But the biggest factor in success is understanding the image search itself – they don’t pull up images that match the keyword criteria in most cases, they bring up images from pages that use those keywords in their text. Understanding this is critical to choosing the right keywords for an image search.
Things are a little different if you’re searching Pinterest, or Wikimedia Commons, or DeviantArt. They rely on tags – which, as everyone should know, are little labels that the uploader has used to describe the content of the image. There is little or no AI assistance in this search – it won’t generally look for synonyms of your search term, for example, which would be both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, in that it finds more images for you to consider; and a curse in that it would make it much harder to drill down to find the exact thing that you’re looking for.
So either way, you end up with pages of images to wade through in search of the perfect result. And that can take considerable time. A search for “Mountains” offers up:
You get the idea. I have found that a great shortcut is to select an analogous country, geology, or location, especially one with a matching climate, and inject that as a keyword – “Bolivian Mountains”, for example, or “Tropical Mountains”, or “Volcanic Mountains” – or even “Lunar Mountains”.
The Benefits of a Landscape Search
Let’s talk for a minute about the benefits that you reap from a landscape search, even if you don’t find an image that matches what you are looking for. You still get hundreds of results, for example, if you search Google Images for “Antimatter Mountain” – and it’s a near-certainty that none of them are even remotely what you’re looking for. So, why bother? There are three good reasons:
1. Inspiration
Take a look at each image result, and understand the relevance it holds toward your search target (even if that’s “none”). You will find additional ideas that enhance the specificity of what you’re looking for and any associated details.
This is a great way of taking a vague idea and pinning it down.
2. Language
If you’re having trouble describing something to a search engine, how evocative do you think your language will be when describing it to your players? Taking the time to winnow through the search results, and refining the search keywords and parameters a time or two, can yield priceless dividends in terms of giving you something to describe, which then forms a starting point. Even if successive editing passes replaces each and every line of description from that starting point with something more specifically appropriate, that can still have been a worthwhile exercise.
3. Representative Scenery
And, finally, you might get lucky and uncover a scene that’s the perfect illustration for what you want.
The Perfect Landscape
Ultimately, it’s not up to you to decide what is the perfect landscape or the perfect representation of your campaign. As soon as you show the image to a player, they will either (a) disagree with your choice, or (b), start reading things into your choice, or (c) both of the above. And the moment one of those things is not something that you meant to imply, either your vision of the campaign has to expand, or the chosen image falls off the peak of \perfection.
That doesn’t mean that the quest itself is not worthwhile – it often is, refining mental images, suggesting new things, and depicting even a small part of the game world are all worthy outcomes of your efforts.
Growing your narrative and grounding events in context is always worthwhile. Even if the results are not perfect. And that’s true whether the landscape in question is visual or metaphoric.
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January 20th, 2025 at 6:19 pm
Love how you highlight the importance of landscapes as symbols for a campaign. It would be interesting to explore how landscapes could also reflect a character’s growth or personal journey—like revisiting a familiar place that’s changed as they’ve changed.
January 21st, 2025 at 1:09 pm
Excellent point :)
January 29th, 2025 at 9:43 pm
This is a fascinating shift in focus! I love the exploration of symbols and their power in campaigns. The hex grid is such an interesting choice, especially given its past popularity. How do you see these symbols evolving in future campaigns, especially as digital landscapes continue to change?
January 30th, 2025 at 6:03 am
Computer games were originally modeled on Board Games, with a set turn structure. Then the hardware and software evolved to enable real-time gaming, free of the artificial construct of one ‘turn’ following another. At much the same time, gridded maps gave way to more realistic environments. For a while “real time” was the industry buzz-word that every game had to have. Then people got used to it and, for those games where it was an advantage to game-play, turn-based gaming came back.
I think the same thing is going to happen in roleplaying games as digital / virtual gaming becomes more ubiquitous. All it really needs is a catchy label and you will again have a bandwagon that everybody has to jump on for a while, whether they want to or not. Then people will realize that for non-virtual gaming, the meat-and-potatoes of the industry, gridded maps serve a useful purpose, and they will have a resurgence. Once people get used to the notion that the online version doesn’t have to be the same as the tabletop version, the industry will bifurcate and which one you use will become another GMing option, decided by the group actually doing the playing.
February 4th, 2025 at 12:02 am
[…] Some of it could even be labeled ‘iconic’ – which, regular readers will know, is a big thing with me (see my recent post, Looking At A Bigger Picture, part 1 and part 2). […]