On The Priorities Of Graphic Depiction 5: Vehicles
The story so far…
This is the fourth in a set of mini-posts that I’m writing and publishing as quickly as possible, something I’m calling a mini-blitz. My normal publication schedule will resume at the end of the series.
Each post examines one of the specific image categories nominated in the first post of the series, dividing them up into strata of commonality.
So far, the series has looked at Objects, People, Monsters (and other encounters), and now it will turn its attention to vehicles. I’ve expanded this post more than most because it’s both useful to do so and the post will be published in the usual window for CM.
The goal is to define a set of policies, processes, and principles that use the game value of the result to define how and how hard it is worth searching for a particular image within each category / strata combination.

Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay
Vehicles
There are three, no four, attributes that combine to yield the Game Value of a vehicle.
Distinctiveness
The more unique the vehicle, the greater the imaginative leap required to visualize it from description alone. With some players, that doesn’t matter too much, but with others it can make all the difference in the world. Either way, it is something that they need to concentrate on in addition to playing, and that means that they can benefit from a graphic representation doing that part of ‘the work’ for them. Hence, the greater the distinctiveness of the vehicle, the greater the game value of an illustration.

Image by Jean photosstock from Pixabay, sky by Mike.
Try describing this vehicle in a couple of hundred words – whatever the impression your text creates will be inadequate next to the graphic visual image.
Plot Impact
The more important the vehicle is to the plot, including as a setting, the greater the Game Value because important pieces of roleplay will take place there. Making an RPG immersive is one of the greatest challenges faced by a GM, and illustrating a vehicle with significant plot impact punches above its weight in this area.
It doesn’t even matter too much if the vehicle itself has low plot impact, being nothing more than a place where things happen while characters travel from A to B. If significant events take place there, then it can be considered an important location, and that earns it the same plot impact as though the vehicle were plot-significant.

Both of the spacecraft images below would be suitable as either a base of operations for a group of PCs or as a vehicle for the regular use of a group of PCs, but they convey very different impressions and subtexts. The first image is by Thomas Budach, while the second image was shared by Thomas Budach, both through Pixabay. Images rotated and cropped by Mike.
Campaign Penetration
I struggled to find the best terminology for this aspect of a vehicle. Simply put, if it’s going to appear in multiple adventures, if it greatly expands the choices open to the PCs, if it functions as a mobile headquarters for a recurring character of any kind, then the vehicle achieves a higher level of campaign penetration than it’s relevance to any specific adventure or encounter, and that gives it greater game value than might meet the eye.
Metaphor, Metagame, and Implication
These three elements, even in combination, are not as significant as those described before them. That’s why I have grouped them together into this one banner headline rather than counting each separately.

Image by Eduardo Davad from Pixabay
Proposal One: Metaphor
Telling players that their characters have traveled from A to B is not as effective as telling them this while showing an image of the vehicle that conveyed them. The vehicle itself is a metaphor for the act of traveling. One picture is worth at least 500 words in this case, maybe more – even if absolutely nothing of interest is going to transpire on board and you intend to hand-wave the entirety of the passage.
Proposal Two: Metagame
A vehicle can contain a cultural context that holds significance beyond it’s simple existence. Think back to the first appearances of the other schools in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (the Durmstrang Institute and the Beauxbatons Academy) – the first thing you see is their mode of transport (the carriage drawn by pegasi and the ship rising from the sea floor). Both of these begin the process of establishing these schools and their styles even before they are introduced by Dumbledore.
This is foreshadowing, which readers might not have realized is inherently metagaming – it’s the GM using his foreknowledge of the plot to hint at what is to come, and (in this case), manifesting it in an image. The image is therefore a critical piece of the plot, designed and intended to subtly prod the thoughts of the players in the “right” direction.
And that gives such images a level of game value beyond any that meets the eye.

This image places two representations of the same train from two different sources side-by-side. Which image you choose depends on the impression that you intend to convey. The mostly grayscale image was provided by Brigitte Werner, the color image is from blizniak, both from Pixabay, cropping and compositing by Mike.
Proposal Three: Implication
The players see an alien spaceship land. Even if the pilot is about to appear in its doorway and steal the spotlight, the first hint that the PCs will have as to the nature and intentions of the occupant is that spaceship. Depicting the ship lets the players process exactly what their characters are seeing, and that gives it a higher game value because it conveys implications about the contents.
The analysis below, as usual, is based around the first of the four attributes just discussed. That means that the primary source of nuance and differentiation within each resulting sub-category are the other ‘three’ attributes – Plot Impact, Campaign Penetration, and the three-legged Metaphor / Metagame / Implication bundle. Collectively, these comprise the Importance of the vehicle. Even the most common types of vehicle can have enough Importance to justify an extensive search; rising rarity simply elevates the “minimum importance”.
Mundane
Mundane vehicles are widely available in the campaign. Depending on the genre and time period, availability of images can range from the hard-to-find to the routine. For example, if you search for “1970s car”, you’ll be spoiled for choice; you will usually be better of with a more specific search – “1970s Ford”, “1970s sports car”, “1970s pickup”, and so on.
This fact provides the solution to the problem of the hard-to-find categories. For example, searching for “Carriage” brings up a lot of railroad images but not too many of the horse-drawn variety; to actually get results you are better off ditching the term “carriage” completely and substituting the specific type of carriage that you want, something that I’ve learned the hard way. Your starting point should therefore be the Wikipedia page dedicated to the type of vehicle desired – for example, this page for Carriages, and this page for Boats (hint: hover your mouse over each of the types to get a pop-up preview of the page, which generally includes a brief description).
Things become a little more problematic again when the vehicle is a type that doesn’t actually exist yet (and might never exist). For example, “Space Freighter”. Once again, adding “concept art” can find images that would otherwise be missed. In general, you are forced to apply functional descriptions as search terms because any other kind of specific yields few or no images at all.
Being well-read in the genre can make a huge difference. If you know that, for example, Space: 1999 contained exactly the right “look” for the vehicle you’re after, searching for “Space 1999 Vehicle Concept” will usually find you choices that are more useful because they have the right appearance for your intended purposes. Knowing many of the different sci-fi television shows, novels, authors, and artists can be a lifesaver. For example, do an image search for “Chris Foss Spaceships” – here, I’ll make it easy for you:
DuckDuckGo Image Search: Chris Foss Spaceships.
Foss is a quite famous sci-fi artist whose work features on a number of sci-fi novel covers; his style tends to be instantly recognizable.
Nevertheless, as a general rule of thumb, image searches for spacecraft and the tend to be either too broad, or too specific; there doesn’t seem to be much middle ground. Be prepared to aggregate the best results from multiple searches in order to find enough choices.
Other additions to the list of search terms that can be useful are “Primitive”, “futuristic”, “Sci-fi”, “Scifi”, “Interplanetary”, “Interstellar”, “Intergalactic”, and so on, both singly and in combination. The sheer number of possible search terms that result can quickly become overwhelming; it’s almost unheard-of to search for all the possibilities. That means that a significant fraction of the possible terms never get searched for, and a significant number of the possible results will never get found. To combat this, I try to perform subsequent searches in alternating sequence – first to last, then last to first.
Further expanding the scope of potential results (and I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before), the algorithms used by the different search engines are all different and frequently find different results. Learn to use them all; have one primary go-to (mine is DuckDuckGo because I find it more convenient, my fallback is Google (which used to be my #1 choice, but they have made it progressively more annoying and hard to use), after that Qwant, then Bing – except that sometimes I’ll scramble the order to avoid over-reliance on the same sources..
The devil’s in the inconsistent detail
Two of the biggest problems that you will face is technology that looks too dissimilar and technology that looks too similar.
Two alien races should have differing engineering philosophies, and that should translate into a distinctive appearance for their respective spacecraft (or sea-craft, for that matter). At the same time, the same physics will usually apply to both, and so there should be some consistency, too. And that can be a very difficult duality to achieve.
Star Wars doesn’t quite pull it off; their designs are too variegated for consistency. Star Trek does a better job – Vulcan, Romulan, Klingon and Federation ships all operate on similar physical principles, and so there’s a consistency of general design principles, but each race also has its own style. If a ship shows up in an episode that looks different, it will prove to operate on different physical principles, often with benefits and disadvantages that the rest don’t share.
For contrast, study the different ships of Babylon-5, in which the technologies and design priorities of each race are distinctly different and so each race’s ships are similarly distinctive (Earth ships look like they were designed by Chris Foss…). Each race’s design ethos also translates into many other design manifestations – from homes to diplomatic quarters to weapons to… well, you get the point.
Decide where your dividing line has to be and stick to it like glue; that is your only pathway through the complexities of inconsistent consistency and consistent inconsistency!
Game value of images can range from the trivial to the monumental, but even the trivial ones tend to still offer some reward to the GM who seeks them out.

Image by pschulz from Pixabay. If you needed this ship to belong to a specific individual or nation, it would be easy to replace the name with something more appropriate to its plot function. “La Petite Sirène” says French, for example.
Common
Common vehicles are less widespread but still easily obtained if you go to the right place. They are vehicles that most travelers would see regularly if not with great frequency. For example, while sailing the Mediterranean, it would not be all that surprising to see a Spanish Galleon in the appropriate era, or a Dutch Trader, but a Barque showing the colors of Turkey, or one of the Scandinavian countries? Much less likely.
Or, to take a D&D-relevant example, Carriages would be mundane, Royal Carriages would not – but there are enough nobles that you would probably see one every month if you were traveling regularly. Or carriages might even be ‘common’ and wagons ‘mundane’ in your game world.
The same search tips and techniques apply to common vehicles, as do the same problems.

A gorgeous picture of a very specific aircraft, the SR-71 Blackbird. Image by WikiImages from Pixabay
Specific
Specific vehicles are where things often start to get sticky for the fantasy GM and easier for the sci-fi GM, because – as with all searches – the more specific you can be, the more targeted your search results. You may get fewer matches, but the average result will be a better match. But specific for the Fantasy GM means something that matches a specific style, and they can be very hard to match.
At one point, for the Pulp campaign, we needed to find an image of a longs hip being excavated. There were a number of viking long-ship images, but very few of them matched that specific criteria. What’s more, they were all photographed from above, we needed one that was at or above the eyeline of the observer. I ended up getting a ship from one image, the dragon-prow from another, some oars from a third, and some colorful shields in a row from a fourth, then compositing everything with a background image that was itself a composite of multiple images. This search was so specific that the full criteria approaches ‘unique’ status, but even discarding the additional requirements, there were so few matches that the general principle still holds.
Despite this, there is a ray of hope that gets bigger all the time. Artists keep creating images, and those images keep getting curated on the web. The pool of possible results is always growing. That doesn’t mean that obscure images will suddenly become commonplace – but it does mean that there is always hope that someone’s artistic product and your need will intersect!
Unique

The bullet train (image by Armin Forster from Pixabay) is probably a unique vehicle whenever it appears in an adventure…

…but so might this custom supercar (image by Lee Rosario from Pixabay)….

…or this futuristic personal transport (image by Mystic Art Design from Pixabay)…

…or this flower-power van (image by Thanasis Papazacharias from Pixabay)…

…or this mothballed, cannibalized, and derelict aircraft fusilage (
image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay)…

…or this space-folding flying saucer (image by Vicki Hamilton from Pixabay). It’s all about the vehicle being EXACTLY what you need, in the right type of setting.
Which brings me to the problem of unique vehicles. These are either something completely specific, like the Millennium Falcon, or Galactus’ spherical ship (from the Comics, not the movie), or the Battlestar Galactica (original or revised version). Or maybe Thor’s Chariot – which (surprisingly) has no unique name (the Norse named his goats, his hammer, his belt, his servants, his gloves, and his staff – but not the chariot drawn by those goats. Go figure).
Quite often in this category, though, ‘unique’ is a misnomer. You might need a ship with a particular figurehead or a specific name, for example, and have multiple other requirements, just as we did with the Viking ship; but we weren’t looking for a specific Viking ship, any ship that matched our needs would do.
Many of these are relatively simple editing jobs in Krita. It’s usually easy to paint out an existing ship name and replace it with a new one, for example.
What this adds up to is that the most unusual vehicle images are often less work than a highly specific one, because – ironically – you can compromise more regarding the image content when you know that you are going to be editing it anyway.
Another week of medical to-ing and fro-ing is in prospect, interfering with my ability to post. I’ll try to get the next mini-post, Locations, done for the usual posting time, but it may be delayed 24 hours or more.
- On The Priorities Of Graphic Depiction 1
- On The Priorities Of Graphic Depiction 2: Objects
- On The Priorities Of Graphic Depiction 3: People (NPCs)
- On The Priorities Of Graphic Depiction 4: Monsters and Encounters
- On The Priorities Of Graphic Depiction 5: Vehicles
- On The Priorities Of Graphic Depiction 6: Locations
- On The Priorities Of Graphic Depiction 7: Events & Effects
- On The Priorities Of Graphic Depiction 8: Examples
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