On The Priorities Of Graphic Depiction 6: Locations
The story so far…
This is the fifth 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 Vehicles. Which must mean that it’s now time to turn my attention to Locations.
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.

When I searched Pixabay for “Island”, three of the images dovetailed wonderfully to tell a story of exploration through key locations. First, the island itself, image by Julius Silver;

Second, a cliff-side waterfall suggesting that the island is much bigger than it seemed (magic!), image by Pexels;

And finally, a path through the undergrowth – image by Kanenori (all three images from Pixabay.
Throw in an encounter or event at each location for some interaction, and you have a road to adventure!
Locations
At it’s most elementary, a location is someplace for something to happen.
That something could be roleplaying, or a skill test, or a combat, or a narrative passage that conveys essential information to both PCs and players.
But when you start digging a little deeper, complications start to emerge. For example, let’s say that you have a map and you have an image; the first describes the tactical situation, the second gives a sense of the atmosphere and trappings, the look-and-feel of the location.
Which came first, the map or the image? If the map came first, the image is a mere representation of what the location is like, not what it actually is. If the other way around, then the map is an estimation, an approximation, of what is depicted in the image.
Either way, what do you do if there’s a discrepancy that you didn’t notice and take into account during prep? Which do you regard as canonical?
Most GMs will choose the map, in the process undermining the credibility of not just this image but all images presented to the players. Counter-intuitive though it may be, I would sooner adjust the map.
The even better answer is to tell the players in advance that the image is just to convey an impression. By taking the implied promise of accuracy off the table, you can keep the map as accurate without the resulting price-tag.
Regardless, that elementary definition tells us what we need to know, because it establishes a direct correlation between the basic commonality of the image and its game value. The more important the image to the plot, the more specific it has to be, and its Game Value is commensurate to that plot functionality.
Locations as punctuation
A location image does more than set the scene for something to happen; it signals the end of the previous sequence of events, serving as punctuation within the adventure. New locations almost always work well as break points within an adventure, a good place to end for the day or take a five-minute rest break.
Locations as time
There is also something of a psychological ‘reset’ that occurs when you present a new location. It’s as though we subconsciously associate the change in scenery with an associated passage of time, and with everything that such a passage implies.
The GM needs to explicitly connect the new scene with the one just past if there is not such a passage of time, or the players will experience a discontinuity between what their head and their instincts are telling them which is distracting and undermines the verisimilitude in both areas.
It might say something about human nature that unless explicit mention is made of the arduous nature of the transition, most players will usually respond to a new location as though they were refreshed – “a change is as good as a holiday”, so that’s something else that the GM has to explicitly mention. The only exception to that is when the previous location, or the events that follow it, deliberately embed awareness of the difficulty in reaching the next location into the narrative.
Tonal Shift
Finally, there is a natural expectation and receptiveness to a shift in tone or intensity with a new location. That makes them serve as ‘mile markers’ of the journey through the adventure from start to finish.
Game Value
All of these imbue a location image with Game Value regardless of the commonality of the image. The rarity of an image still provides increased value, however, but it does so with subtext, tone, and other intangibles.
The greater the ‘rarity’ of the image, the more these intangibles are communicated to the viewer – that is the determinant of ‘image content quality’, the ambition that you hope your image search will satisfy.
This is an important point to understand. For any given basic search, there will be dozens of location images to choose between. To some extent, temporal content will restrict your image choices, but when the ability to edit images is taken into account, that ceases to be a definitive factor; it’s a consideration and a constraint, but nothing more.
That permits other factors to come to the fore, the intangibles mentioned earlier foremost amongst them. It’s more important for an image to convey the right intangible messages than for it to match precisely other restrictions because they can be edited in or out in many cases.
I’ve lost count of the number of air conditioners that I have painted out of windows to make a modern-day image reflective of the way a building might have looked in the 1930s for the Adventurer’s Club campaign, for example. Each time, the building in question had the right look and the right context – but one or two too-modern features. Massed phone lines are often another item that needs to be redacted. And don’t get me started on modern cars….
A valuable tip: what you lack the time or skill to paint out can sometimes be conveniently covered over by importing some relevant image. An old car in place of a new, for example. Or a convenient wall. A snowbank (doesn’t work in a summer scene, of course). Even a convenient tree!
Mundane
Mundane images are the most easily found with an image search, it says so on the tin. Unfortunately, there can be a gulf separating expectation from reality, and the breadth and depth of that gulf is largely a function of genre.
For example, search for “Science Fiction Corridor” and you’ll get fewer usable results than if you search for “Lunar Colony” even though you would expect corridors to be more ubiquitous. The reason is because Lunar Colonies are “sexy” subjects while corridors are boring.
“Castle Corridors” on the other hand, are reasonably well-represented, at least in comparison. Why? Because there are any number of actual castles out there with corridors, and some of them will have been photographed.
Mundane locations are therefore fairly generic in nature. A snowy field is more about the snow than about anything underneath it. Drop a genre element or two on top (and anchor it with a suitable shadow) and it can be anything from a sci-fi setting to a fantasy wonderland with minimal effort.
Generic scenes, by their nature, add little to the setting in terms of intangibles, but they provide the same basic benefits as all location images.

Image by Bittermuir from Pixabay
Common
Common images can be a little trickier, because you are generally forced to deal with anachronistic elements. I’ve already mentioned air conditioners for 1930s locations; for one particular image used in my Dr Who campaign, I had to paint out modern rubbish bins, and two modern cars, replacing the latter with snow and road in one instance and road, sidewalk, and wall in the other. It wasn’t difficult but there was a lot of fiddly detail required.
You are more often forced to compromise with common images, in my experience. The more specific your description of a village, the less likely you are to find an exact match – unless you do the image search first and then base your description around a chosen image.
The problem with that approach is that there are only a certain number of usable ‘village” images available, and once you have used them, you are inevitably looking at photo-editing something, and some time thereafter, will inevitably be faced with choosing between a more accurate depiction of a village that is going to involve more work to prepare, or a less accurate depiction that is also going to be less work.
If you have the time in hand, the first one would be your choice every time – but GMs rarely have excess prep time to devote to projects of such limited value. There’s almost always something you could better spend that excess time on than a common scene – so almost certainly, you will tend to choose the quick-and-easy option and compromise the fidelity of the image’s relationship with the narrative.
All this makes ‘common’ images much harder to deal with than most people expect. There are few easy answers to the problems described; you simply have to do the best that you can in the time available.

Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Venice is an unmistakable location.Mbr />Image by liudanao1991 from Pixabay.
Specific
Many of the problems with Common images go away when you turn to more specific locations, because there will often be either real images of the location to choose from, or because it’s a more interesting subject, and so has been depicted by artists more frequently.
Either way, it’s far more common to find usable images, even of small and obscure locations – with the same caveats regarding anachronisms.
With the greater range of search results, a different problem manifests itself, however. What you find is very dependent on what search terms you feed into the search engine, and getting the most out of them involves a deeper understanding of how the search engine works than most people ever need.
When you search for an image, it’s commonplace to employ search terms that describe the image content, and sometimes that can be successful. But most search engines work by finding the search terms within the text, offering up all the images found on a relevant web page, and then sorting and weighting the results based on the image information itself. It’s also not uncommon for more recent images to be weighted to appear closer to the top of the results.
With most image searches, that approach is more likely to find what you are looking for, and it’s relatively easy to do, which is why the search engines do it that way. We, on the other hand, are using image searches for a purpose for which they were never intended, and since we can’t change the search algorithms, it’s up to us to adapt by using different search terms, i.e. image searches that are more likely to produce viable results. And this can be harder than it looks.
The best approach is always to be flexible, and think around the problem. Use synonyms – if you are searching for a snowy village, “winter hamlet” might find the perfect result. Creativity in selecting search terms, and making multiple attempts, can be the difference between ‘easy’ and ‘hard’, and between greater compromises and better results.
Unique
As usual, it’s when you get extremely precise about what you need that it becomes unlikely that you will find it with an image search. That leaves you with three choices: compromise with a less precise image, create your own, or adopt a half-way position between these extremes, creating something that is close but still not perfect.
It can actually be quite surprising how little specificity you need to reach these levels of restriction; some subjects are surprisingly hard to find represented. For example searching for cave entrances will find you many images taken from inside the cave looking out, but images of cave mouths from the outside tend to be rarer than hen’s teeth; if you need such an image (and they occur in almost every genre, at least occasionally, and often regularly), you will almost certainly need to make it for yourself. Fortunately, that isn’t all that hard to do.
Which of the three alternatives you employ in any given case will vary with the subject matter, as the above example implies. It all depends on how closely what you find matches with what you wanted.
Of course, you can always ‘cheat’ and do the image search first, based on a generic label or description, choosing an image that looks good and describing it in your narrative and other planning. This compromises the adventure content to match the image results available, but if you aren’t locked into a specific need, it can often be the easiest solution here, as it has been in other categories.
I’m going to close this mini-post with a surprising real-world example. For the current Adventurer’s Club adventure, we needed a jungle valley with a certain grandeur and scale, completely surrounded by mountains or better yet cliffs. The valley needed to be large enough to have a flat floor through it’s center, and it could contain nothing man-made – all such objects were specified by the plot and unchangeable; they would need to be constructed and inserted behind layers of vegetation.
This is a very specific set of requirements, but a valley seen from a mountaintop sounds picturesque enough that I was hopeful. Unfortunately, nothing was quite right; there were alpine valleys and Canadian valleys that had the right shape and size, but were full of the wrong trees, and there were jungle valleys that had the wrong shape and often the wrong size, but the right vegetation.
In the end, I created my own, disassembling 14 source images into more than 70 components and layering them (with some paint-work) Some components were blurred and some sharpened, some were color-shifted or otherwise manipulated.
I shared the unfinished image on social media as a work in progress. Below, I have not only shown that unfinished image but the final version without the all-important details.

Above, the unfinished composite. The distant background is mostly complete but needs some clean-up work and the sky has holes that need patching; the foreground is also mostly complete, but needs some further editing. It’s the mid-ground, where some of the important bits are to go, that needs more work.

Above you can see the completed image. This took most of my spare time for a couple of days; for someone with less experience, it might have taken a week or more. If you were too look too closely, the image’s nature as a composite would become obvious, but at the working size (3196 x 1410) it looks just fine – and at the size shown here (556 x 245) the seams are completely invisible.
As usual, the more important an image’s content is to the plot, the more easily you can justify taking the time to do something like this. It’s a perpetual balancing act between the cost (in time, which is a function of your skill with your chosen photo-editing application) and the benefit to your adventure. If it’s a quick and easy edit, it’s relatively easy to justify; if it’s more involved, it needs to be sufficiently important.
Two mini-posts remain in this series – Events and Effects is up next!
- 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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