I really love role-playing games — given the publication for which I am writing the present article, I doubt that this is a surprising confession. I also love making art — when a graduate school task is not actively ruining my day, I tend to spend hours every day working on whatever drawing idea strikes my fancy. These two hobbies of mine have overlapped considerably, becoming more entangled over time; many — perhaps even most — of the pieces I dedicate my time to these days are related to TTRPGs. Whether I’m a GM or a player, I love to create character designs, illustrate cool narrative moments, paint over-dramatic portraits, and doodle silly little game-related jokes
Good, interesting games genuinely serve as a significant source of inspiration for me, and I’d even partially credit a recent Blades in the Dark campaign I played in with pulling me out of a two-year-long, academia-induced artistic rut. I simply liked the characters of my fellow players and the world painted by our wonderful GM (and fellow Storygames Chicago founder) Collin so much that I had to draw them, slump be damned. As I started getting back into the swing of things, I also began sharing my art with the people I was playing with — it seemed only fair, given that I was drawing characters they created. After a while of bombarding our Discord server with doodles, I began to notice a phenomenon that I hadn’t really experienced before; the drawings seemed to be reciprocally contributing to the conversation of the game.
The more attention I’ve paid to this mutual creative exchange, the more interested I’ve become in the relationship and interactions that can occur between game and art. In my experience, limited and anecdotal as it may be, making art a regular part of one’s engagement with a game has the potential to change the way that game is experienced — not just for the artist, but everyone at the table. To be clear, this is not because I am some uniquely remarkable artist; the reciprocal exchange between art and game is not dependent on technical skill. It is the act of creation itself and the sharing of those creations that can contribute to and alter the shared fiction of a game.
The most obvious illustrative example of this phenomenon occurs through the creation of character designs. It is, of course, quite common for players and GMs alike to share unrelated, previously created images as a means of describing the appearance of their characters, but being able to develop a visual design which has been explicitly crafted to represent that character has a different effect. When I annoy my friends with incessant questions about how they imagine their characters, it can help us all develop a more complete vision of those characters. As I create preliminary character design sketches, I always think about the things that I find most striking about that character’s personality and how the player embodies them, and I try to represent those things visually. I usually don’t get it right the first time, but I welcome feedback, and I get better with each successive attempt. Though this is partially attributable to the magic of practice, it’s also because our shared vision of the character evolves and improves as we get to know them better through gameplay. I find it especially exciting when a design changes to represent a character’s in-game development, providing the table with a sense of progress that can’t be achieved mechanically. Every time a character receives a new outfit, haircut, scar, or other change, I write it down so I remember to draw it later. At the end of a campaign, it’s fun to be able to look back and see how far we’ve come.
Creating art of specific in-game scenes can also sometimes serve to intensify or even recontextualize the tone of those scenes in the minds of game participants; in one particularly illustrative instance, my melodramatic rendering of a BitD end-of-session stinger scene prompted a fellow player to remark that he hadn’t realized how unsettling and ominous that moment was. We all went into the next session anticipating a dramatic resolution, and after nearly eight hours, we had reached a satisfying conclusion to the entire campaign. Though the vast majority of the credit for this successful ending goes to the excellent roleplaying of the table and the hard work of our exceptional GM, I’d like to think that my illustrations contributed in some small way, offering a visual representation of my excitement over cool ideas and heightened narrative stakes.
Creating game-related art also provides me with an additional space in which to explore aspects of characters and the narrative that couldn’t be directly experienced in-session. It’s fun for me to think about what an off-screen moment may have looked like, or to illustrate how I imagine characters who may never appear as NPCs but are important to someone’s backstory. Sometimes other members of a game will even share something I didn’t know about their characters with me out of session so I can draw something related — I always appreciate interactions like that, and I don’t think they would occur without art being a natural part of the game conversation.
To my surprise, I have even seen my drawings impact the development of a game that has not yet begun as of the publication of this article. When my friend (and also another Storygames Chicago founder) Jesse floated the idea of running an Apocalypse World campaign, I got pretty excited about it. We had no planned start date or timeframe, but I began reviewing the playbooks and sketching out character concepts anyway. After I bothered them with questions about their own ideas, some fellow prospective players of the as-of-yet unrealized campaign were kind enough to allow me to draw preliminary designs for their characters as well. In doing so, I inadvertently pushed all of us to think about the game more concretely, and before too long, Jesse had decided with certainty that he would indeed run it for us. Due to scheduling conflicts, we won’t have session 0 until August, but I’m looking forward to it — I’m eager to see how the way we all imagine the world and characters changes throughout the course of the game.
It’s important to note that the digital illustrations I tend to make are hardly the only method of creating impactful game-related art. During his time GMing the previously discussed BitD campaign, Collin created a variety of incredibly cool supplementary materials for the game which functioned in much the same way — including such creative inventions as articles from a Duskvol newspaper and a recording of a police scanner exchange. There are an endless number of ways to create art, and I think all of them have the potential to become an important part of the experience of playing a TTRPG. There are, in all likelihood, a wide variety of factors that determine how and why the creation of art may or may not influence the course of any given game. I hope to have the opportunity to discuss this subject with other artists, GMs, and players at some point in the future to learn about these factors, as well as how their experience with game-related art may differ from my own. Until then, I’ll continue exploring it within my own roleplaying experiences.
For more from all of us at Storygames Chicago follow us on our socials, check out our website for links to member socials and other games, and join our discord! We run games online and locally in the greater Chicago area.