TTRPG art on a shoestring budget

Here's a little general advice for indie game creators who can't afford all the art they want.

Stock art

If you have a little bit of money to use, stock art is cheaper than commissioned art and it's way easier to find what you need compared to trawling through commons (more on that later).

Understand and abide by licenses!

Artists license their art in different ways, with drastically different conditions. If all your art comes from one or two artists (or is all under particular licenses, like CC-BY), you'll save some headaches when it comes to complying with licensing terms and laying out credits.

An aside: I have found several pieces of licensed art where artists specify how they must be credited, and then the provided credit line has a spelling mistake or grammatical error. Should you fix it? I wouldn't personally risk it. I'm not a lawyer. I follow instructions.

I'm assuming you're not using AI material. Stock art creators are increasingly (and understandably) forbidding use of their work alongside it. Note that stock art websites don't do a very good job of tagging and filtering this stuff out!

• Some, like Adobe Stock, are moderately diligent for mediocre results: exclude generative AI from a search and maybe one will slip through in ten pages of results.
• Sites relying strictly on self-reporting, like Pixabay, are pretty much all saturated in untagged AI images. They've become practically unusable; you're basically reduced to searching in older time periods or within specific artists with a consistent, identifiable style.
• DriveThruRPG also relies mostly on self-reporting, but I haven't seen many AI images passing themselves off as handcrafted.
  

Stock art directly from the creator

If there's a specific look/type of art you want, Patreon is one of the better sources, because you can support currently-active artists on an individual basis and at reasonable prices. I can't speak to whether or not it's better for the actual artists (I know they hiked their cut a little while ago).
 

An aside for Patreon artists: Please provide something like an actual license! It doesn't have to be long or detailed. It just has to make me feel confident that I am permitted to use your work for commercial purposes, can or can't advertise with it, won't be infringing on your moral rights, etc.

Open-sourcing your game art

So, on to doing it yourself! Lots of indie game makers have achieved great results by sourcing, compositing, and laying out their own art. Expect it to take a lot of work.

You'll probably have looked into public domain art. Specifically, works that have lost copyright status due to the amount of time that has passed since the death of their creator. If someone tells you a hard and fast rule for establishing this, they are wrong!

• The "falls into PD" age differs between nations, there are all sorts of carve-outs, and even a photo reproduction may or may not be transformative. Don't rely on anyone but your lawyer for legal advice.
  

A lot of sites purport to collect and curate art "in the public domain". They almost always mean "in the public domain in the USA", and even if that's fine with you, they might be wrong, and even if they're right, they might not be conscientious. Check your sources!

Where can you get free-to-use art? Well, there's tons of places. Start with Wikimedia Commons, which is huge and usually quite accurately labelled with regards to sources and licensing (...but I have found errors before. Check your sources! Check your sources! Check your sources!).

Other sites for free art include: OpenGameArt, Pixabay, Pexels, Adobe Stock, various open clip art creators, and museums and libraries like The Met and the NYPL digital collections. All have their own foibles.

Understand that "free" doesn't mean "obligation-free".

I mentioned stock art licenses earlier. Learn what the various Creative Commons licenses do. CC0 (essentially a PD dedication) is the most generous, but fairly rare in the wild. As well as the license requirements, learn about and respect creators' moral rights. Credit people even when you're not required to by the license terms.

A lot of old PD art is unfortunately physically degraded. There are great pieces made unusable by age. Too bad. Don't waste time on things that are too small for your DPI, too faded or blurry, or too palimpsest'd. Understand that entropy is mostly irreversible. Or try tracing.

And know the value of your time. If you spent a hundred hours sorting through public domain art trying to find suitable works, and you didn't enjoy the process... would you have been better off just working for money and using that to pay an artist?

Good news

Anyone can be a competent collage artist by compositing, cropping, tweaking, and laying out PD / open license art. And digital tools stratospherically expand what the word 'collage' means. Have fun testing things!

The more you try things out, the more neat combinations you'll find. Sometimes even a very simple effect can make a serviceable piece of art out of something stylistically inappropriate.

For example, I had this old black-and-white John Batten illustration saved:

 

I wanted to use it as the Nuckelavee demon in my current monster compendium (https://bit.ly/ancblasph). But it's a bit cartoonish, there's no colour to make it pop, and the solid white won't work against my backgrounds. It only takes six or seven trivial image operations to get something a bit more atmospheric:

I'm not much of an artist, but if I spent a bit more time on it, I could use more masks and curves and things to make this into a really crisp, vibrant piece.

Software

What tools should you use for image editing? I love FOSS in principle, and the people striving to make it work, but you do tend to get more or less what you pay for.

GIMP is perhaps your best free option, but it lags behind Affinity Photo (having no proper CMYK support, for example). APhoto in turn is cheaper than Photoshop, but lacks a few of its features.

You can do pretty much everything in a suite like Affinity Photo or Photoshop. But there are specialist tools for TTRPG-specific things (hexographer, inkarnate, etc), and their narrow focus may make them easier and more convenient than doing the same thing in an image editor.

Using these tools

What do you need to learn? I would say the ten basic concepts to familiarise yourself with are:

• colour level/curve manipulation
• selections
• non-destructive editing
• filters/adjustments
• brush tools
• geometry tools
• perspective tools
• touch-up tools
• layers and layer modes
• masks and clipping

There's plenty more, of course.

What do you need in terms of meta-level knowledge? Mainly, where to go for help. The internet is awash with tutorials. Start by reading/watching one of those, and then turn to searching/asking in the forums for your software.

Concluding thoughts

I started this by addressing those "who can't afford all the art they want". Again, don't forget that your time on Earth has value. If you have some exact image in mind, and it takes you 50 hours to assemble a pretty good version of it from diverse sources and painstaking image manipulations... then maybe you were better off paying an artist.

Except.

You're gaining skills as you go, and that alone may be worth it in the end. You're trying new things and making stuff.

Assembling other people's work in new ways is itself an art form, and constructing things from publicly available works may lead you to explore other ways to create.

There are side benefits, too.

Once you have the basics down, you can make your life easier by using your image manipulation tools to do mockups and visualisations. For example, I spent ten minutes this morning pairing up different candidate typefaces against different grungy/distressed visual styles in a scratch-built design, as in this snapshot:

Art, like everything in life, is a learning process. You'll find that you can cut some corners and not others.

And finally, if none of the above works for you, you could always Learn To Do Art Using Raw Materials yourself. I hear it can be very rewarding!

Monsters of the Month: Otherworldly Aberrations

The sky ruptures along some philosophical faultline and the sun splatters across the horizon like a dropped egg. There comes the distant dull crack of the cosmos breaking. Aberrant things begin to drip out of fissures in reality.

Fluorescent vermin with odd limbs come to graze on the verdant quiddity. Abominations fall from the flickering stars, and the world turns to mismatched bone and metal as they crawl by. There is something striding across the upper atmosphere, spindly legs higher than any tower. Space itself breaks open, and things feed on its viscera.

Introducing the first in what should be a series of monster books for Dungeons & Dragons! This one is all about extraplanar and interdimensional beasties, like the Treader: an infinitely-long spindly leg dangling from the sky and traipsing about the landscape.

Inside this creature compendium, you'll find

•     38 pages of bizarre monsters from CR 0 to CR 16
•     Tactical advice for each monster
•     Creatures crafted with modern D&D 5e design principles
•     50 variant monsters for different environments and themes

Available now on DriveThruRPG!

Discworld RPG: Concludium

In this Octobereview, I wrap up the Discworld Roleplaying Game (powered by GURPS), by Terry Pratchett and Phil Masters. Last time, I talked about the setting chapters.

This time, I'm reviewing the remaining parts of the book (pp 367–408), all the juicy running-the-game stuff!

This is probably the most important section to me. Although the 'GURPS rules' parts are necessary for running the game, and the 'Discworld review' parts are necessary for understanding the canon world, this is where the authors are handed the reins to really extrapolate, develop, and get creative.

Part 11: Bad food, no sleep, and strange people

We start the section with Running for your laugh, guidance for game/campaign management. There's some good general structural advice here. They also managed to get a chuckle out of me (p 368):

If anyone really wanted, they could use the setting for an old-fashioned game in which heroes and wizards beat up monsters and take their treasure. Or they could create gloomy sagas about angst-ridden vampires on the streets of Ankh-Morpork. There's no obvious reason to do so, but nothing to stop anyone, either.

The authors talk about managing tempo and pace (p 369). This advice is generally good, but some lines jumped out to me here: "a fight that lasts mere seconds in the game world can take much of the session to run [...] The GM should avoid combat if the current aim of the game is to get to the next important plot point quickly." Emphasis in original.

I must admit, this – and some similar language scattered throughout the book – rubbed me the wrong way. It practically admits that the underlying engine is too slow to be useful. It also suggests a view of the GM as fundamentally a linear storyteller, which might be appropriate if this was, you know, a story-telling game, rather than a traditional TTRPG with a smattering of story-telling elements.* Pesto and chocolate milk are both tasty, and maybe you could find a recipe to combine them complementarily, but it's been 368 pages of rules for chocolate milk and now I'm being told to sprinkle pesto on top.

* The implication, here and elsewhere, is that the GM's role is to decide "the next important plot point", disregarding choices and rules to shepherd the player (character)s towards it. I'm not a fan.

The text goes on to add, "In general, Discworld games should run fast and light. [...] A roleplaying game, humorous or not, is a cooperative project, and if the GM takes too much power from the players, they'll ultimately become frustrated. Everyone should be allowed input." Again, this sentiment seems out of place for a simulation-heavy TTRPG

"Everyone should be allowed input" ...into what, exactly? This pretty clearly doesn't just mean the truism, "don't take away for non-diegetic reasons the exactly one way players can affect their environment in a classic TTRPG, i.e., their power to make their characters' decisions".

Even with a generous reading it seems to mean, "import story-telling-game elements into how you run this TTRPG, by having aspects of the world/outcomes decided by an unspecified collaborative process with the players." And in 408 pages there are no rules for doing that, and little to no advice for dealing with the dissonance of players having to break out of the making-decisions-as-if-they-were-their-character headspace to make decisions about the world as if they were its creator. Shrug.

One little thing that caught my attention, on p 371, is that "The Colour of Magic contains several RPG references". This surprised me; maybe I need to read it again.* It definitely contains a lot of references to the sort of 1960s-70s pulp adventure and sci-fi/fantasy fiction on which early D&D was built, but if there are direct TTRPG aspects, I never noticed them.

* The game the gods play throughout has miniature tokens representing characters and creatures, but I remember it being in much more of a "European boardgame" style.

Sample campaign setting

The book's main sample setting (essentially, pirate adventure in the Brown Islands*) is quite good! It covers a region that sits largely outside of the Discworld canon, and it hits a lot of the right notes in terms of descriptiveness and usefulness to a GM. The islands are presented as a sort of semi-policed melting-pot wilderness borderlands, which is an excellent background for RPG adventure.

* A pastiche of Hawaii, mostly.

I'm pretty sure that Llapffargoch-Wokkaiiooii is meant to extend the Hawaiian pastiche to include some of the Pacific Islands and New Zealand, which (as a New Zealander) feels a bit forced, but that's pretty much always going to be the case when you're reading an outsider's view.

I've got to say, the idea of hiring the PCs to "break into an enemy's home or workplace and rearrange the furniture to bring bad luck" is great. That's completely outside of the classic RPG scenario space, and I'd love to use it some day. (The book also gives it pretty thorough mechanical support.)

The Discworld RPG presents several other settings in short form, and all of them seem like they could be a good time. For example, there's advice for a Fourecks "road warrior" setting.* I should note that this book is somewhat old-fashioned in places, but it could be worse when it comes to things like colonialism and female empowerment. The Brown Islands is run by foreign governors... but the indigenous people don't much care what they say. There's a Klatchian setting with a harem... but the women are comfortably running the town. Et cetera.

* I was expecting the waterless regatta from The Last Continent, given this book's reluctance to extend canon. I suspect road warrior was chosen just for the cart wars / car wars joke.

Sample scenarios

The book presents three adventure scenarios; two about fruit and one about herring historical justice.

In "Lost and Found", the PCs investigate a banana shortage and discover a magical jungle lab emitting reptilian monsters. In "Full Court Press", the PCs get involved in the succession politics of an apple-growing duchy. In "Sektoberfest in NoThingFjord", the PCs set out to rescue a skald (storyteller) from a huge troll and probably end up settling a historical injustice.

I want to say off the bat that the underlying ideas are great. I'd run a scenario based on the first or third scenario without hesitation. 👍

And the implementation of those ideas is mostly good. 👍

Unfortunately, the presentation of the scenarios is undermined by two major issues.

Issue 1: Failing to help the reader

The authors commit one of the cardinal sins of RPG scenario design: presenting the adventure as a fun little mystery for the GM to be puzzled by until they've read to the end. None of the important parts are explained up front. The authors want the players to feel like they're experiencing a story? Sure. Writing the scenario as if the GM trying to read the thing also has to experience it as a story? Excruciating.

So in Lost and Found, the GM reading isn't told why there's a banana shortage, which is the entire basis of the scenario. Without a precis sketch up front, they won't find out for many pages. Long after they encounter a text box which says: "remember that the problem lies hundreds of miles distant, and is somewhat peculiar, with a certain amount of unconventional magic involved." The reader can't "remember" those three things. They haven't been told any of it!

So the GM who just wants to know if they like this adventure enough to study it and run it has to read the whole thing through to find out, then reread it with the basis facts required to actually plan how to use the scenario. It would have been trivially easy to provide the necessary information in a text box or paragraph at the start.

In Full Court Press, it's worse. The scenario writers simply didn't finish their job. Who killed the old duke, and why? What do the various described activities indicate? Well, it "depends on what the GM has decided about the true history and motivation of the NPCs" (p 394). "Matters should culminate in the revelation of some truth".

This is a cop-out, and one which particularly stings because not only does the text lack a disclaimer up front ("this scenario is incomplete"), it actually claims a GM can use the scenario "as is"!

If the problem was space, why not just write even less of the adventure and put it with the other incomplete scenario ideas at the end of the book?

The "failing to help the reader" issue comes up somewhat in Sektoberfest in NoThingFjord, too. The PCs are in a cave complex chasing after an abducted skald (p 396). They hear a deep voice relating things that happened in the past (something a skald does), and then they see the abductee. Seven paragraphs and a section break later, the reader discovers that it's not the skald who's been talking! I'm fairly sure this was just sloppy editing rather than a deliberate mystery, but again, a paragraph at the start sketching the overall scenario would have avoided the problem.

Issue 2: Implied culture of play

The other issue I'll freely admit is subjective: The scenarios advocate for a culture of play which makes me uncomfortable. It's similar to the problem I had with some of the tempo/pace advice (above).

We're told that the GM should just veto a PC's advantages from putting points in Wealth (p 386). The GM should fudge dice results and move things behind the scenes and ignore creature traits (p 391) so that things happen as they envisaged. There's this expectation for the GM to have an idea of "the way things ought to go" and covertly change things to make that happen. Is it railroading? It's at least railroading-adjacent.

Reading Sektoberfest in NoThingFjord, I started to believe that the authors just fundamentally disagree with what I would consider the deepest TTRPG loop: mentally simulating a world, seeing what the characters try to do, and then arriving at plausible outcomes using rules + good judgment + knowledge of how the world works.

• Instead of referring to rules for light, it's "reasonable" to "penalise" explorers for not taking equipment such as lanterns.
• Instead of referring to rules for navigation, "there's only a limited amount of fun to be had by getting them lost, and having them completely lost and starving to death is dull. But the players might pay more attention if they sense that the GM is thinking about that possibility."*
• Players get to "make IQ rolls to grasp the subtleties of" an issue once the GM has described it, instead of engaging their brains.
• After the script says a troll gestures at the wall, "visitors should make Per rolls to notice the general shape of the walls on the far side of the cave." Implicitly, characters can't notice a secret until the "right" story beat, no matter what they do.

* There are numerous references throughout the book to the GM feeling "kind" or "sadistic".

Again: The Discworld RPG has very few story-telling-game mechanics, and the ones it has (like Riding The Narrative) are limited and optional. But there are all these little asides telling a GM not to run the game as the crunchy traditional GURPS TTRPG it has been built as.

I understand that occasionally a GM might end up with the donkey up the minaret, and have to choose between (a) cheating to create a fun play experience, or (b) letting the chips fall where they may. But note that this is a choice.

If you play it without cheating, yes, you might have an early TPK or an anticlimactic ending or have to split a session because you run out of time. Yes, it might be less fun.* You at least won't be teaching the players lessons like "the PCs can't lose" or "the PCs can't win early with cleverness" or "there will be x amount of conflict per game session no matter what" or "the GM doesn't care about the rules of the game".

* But you don't know for sure.

If the GM finds that they need to cheat to "save" a fun play experience, something brought them to that point. It's almost certainly down to a failure of the system, a failure of the scenario, or a failure of the GM. Two of those things were within the purview of the authors to fix, and in a book of this size they could have advised on the third. Instead, they keep calling for a thumb on the scale within the scenario design. My personal opinion is that it's a bad look. Rant over; my apologies.

Other scenario possibilities

Fortunately, we don't have to end the review on a sour note! The final part of the chapter ends with a half a dozen scenario seeds, for a GM to take and run with. These are all very ideas-dense and a great fit for the canon, and I enjoyed reading them.

If I were to run the GURPS Discworld RPG, I'd pick one of these to start with – probably Plumbing the depths. If PTerry hadn't suffered his health disaster, I think we were cued up for a book about the Undertaking in Ankh-Morpork, and this offers a chance to explore what that might have been.

Remainder

There's some end matter, too! It consists of a slightly absurd glossary of Disc terms, the inevitable Discworld + GURPS bibliography (which sums up the books fairly pithily), and a comprehensive index which almost never just redirects the reader to another index entry (D&D, take note).

Final thoughts

I began this book as a Discworld fan and GURPS outsider. By the end of it, I had a better grip on GURPS and an itch to go back and read through the Discworld books. I consider that a win!

I'm also backing the new Modiphius game, Terry Pratchett's Discworld RPG: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork. I can't wait to see the difference in approaches to this large (and for many reasons difficult-to-translate) corpus of creative material.