Mood Boarding your Campaign: Setting a Collaborative Tone
Going for a run and listening to Between Two Cairns, I love when Yochai, Brad, or now Sam drop a quick nugget of RPG wisdom, often for 30 seconds before leaping to another interesting topic. One that resonated strongly with me was on the recent episode Snail Fancy, where Sam asks the talented host Bodie H if his adventures are 'animated' like his art is, and how the art of the adventure conveys the tone of the game. While the conversation quickly diverted onto other topics, I think Sam struck something that is a key part of my own RPG campaign prep, and is a recommendation to potentially add to your toolbox as well.
A week ago, I was taking a break from my forever GM role to play in a close friends Draw Steel campaign, a system quite different from the OSR campaigns I tend to play. Here, characters are powerful out of the gate at level one, should have backstories that are crafted to the world, and the risk of character death is low - very neotrad. When I got onto a discord call with him to discuss what the campaign world looked like to make my character, I asked him what art and media touchstones he used to inform the tone, and took him by surprise.
Whenever I sit down to run a new campaign (most often a 6 to 10 session arc these days), I will find 3 to 5 pieces of art that capture the intended tone of the game, not write up a setting bible or game pitch. This my interpretation of what Sam was asking Bodie on the show, when he asked how he uses his art style to capture the tone of the game. Fundamentally RPGs exist only in our collective imaginations, and the prior media we have enjoyed is what is crafting this shared space. However, its not actually the content of the media which drives our collective imagination, but its tone and delivery.
My opinion is that part of what makes BREAK!! such a successful indie darling in the scene (and also Sam's implication in the episode) is that by screaming from the rooftops "picture this game as an anime!" you have already built the scaffolding of that shared narrative.
To go back to my friend (and beg forgiveness to the reader for my Nolan-esque narrative structure in this blog post), its uncommon to tell your friends when pitching a campaign "picture this campaign as shot by Guillermo Del Toro" or "picture The Expanse, not Cowboy Bebop, for our science fiction game." But to extend the metaphor, if we are playing a Cowboy Bebop game, I am less worried about my martial arts expert character dying to a random spacer, where in The Expanse, a major character is taken out quite early no spoilers to whom it is!
After my friends initial confusion, together through the use of many different media examples, sharing of art pieces, and discussing media touchstones, we built a strong shared narrative picture to help build a richer backstory. It is my opinion that 3 or 4 pieces of art and media examples are going to do so much more to help align your players to the tone of the game, to partake in the shared narrative, than any session bibles will.
I know this sounds like a common adage of 'a picture is worth a thousand words,' writ large, and that is sort of true. But the point I want to hammer home that I think Sam instinctively knew asking that question, is that aesthetics themselves matter. The art isn't just there to help guide the content - in the medium of the shared imagination, the aesthetics is also the content, as reflected from your thoughts to your actions at the table. Next time you pitch a game to your players, consider forgetting questions like what playable species there are, or what does the magic look like, but instead think if my game was a movie, who would the director be? If my game was a comic, would it be drawn by Jeff Smith or Mœbius? This is the engine that powers the shared narrative.